written 3 January 2021
published 10 January 2021
I write this on January 3rd. By the time you read it, the two Senate elections in Georgia will be over and the results probably known, determining control of the Senate for the next two years. The joint session of Congress will have certified the Electoral College votes, but the Trump faction, including 11 Senators and 140 members of Congress, is planning to contest the issue, and invited armed insurrection by white supremacists to force their point. I expect President Biden will have been confirmed, and that law enforcement contained the domestic terrorists acting as "patriots", but this is a sad time for the American experiment in democracy, and the dissolution of a once great political party.
Steve Schmidt, life-long Republican operative and co-founder of The Lincoln Project, believes January 6th will spell doom for the Republican Party as they plunge into a civil war that will pit the authoritarian and anti-authoritarian factions against each other. This is excerpted from his recent Twitter feed.
"The poisonous fruit from four years of collaboration and complicity with Trump's insanity, illiberalism and incompetence are ready for harvest. It will kill the GOP because it’s Pro-Democracy faction and Autocratic factions can no longer exist together. It won’t happen over-night but the destination is clear. The Conservative party in America is dead. It may continue to bear the name “Republican” but it will be no such thing. Fascism has indeed come to America and as was once predicted, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. This movement must be defeated. It cannot be appeased, accommodated or negotiated with. We must all recognize the new age of American politics it has wrought. There are only two sides in American politics now, the American side and the Autocratic side."
"2021 will be a hard year in the life of the American nation. There is a great struggle that lies before us, and our disbelief at its arrival must not blind us to the lethal danger it poses to the American experiment. The poisonous bounty of Trump's catastrophic presidency is ready for harvest, and the whole world will get to watch his seditious antics play out during a joint session of Congress on January 6th. It will play out as a farce, and it will fail, but the danger lies in the act, not the outcome."
"Before I start, there is an important matter of fact which unfortunately needs restating. Joe Biden won the presidential election decisively. The election was free, fair and legitimate. There is no evidence of any widespread fraud. Allegations of fraud are premeditated lies being made by a rancid assortment of Trump’s stooges and propagandists. Every single House Member and every U.S. Senator that participates in denying this reality, and thus the legitimacy of our election, does so as a cynical act, which they know for certain has no legitimate basis. Such actions are a grievous sin against American democracy and a brutal betrayal of their oaths of office and duty."
"They are fighting to maintain the power of a defeated president against the sovereign will of the American people. They are fighting to establish a tyranny by deliberately poisoning faith and belief in American democracy; a system rooted in the willingness of one side to cede power to another at the will of the people. The legitimacy of that system is being strangled by Trump's lies and the lies of his movement. That movement is an autocratic one with fascistic markers, hostile to the American Constitution, the rule of law and the highest ideas and ideals of American liberty."
"January 6th will be an historic day in America. The autocrats will step forward into the light, including a substantial number of GOP Senators, and almost all of the known GOP presidential aspirants. It must be opposed fiercely, and recognized for what it is; another storm in the constant struggle between liberty and her enemies. This is a movement that is fueled by lies, conspiracies, corruption, greed, extremism, racism, grievance, resentment, cynicism and a profound absence of love for America. It is right to feel anger and contempt toward its leaders and enablers. Sedition is the precise word, and the right word, to describe what we have been witnessing. Shame on them all."
