The riot at the Capitol that Donald Trump did so much to incite in his desperate effort to overturn an election that he lost has helped to answer perhaps the most interesting question that that election produced, which was whether Trump would continue to dominate the Republican Party to its continuing and great misfortune.
The answer--almost certainly not--might be the only consolation for what we have been through. Trump's response to his defeat will likely constitute a legacy that forecloses any opportunity to join Grover Cleveland in the history books. It will also ensure that he has no influence in coming years in the party he so obviously despised while pretending to lead.
For Republicans who have swallowed hard and supported Trump through so much venality and ugliness he has now finally provided the pretext for saying "enough is enough," even if it should have been said before the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland.
Precisely because the vast majority of the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for Trump are good and patriotic folks, their support was always contingent in the sense of having at least a hazy conception of what would lead them to withdraw it.
The most powerful, if purely instrumental, argument for that support was that Trump was preferable to the alternatives, first a Hillary Clinton presidency and then the increasingly hard-left "resistance" that came to dominate her party; that Trump was the only thing preventing the crazies from immersing the nation in woke socialism.
This was a not entirely unreasonable position, but also one which unfortunately had the relationship backwards. As should be obvious in the wake of what happened in November and more recently in Georgia, Trump hasn't successfully resisted the radical left; his behavior has had the effect of handing it virtually unconstrained power.
A running joke among Sovietologists in the late 1980s was that Mikhail Gorbachev had to be a CIA mole because he couldn't have done more to destabilize the USSR and give victory in the Cold War to America. By the same logic, Trump could just as easily been a covert Democrat given all he has done to weaken the primary institutional barrier to the left, the Republican Party.
By discrediting both the GOP and the broader conservative worldview that it has long represented, and causing Republicans to sacrifice both moral and political principles to stand by him as he did so, Trump has, in ironic mirror reflection of the expedient calculus of so many Trump voters, made the radical left appear less radical and thus the lesser evil.
The sad truth is that Trump is responsible for handing the presidency and both chambers of Congress to the same forces that his supporters claimed he was protecting us from. Far from serving as a bulwark against the left, Trump has made the GOP anathema to ordinary Americans in a way that makes it easier for the left to impose its agenda upon them.
Given such considerations, one would think that Democrats would pursue Trump's impeachment purely for symbolic effect, only if they know it will fail and thereby leave their most powerful weapon free to pursue the presidency again and continue to wreak havoc on the other side.
I have often been asked by many on the right why, given their understanding of my political orientation, I early on joined and never left the "Never Trump" camp, even as the Democrats grew more radical during the Trump years and Trump himself occasionally managed to stumble into something resembling conservative accomplishments.
Although I strongly suspect that the question won't be asked as often post-Jan. 6, 2021, the answer will remain the same: that Trump would lead the Republican Party to ruin by redefining both it and conservatism more broadly in his unsavory image; that to the extent conservatism became indistinguishable in the public consciousness from Trump, it would die and deserve to.
Ostensible conservatives who disagree with that contention, or somehow find the Trump-inspired GOP makeover less disturbing, might, as an interesting thought experiment, identify a particular conservative cause plucked from the agenda which faces better prospects of being realized in coming years than it did five years ago.
A modest moral sensibility would have from the beginning judged Trump unfit for public office. But even if invocation of the moral sense isn't sufficient, we can always fall back on what has always served as a substitute for it in Trump's mind--that he's a loser.
Preserving the viability of the Republican Party was (and is) crucial because America needs a functioning two-party system as an electoral supplement to its broader constitutional system of checks and balances. Indeed, there are fewer more readily discoverable truths in a perusal of history than that extended periods of one-party control are conducive to corruption and decline, whether manifest in municipalities, states or entire nations.
Political parties that lose elections tend to engage in a fair amount of soul-searching that leads to retooling for next time, with enhanced prospects for success.
Political parties that sell their souls to the devil in order to win but still end up losing have much more work to do.
--–––––v–––––--
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.