To avoid political Armageddon, Democrats must do more to highlight GOP weakness

The conventional political wisdom is that the Democrats are in for a shellacking in the upcoming mid-terms. No less a prognosticator than Newt Gingrich is predicting that the Republicans could set a record for the number of house seats they will gain. Mitch McConnell is advising Republicans not to get into the weeds of policy. Just make the mid-terms a referendum on Joe Biden.

To avoid political catastrophe, Democratic strategists are warning President Biden that he needs to empathize much more with the frustrations and discontent that ordinary people have experienced over COVID and its deleterious consequences, ranging from vaccine and mask mandates to supply chain breakdowns and inflation. He needs to be “Scranton Joe,” reaching out to the working-class folk who inhabit the small towns and countryside of Middle America.

Much of this prognostication is driven by the knowledge that the party holding the White House has historically suffered serious losses in the mid-terms. Call it historical determinism. Just let the wheels of history roll on as they almost always have. But, of course, history does not vote. People do. And, as McConnell knows all too well, if the Republicans can effectively demonize Biden and the Democrats, then less-than-informed voters will make sure that history will once again favor the GOP in November.

Fortunately for the Democrats and the nation, the Republicans cannot resist showing to the world what a menace to democracy that they have become under Donald Trump. One such epiphany occurred on Jan. 19 of this year, when every Republican senator voted to uphold the filibuster, thus ensuring the failure of legislation establishing national standards that would ensure the integrity of elections across the country and hence preserve the principle of majority rule. Together with two Democratic collaborators, these complicit or careerist senators facilely consigned the fate of our republic to the anti-democratic forces dominating Republican-controlled states. The grim consequences of this surrender is already plain to see. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and partisan certification of elections will most likely enable the Sedition Caucus in Congress to come out of the next election with greater numbers and power. Key leadership positions will fall to the likes of Jim Jordan and other Trump acolytes. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will immediately disband the Jan. 6 committee, and seek ways to punish, if not to jail its members, as Gingrich has suggested.

The second epiphany involved the censuring of two Republican House members by the Republican National Committee. The committee, with no discussion or debate, by a voice vote condemned Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for engaging “in actions . . . as members of the January 6th Select Committee not befitting Republican members of Congress . . .” The RNC charged the pair with jeopardizing a Republican victory in November . . .” by aiding “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse . . .” This last indictment made all too transparent the Republicans’ real fear: that the committee might transform the political landscape by bringing to light how perilously close to losing our democracy the country had come on January 6, and how complicit many in the Republican Party had been in abetting that attempted coup.

Change a few words, and this dystopian resolution could have come out of the Politburo or any totalitarian body adept at propaganda, pathological partisanship, and the rewriting of history to stamp out dissent, either from without or within. If one needs to turn reality upside down in order to accomplish your objective, so be it. In the Orwellian world in which the Republicans have chosen to live, it becomes a crime to hold Trump and his abettors accountable for their treasonous actions

The authoritarian clock races toward midnight. The only way to turn it back is not for Joe Biden and the Democrats to highlight their supposed failings in the dubious hope of reclaiming voters who have strayed into the Republican camp, but for Democrats to shine maximum light upon the rot which pervades the Republican Party itself and makes it such an existential threat to the survival of democracy in the United States. There lies the key to avoiding Armageddon.

Robert Emmett Curran is a Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University.