The MAGA Threat Is Greater Today Than It Was in 2020
Proud Boys scream at counterprotesters near McPherson Square, Washington, DC, December 2020. Police had separated the two groups., photo credit: Tyrone Turner/WAMU // NPR
McCarthy got his gavel, but MAGA pulls his strings. The GOP is comfy with armed fascists, SCOTUS is rolling back the 20th century. Time to get busy.
by Max Elbaum
Lots of hard work and savvy grassroots organizing stopped MAGA election deniers from winning battleground Senate seats and offices controlling election machinery last November. Celebrating that achievement—and noting the ways it put a wrench in MAGA’s 2024 coup plans—was and is totally appropriate.
But let’s get real about what MAGA did achieve. The bitter truth is that MAGA is more dangerous and better positioned to take political power in this country than it was in 2020.
Fracas in the House shows ultra-MAGA is in charge
The backstabbing fracas among Republicans over who would be Speaker of the House had some entertainment value. And no doubt it alienated some voters from the GOP. But from beginning to end, the underlying politics of the battle proved that Podhorzer’s point quoted above was right on target. Kevin McCarthy may be sitting in the Speaker’s chair, but the fascists-in-suits of the “Freedom Caucus” are calling the shots.
No way it could be otherwise. Podhorzer again hit the nail on the head, writing that “the Republican Caucus taking power in January will be even less committed to the peaceful transfer of power than the one it succeeds, having purged nearly every one of its members who voted to impeach Trump the second time. Jim Jordan, who assisted the insurrectionists and refused to testify before the January 6th Committee, will chair the Judiciary Committee.”
With Jordan at the pivot, House investigations of the January 6 Committee, as well as the FBI and other security agencies, were approved as part of McCarthy’s concession list to become Speaker. These need to be understood for what they are: projects designed to protect and legitimize right-wing militia and paramilitary violence and prepare the ground for more of it in the years to come. The timing may be a coincidence, but it’s no accident that leading MAGA figures such as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are key advisors to Jair Bolsonaro, whose supporters just rioted and invaded government buildings in Brazil January 6-style.
A few so-called moderates groused a little about the terms under which the most extreme MAGA stalwarts will pull McCarthy’s strings. But not a single one pushed back against the dictat by election deniers and 2020 coupsters. The House majority is now openly aligned with the January 6 insurrectionists against those who defended what remains of US democracy: Only one of the 222 House Republicans attended the January 6 ceremony honoring police officers and others who faced violent assault from the MAGA faithful.
MAGA operatives run the Supreme Court
Likewise, the current SCOTUS majority are not jurists who have any kind of “conservative” principles. They are as much political operatives as the members of the Freedom Caucus in the House, products of a systematic (and openly proclaimed) 40-year effort by the Federalist Society to turn the judiciary into an instrument of its reactionary political agenda. To today’s Supreme Court “The 20th Century Was Wrongly Decided.”