Forget the Myth of a GOP 'Civil War'

Rep. Liz Cheney speaks to reporters after the Republican Party expels her from third highest leadership post.

Political analyst Jeff Greenfield has written an astute opinion piece laying out the Republican Party’s systemic purge of all who disagree with former President Donald Trump. This is no “civil war,” he declares.

 The Democrats, Greenfield insists, must put aside any hopes that the GOP is in abject disarray, engaged in a mythical circular firing squad. Instead, Dems must accept the truth that the Republicans are merely expelling anti-Trump dead-enders. The party is morphing into a wholly owned Trump subsidiary.

 This is one reason the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group founded by skilled GOP strategists, gained little traction with Republican voters during the 2020 presidential campaign. Democrats and the left would go into raptures every time the group released a clever anti-Trump ad. But these longtime GOP sachems were no longer speaking to most of the Republican Party. The base could hear only Trump.  

 In ejecting Rep. Liz Cheney (Wy.) from its leadership, the GOP is replacing a 2020 election truth-teller (Cheney) with a 2020 election denier (Rep. Elise Stefanik [N.Y.]). This purge, as the longtime Washington Post reporter Dan Balz lays out, is happening across state and local Republican Parties, as well as the national. More than the future of the GOP, Balz writes, the future of the nation may well be at stake.    

Yet, this practice is not new. Extremists succeeded in wresting control of the Republican Party in past. Consider the Tea Party. It surfaced as a fringe group fighting against the Affordable Care Act -- protestors dressed in Revolutionary War garb flocked to congressional town halls in 2010 to stoke public outrage over a supposed federal government takeover. This “grass roots” radical right movement was, however, nurtured by major Republican money. It stirred up dark currents that had long been part of the conservative movement – submerged white nationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-labor tropes. The Tea Party ultimately enveloped the GOP.  

President Ronald Reagan had helped set the paradigm. No matter how sunny his outlook, Reagan was mining the dark lodes unearthed by Barry M. Goldwater Jr.’s 1964 presidential campaign. Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign, for example, at a county fair near Philadelphia, Miss., site of a notorious murder of 1960s freedom riders. Yet, as far as the GOP base was concerned, Reagan could do no wrong.

Now they feel the same about Trump. As one ardent believer told Ashley Parker in The Washington Post: “I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong.”

For too many, Trump’s Big Lie that he won the election still remains nothing but the truth.