Five Ways the Coming Republican Revolution Might Fail

The Democratic Party has collapsed, but other institutions, along with the party’s own internal contradictions, will be harder to conquer

The Republican Party in its current incarnation is a grab-bag of insurgents and grifters who have won the right to overthrow American democracy by offering a range of promises to two constituencies: a “vengeance” constituency made up of its deplorable base of Trump voters, and a “greed” constituency made up of its radically libertarian wealthy donors and benefactors. I argue in a companion piece that it will not be able to fulfill those promises, even after it has assumed autocratic power, because (a) it has no idea how to govern and (b) the promises themselves are often incoherent, incompatible, or simply impossible to implement (i.e., delusional).

We know how it’s going to start, but how is it going to end?

The Democrats in the Senate, for reasons historians will be debating for decades, were unable to protect American voting rights from the nation-wide Republican assault launched under the pretext of Trump’s Big Lie.

As a result, we know how it’s going to start: rigged electoral maps and unfettered voter suppression will result in a massive wipeout of Democratic office holders in the 2022 midterms, solid Republican majorities in the House and Senate, and the inevitable installation of a Republican president in 2024 (either “legally” through successful voter suppression or “extra-legally” through successful subversion of the Electoral College). That person will then attempt to wield all the power of the federal government to pick up exactly where the Trump administration left off.

Then what happens?

Too many people seem to think once the electoral fix is in, it will be smooth-sailing for our new Republican overlords. Unconstrained by accountability at the polls, Republicans will go hog wild, stripping away the rights of their “enemies”, emptying the US Treasury into the pockets of their super-rich donors, and generally succeeding in recasting American in the image of Putin’s Russia. Certainly, they will want to do all this.

But I believe this Republican Revolution must ultimately fail. How might this happen? What will stand in its way? In a word: reality.

When you base your movement on blatant lies and false conspiracies, when you attempt to excise the very idea of truth, you are bound to discover that, in the baseball game of life, reality bats last.

Here are five ways the new Republican regime might run into unexpected resistance as it attempts to implement its dystopian dream of a permanent minority-rule, white supremacist America. Be forewarned, the outcomes these scenarios imply range from moderately tolerable to catastrophic and unrecoverable.

Scenario #1: Business refuses to play

This is actually a best-case scenario. Big business is big in America. It operates powerful trade organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. It provides millions of dollars in donations to the Republican Party. Its lobbyists work in league with Republican legislators at both state and federal levels on a daily basis.

In the past, big business has been very conservative in its outlook. But that may be changing as business leaders realize the new Republican autocracy will not abide by the old conservative rules about keeping the government’s nose out of business’s affairs. The Trump Administration, in particular, opened a huge rift with big business, even after providing massive tax cuts, when it impetuously imposed tariffs that damaged several American industries. The relationship was not helped when the supposedly business-friendly president launched occasional tweet storms insulting and berating major Fortune 500 companies when their actions displeased his fragile ego.

What can business do? Initially, they might use their lobbying power to try to redirect the new regime on topics like voting rights, immigration, and openly discriminatory policies that impact their customers. Should that prove ineffectual, they might try to organize and issue public statements opposing particularly egregious policies, as they did recently (and only briefly) with regard to new voting suppression laws in Florida and Texas. They can also publicly resign in protest from governmental advisory groups, as they did after Trump expressed his support for the “very fine” neo-Nazis who invaded Charlottesville. Finally, they have other significant sources of influence at their disposal, such as cutting off donations to offending politicians or threatening to move their headquarters and employees out of rogue red States and into more business-friendly blue States.

Any of these steps would be considered unthinkable a few years ago, but if the legal foundations of trade and commerce in the United States are adequately corrupted by a lawless, kleptocratic, and electorally unaccountable regime, big business may have no choice but to join the effort to remove that regime, or to remove themselves from the failing country that regime governs.

Scenario #2: Judicial review hobbles anti-Constitutional progress

This is another fairly benign scenario. As we saw during the Trump years, no branch of government is more devoted to defending the Constitution and upholding the rule of law than the federal judiciary. Indeed, that’s their job. Judges rely on evidence, precedent, and explicit procedures and rules to administer the law.

Because the judiciary relies on deep institutional norms and traditions, it is hard to corrupt. This is evidenced by the fact that the Republican Party and the Federalist Society have been trying to corrupt it for decades, and to date have been only partially successful, at least below the level of the Supreme Court. There are still many honest judges out there, who will administer the law fairly, even as the other two branches sink deeper and deeper into autarchy.

Expect the judiciary, at both the federal and state levels, to block many of the new regime’s most radical, anti-Constitutional efforts, as it did during the Trump years. Whether the Supreme Court will aid or hinder such efforts remains to be seen. But judicial oversight will continue to provide some protections against the worst anti-Constitutional ambitions of the new Republican regime.

Scenario #3: Republicanism/Trumpism splinters internally and devolves into internecine warfare

Before the mainstream media decided to declare a Republican takeover of American democracy a sure thing, they were busy spilling much ink over how the Republican Party was collapsing from within and “searching for its soul” in order to get beyond the disaster of the Trump presidency. But it is important to remember that the Republicans’ victory in defeating democracy, was handed to them by two Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (a betrayal Democratic voters are unlikely to forget anytime soon), not by any brilliant maneuverings on the part of Republicans. In any sane scenario, their autocratic ambitions would have been snuffed out easily in the first year of the Biden Administration. But instead, Democrats managed to produce what is probably the biggest self-own in the history of American politics.

Despite the Democratic collapse on voting rights, one fact remained unaltered: the Republican Party is still its own worst enemy. As noted above, its current incarnation struggles constantly to balance the irreconcilable demands of its “vengeance” and “greed” constituencies. Beyond that, the party has a Trump problem. First, his Big Lie is becoming problematic within the party. While Republicans were quick to seize upon it as a handy pretext for justifying their electoral power grab, now that Democrats have handed them that victory, do they really benefit from continuing to parrot Trump’s completely debunked, obviously self-serving claims? Adhering to the Big Lie (and Trump) may be necessary to win the votes of Trump’s base, but can it win a general election, even with voter suppression and subversion? Republicans are not sure. And this may make them a bit more cautious.

Trump is an albatross around Republicans’ necks in other ways. First and foremost, he is crazy. The mainstream media does not emphasize and document this enough. Trump will reflexively attack anyone he believes threatens his fragile ego, including anyone in the Republican Party. He is impetuous and unpredictable, engaging in bizarre behaviors like telling his followers to boycott an upcoming election in Georgia that resulted in Democrats winning two Senate seats, endorsing the reelection of a European dictator, and elevating the most extreme right-wing nutjobs in Republican primaries, thereby putting the party at risk of losing otherwise winnable House and Senate seats in subsequent general elections. Trump is the ultimate wild card and, as such, remains a significant potential disrupter of Republican ambitions.

What happens if Republican Party splits over Donald Trump? What happens if Trump leaves the party in a huff and declares himself the leader of a third party? All the voter suppression and subversion in the world might not be enough to win even rigged elections if Republicans find their voters’ loyalties split between Trump and anti-Trump factions.

Scenario #4: The military defends the Constitution, not the Republican dictator

The American military takes an oath to defend the Constitution, not the regime currently in power. If the new authoritarian leaders decide to violate the Constitution in pursuit of their autocratic ends, how will the leaders of the largest military force in the world react? What will the military do if the Republicans use their state-level voter subversion laws in 2024 to rig the Electoral College and install a losing candidate as president?

We know something about how this might play out by following the recent reporting by Leonnig and Rucker and Woodward and Costa regarding the 2021 coup attempt. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the tumultuous final days of the Trump Administration, knew Trump was contemplating an unprecedented extra-Constitutional act of sedition to stay in power. As Milley explained in surprising detail to both pairs of reporters, military leaders took numerous actions to ensure that they would not be dragged into Trump’s coup attempt. As reported by Leonnig and Rucker, Milley was quite specific with his direct reports:

“They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,” Milley told his deputies, according to the authors. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”

So, as of early 2021, the military leadership in place was both well aware of Trump’s intentions and quite insistent that no coup could succeed without the military’s support because, as Milley so succinctly put it, “we’re the guys with the guns.”

There is no guarantee, of course, that military leaders in 2024 will hold the same loyalties. Three retired generals expressed this concern in a mid-December 2021 op-ed piece, noting that “the potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur.” Much will depend on the extent to which the new Republican regime is able to corrupt not just the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense, as it did in the last months of the Trump Administration, but also the top levels of the military line of command.

Perhaps the best way to think about this scenario is as a potential deterrent to the most extreme Republican autocratic ambitions. Given the Milley disclosures, Republicans will have to think twice about invoking their voter subversion laws to rig the Electoral College and install a losing candidate as president. Should the military fail to support their second coup attempt, Republicans have to consider the possibility that they might all end up charged with treason and incarcerated for the rest of their lives. Unlikely, but worth considering if you’re planning on overthrowing your own government.

Ominously, if the Republicans do figure out how to bring the military establishment over to their side, there is really only one scenario worth considering. It’s the one where everybody dies.

Scenario #5: Climate catastrophes create crises beyond the government’s ability to cope

This is the doomsday scenario. Also, sadly, the most likely scenario. Also, the scenario that the Republican takeover of democracy is most likely to bring about directly as a consequence of its own actions and inactions.

When the United States government is controlled by a political party that fears science, denies climate change, promotes lies and conspiracies over truth and facts, and alienates the rest of the world with its arrogant, isolationist rhetoric, climate change progress — as tepid as it is already — will grind to a halt. And that pause, coming at a time when the environment is on the verge of several irreversible tipping points, may well prove to be fatal.

Experts tell us there are no second chances with climate change. Once the cycle of global warming becomes self-sustaining, the world will enter an irreversible cycle of droughts, floods, wildfires, super-storms, food supply disruption, and mass migrations. How will an electorally-unconstrained Republican government handle these catastrophes as they accelerate year after year? We already have a good idea from past experiences: the Katrina disaster under George W. Bush, the lead poisoning of Flint Michigan, the COVID fiasco under Trump and Republican Governors, the Texas power outage crisis in the winter of 2021, the Texas heat wave crisis in the summer of 2021. And that was when Republicans were still to some degree accountable to voters. The record is not encouraging.

As climate catastrophes mount, the new Republican autocracy could potentially collapse under the weight of its own incompetence, arrogance, and lies. But should that unprecedented outcome occur, it will not be an orderly transition to a new normal, but rather, a descent into chaos and suffering from which the United States we know today may never recover.

So there you have it. The repercussions of allowing the inmates to take over the asylum will be far reaching. Democrats’ failure to protect American democracy from a radical Republican-led movement that champions hatred, bigotry, conspiracies, lies, and permanent one-party rule has left us weak and defenseless precisely when we need strong, clear-eyed leadership the most. It may end us as a species. Only one thing is certain: America and the world are about to enter an era of unprecedented instability and danger. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.