The Dark Heart of the Republican Party
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here .
January 6 was not an outlier. Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.
A Spreading Cancer
It might seem late in the game to point to any one event as a final or conclusive moment in the decline of the Republican Party. And I have no doubt that if the GOP returns to power this winter, its worst members will find new ways to appall decent people while gamboling about in jester’s bells for its base. (As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer has put it so well, “The cruelty is the point.”) But the reaction among Republican elected officials and their conservative-media life-support system to the beating of Paul Pelosi—by a man named David DePape , who was charged with attempting to kidnap Speaker Nancy Pelosi and admitted to planning to torture her—feels different.
I am not alone; my friend Mona Charen, among others, also senses that this event marks a new level of depravity in the GOP. I have struggled for a few days to decide why, exactly, this moment seems like an inflection point. In terms of actual damage, January 6 was far worse than one violent crime in San Francisco. Republican leaders—and here I will leave aside Donald Trump, who is in a class of hideousness all by himself—have said far worse things over the past five years. But a parade of Republicans somehow think that an unhinged, hammer-wielding intruder putting an old man in the ICU is funny .
We might expect such inanity from pathetic attention hounds such as Donald Trump Jr. and the usual conservative troll-pundits . Some of them tried to get a rumor about Paul Pelosi trending and briefly succeeded, especially when Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, characteristically decided that he just had to get involved in something he knows nothing about and amplified a dodgy story about it on Twitter. (He later deleted the tweet .) GOP leaders, however, stayed silent .
But that didn’t stop people in both right-wing politics and media from laughing it up over the Pelosi attack, including the Arizona gubernatorial contender Kari Lake , Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin , and sitting Representative Clay Higgins . Others have joined in trying to obfuscate or deflect attention from the intent of the attack; Senator John Cornyn of Texas even lamely tried to raise immigration as an issue. ( DePape is here on a long-expired visa from Canada.)
One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable .
Of course, Republicans have put on a master class in whataboutism over the past few days. What about the people who laughed at Rand Paul’s neighbor giving the Kentucky senator a beatdown? What about Kathy Griffin’s ugly photograph of her holding up a mask representing Trump’s severed head? And, most of all, what about James Hodgkinson , who shot at a group of GOP political officials and nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise? These are all said with triumph, as if the transformation of the GOP into a violent mob is rendered moot by these examples.
I disapproved of laughing off the attack on Rand Paul and the Griffin photo shoot. (I am allergic to even the implication of violence against any president.) But I also don’t think these are neatly comparable cases; Paul, a middle-aged man, was attacked by a neighbor angry over a pile of brush in Paul’s yard, and Griffin paid a significant career price for her tasteless stunt.
Hodgkinson and DePape , by contrast, do seem alike, a similarity exploited by Republicans. Both were troubled and unstable men who spent a lot of time on the internet and settled on political figures as their intended target. That’s fair as far as it goes.
The problem is that the GOP and their media footmen are flooding the zone with hate, and creating more potential DePape s every day. There is no equivalence here; it’s not liberals who are threatening election officials , stalking ballot boxes with guns , or barraging Congress’s phones and inboxes daily with threats . January 6 should have been our warning that these messages have real power, and yet that terrible day has already receded from our collective memory.
To see how the right wing is deranging more people every day, consider the case of Scott Haven, a Utah insurance salesman. In a new book , the journalist Robert Draper notes that Haven was convicted in 2019 of making threats in many of the almost 4,000 calls he made over two years to Democrats in Congress, singling out Maxine Waters, Dick Durbin, and Jerry Nadler:
He focused his attention on them because Limbaugh and Hannity had themselves done so—even going so far as to supply their Washington office numbers while on the air. Haven dutifully jotted them down. Then he began calling, sharing sentiments like the following:
“Tell the son of a bitch we are coming to hang the fucker!”
Later, as he pleaded guilty in court, Haven trembled with regret. So did many of the insurrectionists of January 6. Perhaps David DePape will do so as well one day. But the members and staff on the Hill who lived in fear of Haven’s threats will not get those years back; the people killed and injured in the Capitol breach cannot be made whole; Paul Pelosi’s body is no less shattered.
Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy. If all attempts at reason and all offers of friendship fail, the rest of us should shun those whose dark hearts encourage them to revel in such poison. Unfortunately, millions of our fellow citizens seem poised to vote many such people into power. The darkness is spreading.
Tags
Who is online
351 visitors
Do you blame an entire group of people only when it's politically expedient? Wasn't it the Democrats who after 9/11 were quick to say don't blame all Muslims for the actions of a few criminals?
Give it a break!
Funny how the liberal media is silent about that. But it's no wonder. They aren't going to let a "crisis" go to waste.
Right, because Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over the building of the 'Great Northern Wall' to keep out all the illegal aliens and this proves Republicans right about wanting the wall. And as for being near Berkeley and using drugs, every conservative knows if you even get close to Berkeley you get a contact high and their electro-politicization machine starts converting you into a liberal regardless of the amount of rightwing rage filled rants about Democrats and pro-MAGA rhetoric you post on social media... /s
[deleted] I quoted more than the accused being illegal alien.