The GOP has effectively built a combat party.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Unrolled thread here
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588203163819339776.html

I keep wanting to say this and it keeps getting stuck in my throat, but here it goes. The GOP has effectively built a combat party. It's not a political party that you see in a system in which communicating ideas matters. It's a mass party with a paramilitary function.

Read @DavidNeiwert to learn how the militia movement was kept at bay from the general Republican Party for a while but started to seep in, particularly with Reagan's hat tip to the Sagebrush Rebellion, Newt Gingrich's support, and the big Tea Party breakthrough.

The Trump movement was the accumulation of all that, bringing paramilitary groups fully into the GOP to the point of praising them as the heroes of the summer of 2020 and calling on them to stop the peaceful transfer of power on J6. It's now metastasized to terrorist violence.

When it was paramilitaries performing vigilante functions throughout the US, they could strike the defensive pose, and when it was the J6 putsch, they could pretend like it was a Constitutional duty, but in this phase, it is stuff like covering for and making light of terrorism.

So what's a combat party? I first heard the term while reading Lenin's collected works. His idea was that the Party wouldn't just try to get elected but would also foment strikes and man the barricades during workers' insurrection. Political pressure had to be more than polls.

Bannon obv drew this comparison by comparing himself to Lenin, but if you go back, Mussolini came out of the Socialist movement and was committed to a similar idea of the Party as a vehicle for elections, as well as violent, mass revolutionary movement-building in the streets.

So he took that idea and grafted it onto the Fascist Party, effectively forming a counter-revolutionary combat party that cared far more about putting down Socialist movement-building in the streets than winning at the polls. He used the same features—mass rallies, putsches, etc.

Ignoring this would be foolish. It's wise, in my view, to view the large amount of stochastic terrorism directed against the left and liberals not as isolated incidents but as emerging from the base of the GOP and compelled by ideologues who have captured the Party through Trump.

Perhaps it's possible to persuade individuals away for a moment, but involvement in the GOP at this point funnels into Trumpism, which is itself the ideology of a combat party. Of course, while it means that community defense is going to be an unavoidable necessity...

it also makes apparent the need for much, much more in terms of security and welfare of communities directly and indirectly targeted by this massive force of violence and hatred in the US.
• • •

[onecaliberal]

1. The FBI should be all over this. Fire Wray he's doing nothing.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

8. Republicans voted against

Funding a study to look at domestic terrorists and white supremacy.

[Irish_Dem]

2. I have been saying for some time now that the GOP is at war with America.

And got pushback. Now I think people finally see it.

[Nevilledog]

4. It's been obvious to me for quite some time

[Irish_Dem]

5. The US has been in a psychological civil war for some time.

And the war has become violent and resulting in deaths.

All the covid deaths were casualties of the disinformation war the GOP wages against Americans.
School gun violence, the same.

[Irish_Dem]

3. It started with Newt Gingrich/GOP brutally going after the Clintons.

Posters with bullseye on both the Clintons.

Investigation after investigation that kept Americans upset and losing retirement savings
as the stock market reflected the constant nonsense being thrown at a sitting president.

Creating distrust, chaos, division, demonizing Democrats.
Sound familiar?

[prodigitalson]

6. I agree

people often trace it to Nixon's Southern Strategy to appeal to racist southern Whites who were still voting for Dems. While racism is clearly a major ethos for the MAGA movement, and those racist southern Whites are that movement's most fervent supporters it was Gingrich who took the demonization of rivals to a level that would have made Nixon blush. But more importantly Gingrich began the jettisoning of the norms of governing and their replacement with maximalist exercises of power. Gingrich's maximum power theory (at the time) was limited to actual constitutional powers. However, the GOP has now embraced a theory of pure maximum power that doesn't consider legality, only will to power. And Gingrich is on board.

There is a direct fascist through-line from Gingrich to Trump.

[Irish_Dem]

7. I was traveling out west and shocked to see wanted posters featuring Bill Clinton.

And target range practice sheets with Bill Clinton in the center, hanging everywhere in stores etc.

People making very nasty comments about President Clinton.

I had never heard such talk before.

Yes the GOP was nasty during the Nixon 1968 election but nothing like during
the Clinton presidency.

The GOP made it clear that if they lose power they will make it a living hell for everyone.
That is why some people said it was just as well Gore didn't pursue the stolen election.
Maybe the GOP will calm down.

But of course it only emboldened them.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

9. They want

Full range domination,been wanting it since the south fell. The fascist rich want to enslave the not so rich
American people.

All profits no paying for labor and no taxes and lots of government handouts. No regulations,no bad words about them,no
critical media,no unions,no worker rights or human rights
(except for themselves) ,no rule of law.

Oligarchs need to be stopped and given a very hard reality check from the people they seek to dominate. Make it so harsh they will never forget they do not own people.

[prodigitalson]

10. agreed - slavery is one of the logical results of completely unregulated capitalism

Since they can't do that anymore, they get as close to it as they can.