11-8-2022
'These people are no longer fringe':
Midterms likely to confirm MAGA’s staying power.
Joe Walsh wants to make amends. Elected in 2010 to Illinois's 8th Congressional District, Walsh was once one of the most prominent, combative voices from the far-right Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. And he was on TV constantly.
In 2012, he called President Obama "a tyrant" and Jesse Jackson "a race hustler." He said Muslims were "trying to kill Americans every week" and that American Jews "aren't as pro-Israel as they should be." Even out of office, he tweeted jokes about the president's birth certificate and repeatedly declared: "Obama is a Muslim. In his head & in his heart." (He is not.) And days ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Walsh tweeted:
"If Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket."
Walsh looks back with some regret about all that now,
a dozen years after he, former Rep. Allen West (R-Florida) and other freshman insurgents were first elected to Congress during Obama's first term.
They were regular guests on CNN and Fox News, always good for an incendiary comment wherever there was a microphone, but accomplished little as legislators.
They were also prototypes for a new generation of Republican agitators now in office: Reps. Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Walsh says now.;
"I've got to live with that the rest of my life,"
I was one of the angry Tea Party guys, and I really helped inflame the base.
There's a direct line from people like me riling the base up to Donald Trump in 2016, and then to the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world."
In the Tea Party era, they were outliers in the party. Now the GOP's leading troll and gadfly is Trump himself, a twice-impeached former president and likely 2024 candidate.
He's led the personal attacks not only on Democrats but so-called "RINOs" (i.e., Republicans In Name Only).
Ironically, Trump registered as a Democrat for nearly
a decade, beginning in 2001.
"Trump really dismantled that norm in terms of the acceptability of politicians being able to say and do things that were considered just a faux pas, abnormal, unbelievable — lying, tearing down the system without solutions."
Chris Haynes, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Haven (Connecticut), who has studied the collision of social media and the presidency. "Trump made it OK to literally tear down the system and not care about what the solutions were going to be."
A lot of the hardcore conservatives who I served with in philosophy and principle__
They couldn't stand Trump, but they all did what they had to do and they sold their souls to stay in power."
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), writing in The Atlantic, condemned the "carefully constructed, prejudice-confirming arguments from the usual gang of sophists, grifters, and truth-deniers" around him.
The noisiest, most-televised Republican House members have only grown in influence, as they lead a growing extremist crowd of election deniers and QAnon believers.
The partisan attacks are becoming crazier and nastier. Greene has blamed California wildfires on a "Jewish space laser."
In February she spoke at a conference of white nationalists hosted by far-right extremist Nick Fuentes i
n Orlando, Florida. Now Greene is being talked up as a potential Trump running mate in 2024.
"Marjorie Taylor Greene is not fringe," says Walsh.
_"These people are no longer fringe. They're the party."
Boebert in her first term in office, she's been among the loudest freshman Republicans, if also the most incoherent.
"I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk –
that's not in the Constitution," Boebert said ahead of her June primary.
(The first clause of the Bill of Rights, of course, says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.")
"I think it's wishful thinking, to be quite honest," says Haynes, who adds that extreme manipulation of the redistricting process has only increased the GOP advantage in certain states.
In Boebert's redrawn district, Republicans now outnumber Democrats 150,000 to 115,000, though unaffiliated voters make up the largest bloc with 44% of the electorate.
When Greene first ran for her House seat from Georgia's 14th District in 2020, she was kept at arm's length by GOP leaders in Washington, D.C. After videos were discovered online showing Greene making comments that were racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic, congressional Republicans spoke against her during the primary.
"The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting and don't reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great," Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), a former Tea Partier, told the Washington Post. Greene still won her primary runoff.
Now she's a MAGA star, with major feature articles in the New York Times and elsewhere, and all predictions are that she will sail to reelection.
"Even more disappointing, all of these voters of mine, the Tea Party folks out there in America, they all abandoned everything they believed in to support Trump. It's just been crushing."
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