"Saving" the GOP: A fool's errand

"QAnon in Red Shirt", by Marc Nozell, CC BY 2.0

Yesterday, the great kerfuffle was a Politico piece, which reported that Joe Biden was vetting Republicans for Cabinet positions. The long and the short of my opinion on this piece is that "vetting" is nowhere near "offering". And considering that Never Trump Republicans are a big part of Biden's coalition, it would be ridiculous to not at the very least give one or two of them consideration. Not for Defense or State, but for a lower-level cabinet slot.

That being said, I don't think many Republicans will want to serve under Biden. As the Project Lincoln folks keep saying, their struggle after this year will be to reclaim the GOP and de-Trumpify it. However, a YouGov poll on the GOP and QAnon might make that a hard, if not impossible, task:

A full 50 percent of President Trump’s supporters now believe the bizarre, made-up claims about an international ring of child sex traffickers at the core of the extremist conspiracy theory known as QAnon, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — a disturbing sign of how susceptible partisans have become to bogus stories in an age of rampant polarization and unbridled social media.

The survey, which interviewed 1,583 registered voters from Oct. 16 to 18, shows that most of the registered voters (55 percent) say they’ve never heard of QAnon, including 44 percent of Trump supporters. And 59 percent of voters who have heard of QAnon describe it as “an extremist conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.” (The survey has a margin of error of about 4 percent.)

Yet these numbers understate the degree to which awareness and even acceptance of QAnon’s underlying falsehoods have permeated the right, regardless of how many unwitting adherents explicitly realize such fictions originate with QAnon itself.

Let's unpack this.

Forty-four percent of Republican voters have never heard of QAnon. Of those who have, 59% consider it a fringe, conspiracist movement. And yet half of all GOPers have internalized Q's batshit theories.

Let's be clear: 50% of GOP voters believe QAnon's outlandish conspiracy theories, whether or not they've heard of the so-called "movement".

It's easy to make comparisons between de-Trumpification and de-Nazification. But I think, with this data, the comparison holds.

You have half of the active supporters of one of the two main parties believing that their hero Donald Trump is engaged in a struggle to expose a Satanic pedophile ring. These are not the kind of people who will be susceptible to the rational discourse being offered by their soi disant saviors. They don't want the Republican Party to go back to its country club roots. They are, to quote the Blues Brothers, on a mission from God. Anyone who opposes them, including other Republicans, are the enemy. But more than the enemy: they're in league with Satan and the forces of evil. How does even a right-wing ideologue like John Kasich combat that? Reason bolted the barn long ago.

And, of course, as much as I welcome the help of Never Trump Republicans in this fight, the fact is that they had more than a bit with setting the GOP on this path. From Nixon's Southern strategy, to Willie Horton, to birtherism, the rot set in when the GOP decided to court racist Dixiecrats to shift its powerbase from the North to the South. And many current Never Trumpers played quite a role in the progress of this illness. 

The GOP as a rational center-right party no longer exists. Those who can't stomach its radicalism have already left. What's left are those who are at least influenced by the likes of QAnon. No amount of blandishments from those who originally sold them the snake oil will do any good. The conspiracism is now their meat and milk. They won't let it go, because it gives them an explanation for a world they no longer understand, and which no longer has a place for them. These people aren't going to simply disappear. They haven't been defeated in a catastrophic world war. Like evangelicals after the Scopes trial, they'll lie low and recover. Once a conspiracy enters the bloodstream, it's hard to excise.

If I were to offer any advice to the likes of Kasich, it's this: Don't save the GOP. It's dead. You're going to have to build up a new center-right party, one more in line with what a center-right party should be. The GOP, as it now stands, is no better than a modern Nazi Party. Leave your tribal allegiances behind. The tribe has split, and half of it wants to kill you. Time to move on.