Republicans can no longer hide their extremist viewpoints from the public
The original ‘big lie’ of American politics is that Democrats are just as ‘extreme’ as Republicans
This essay is the third in a series called “How This Happened,” examining larger trends in American political history and how they manifest in today’s politics. Please subscribe to receive future installments.
Despite the evidence provided by history, polling, and daily news events, there are millions of people in the United States who actually think that Democrats are just as extreme as Republicans. In a 2022 CNN poll, 52 percent of respondents said that Democrats’ viewpoints were generally mainstream, little different from the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans. A survey also done in 2022 by CBS found that 49 percent of respondents said Democrats were “extreme,” only slightly higher than the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans.
Needless to say, thinking that Democrats are anywhere as extreme as Republicans is totally absurd. Donald Trump is the only president in American history who refused to leave office after losing a free and fair election. He frequently lavishes praise on violent January 6th rioters as “great people” with “love in their heart.” He frequently promises “vengeance” against opponents and says he will imprison and execute people who disagree with him.
And it’s not just Trump. Moderate Republicans in Congress have been extinct since the Trumpist hordes eliminated the few who hadn’t been swept away during the Tea Party movement of the late 2010s. The Republican Party nationally and in a variety of states devised and executed a criminal scheme to steal the 2020 election and throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans.
The American right is also much more violent than the left. Since 1970, about 75 percent of political hate crimes are committed by right-wing extremists. Only 4 percent were committed by far-left extremists.
There are no leftist members of Congress who are anywhere as radical as Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who was censured for posting a stylized video of himself murdering New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021. He and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attracted national controversy for speaking at a neo-Nazi political event just a few months later. There aren’t any Democratic members of Congress who have spoken at rallies of communists who advocate violence.
The anecdotal evidence of individual members’ extreme views is also borne out when we examine Congress from aggregate statistical measures. Since 1992, congressional Democrats have moved slightly to the left, while Republicans have moved much further to the right.
On most specific political issues, Americans agree overwhelmingly with Democratic policies. Republicans’ desires to mandate school prayer, eliminate all abortions, ban same-sex marriages, give billionaires lower taxes, and block people from getting health care are terribly unpopular. (That Republicans enjoy majority support on other issues like the economy mostly stems from the fact that Democratic-leaning voters are more willing to criticize their own side than Republicans are.)
A party with such extreme opinions shouldn’t be able to win elections anywhere outside of rural areas in the Old Confederacy. This is why lying to the public about supposed Democratic extremism is the core component of all Republican messaging. Trump uses the phrase “radical left” in every speech he delivers, and the talking point is repeated hundreds of times a day at Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Real America’s voice, and the entire gigantic propaganda apparatus of right-wing media.
But Republicans don’t just lie about the opposition, they are also constantly being deceptive about their own views. Under the watchful eyes of leaders like Mitch McConnell, they have outsourced their most unpopular policy viewpoints to unelected judges who can do things that could never get passed through legislation—like stopping student loan forgiveness or banning the sale of completely safe abortion medication. And under the new Project 2025 agenda being constructed for Trump by Christian nationalist extremists like his former budget director Russ Vought, national-level Republicans will move the remains of their policy apparatus from the Congress and into the bureaucracy, where they intend to do things like using an obscure 150-year-old law commonly referred to as the Comstock Act to criminalize abortions through agency rulings.
Freed from having to advocate or legislate on their most controversial viewpoints, congressional Republicans are able to focus their public messaging exclusively on the few issues like immigration or the economy where they currently have majority support. They spend the rest of their time attacking Democrats through spurious investigations, like their endless hearings on Hunter Biden.
None of these efforts ever results in substantive legislation. Senate Republicans scuttled their own immigration enforcement bill, Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s years-long impeachment investigations have turned up nothing, and House Republicans voted more than 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without bothering to offer an alternative.
The Republican Party’s core beliefs are monstrously unpopular, but instead of changing their viewpoints to align with public opinion, they have decided to not talk about them. Legislation is not the goal for national Republicans. Thanks to their effective policy outsourcing operation, elected Republicans spend almost all their time on branding Democrats as extreme, while on television debate shows and the nation’s opinion pages, carefully coiffed “fictitious Republicans” present a face to the public that doesn’t correspond at all with reality.
The strategy has worked marvelously on the many people who don’t know much of anything about politics.
“We can’t even see communists from our backyard in this country, and yet, a not insignificant part of the population, I would argue probably about 50 million Americans, think that we’re socialist,” Democratic political strategist Rachel Bitecofer told me last month on Theory of Change.
While Republicans’ minimal attack surface approach to politics has been able to hoodwink many Americans who don’t favor their radical agenda, the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson has thrown a gigantic monkey wrench into the plan. While the right-wing justices were willing to overturn a national right to abortion, they declined to set any actual limits on it either. The result has completely discombobulated Republican politics, because it’s forced them to actually have to pass legislation on a controversial topic instead of letting bureaucrats or judges make the law for them.
The situation that’s unfolded since Dobbs is reminiscent of what happened in 2017, early in Trump’s presidential term on the topic of the health care. Once Republicans were able to implement their own ACA alternative, they refused to pass anything into law and simply abandoned what they had claimed for 8 years was an issue of the utmost importance.
With Roe v. Wade overturned, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives has refused to take up any sort of abortion legislation. The party’s now presumptive nominee Donald Trump declined to take a position on a national ban during the just-concluded party presidential contest. He called a 6-week ban on the procedure passed by his then-rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a “terrible mistake.”
In a very carefully written video statement released on Monday, Trump said he wanted to outsource abortion policy to the states entirely.
“The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” Trump said. “Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.”
While Trump’s devious statement did manage to fool many of the national news reporters who should know better, his refusal to take a position incensed the Christian fundamentalist activists who have always regarded him with suspicion given that he has changed his opinions on abortion at least 15 times in the past 25 years.
National Review, an epicenter for Catholic abortion opponents, published an article headlined “Trump Finalizes Divorce with the Organized Pro-Life Movement.”
“President Trump is not a pro-life candidate,” radical Christian nationalist Lila Rose said in a news release. “He’s far less pro-abortion than Biden, but he supports killing some preborn children and will even make that his position in an attempt to get pro-abortion votes.”
Rose also pointed to the current Republican platform which states that the party supports “a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”
Before he became the Republicans’ Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson made it clear what a “human life amendment” means after attending an anti-abortion protest in his home state of Louisiana.
“We will get the number of abortions to ZERO!!” he wrote in a January 2023 tweet. “EVERYONE deserves a birthday. Thanks be to God.”
Far removed from the urbane public relations specialists who control the party’s image in DC and New York, red state Republicans rushed to enshrine their anti-abortion extremism into law. As a result, the procedure is illegal in almost all circumstances in 14 states, including for victims of rape or incest, and banned in some of the earliest weeks of pregnancy in many others.
The number of bans would be even higher were it not for Americans of both parties choosing to protect abortion rights via a series of ballot initiatives. In 2022, voters in six states comfortably passed measures protecting abortion access, including in Republican-dominated Kansas. Last year, a bipartisan majority of Ohio and Kentucky residents protected women’s right to choose as well. Pro-choice majorities also turned out for politicians in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Virginia who vowed to protect access.
Faced with overwhelming public opposition to their radical viewpoints, Republicans in a variety of states have been trying to rig the electoral process against the pro-choice majority by restricting ballot initiatives or blocking them altogether. Rather than become more moderate in response to the people, Republicans are trying to prolong their extremist minoritiarian schemes.
The case of Arizona is particularly notable in this regard. In anticipation of the Dobbs ruling, state Republicans passed a bill in March of 2022 which banned most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy which included language explicitly stating that it did not repeal a much older 1864 law, enshrined in Section 13-3603 of the state code, which banned the procedure in all circumstances except to save the life of a mother.
“This act does not […] repeal, by implication or otherwise, section 13-3603, Arizona Revised Statutes, or any other applicable state law regulating or restricting abortion,” the law reads.
In other words, Arizona Republicans were trying to follow the national model in getting unelected judges to impose their most radical viewpoints on the public without having to actually legislate them. On Tuesday, the Republican-dominated state supreme court gave them exactly what they wanted in a ruling that correctly noted that the 2022 law “does not independently authorize abortion,” meaning that the original 1864 provision would be enforceable.
This was exactly what Kari Lake, the radical Christian supremacist who was then running for governor, wanted to happen.
“I’m incredibly thrilled that we are going to have a great law that’s already on the books, I believe it’s ARS 13-3603,” she said during a June 2022 interview with a Phoenix-area radio station. “It will prohibit abortion in Arizona except to save the life of a mother. And I think we’re going to be setting the, paving the way and setting course for other states to follow.”
Other Arizona Republicans were even more extreme in their desire for the draconian law to go into effect. State Sen. Anthony Kern led a worship service on the floor of the legislature in which he and fellow evangelicals engaged in the superstitious practice of “speaking in tongues.” Footage of the cult prayer practice went viral, horrifying millions.
Arizona Democrats were well aware of what their intra-state rivals were trying to do. They tried to repeal the 1864 law in a bill of their own earlier this year but were blocked by the Republicans who control both bodies of the legislature. On Wednesday, state senate Republicans voted to go into recess rather than have a public debate about what to do about the old law, which was enacted before women could vote and Arizona was a state.
Faced with such flagrant anti-abortion extremism from his own party, Trump has been unable to do anything other than repeat his insincere federalist talking point, while also promoting the longstanding right-wing lies about Democrats supposedly favoring the execution of babies after birth.
It’s unclear what Arizona’s Republicans will do now that the nation’s attention is focused on their far-right viewpoints. Some are talking about legislation of their own, while still others are favoring a ballot initiative approach that would provide them some insulation from voters on both sides of the abortion question. Lake is one of a number of Republicans who previously stated their support for the 1864 law who are now claiming to oppose it. No one should believe them.
State Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, who tried to repeal the 1864 law before it was reinstated, accurately summed up what has to be done instead, in both Arizona and everywhere:
“Let’s put our anger to work. Find a friend, grab a neighbor or relative to sign the petition & put Arizona Abortion Access on November’s ballot! Remind our state Government that the extremists DON’T have the final word!”
Abortion is far from the only issue on which radical Republicans are far out of step with the majority of Americans, and it’s unfortunate that millions of people are having to be the personal object lesson about what the far right wants to do to the rest of us. But at long last, it appears that the public is waking up to the unpleasant reality that far-right Republicans don’t believe in democracy and will do anything they can to restrict and control others. Democrats must act with great urgency to ensure that this process continues and expands by building an infrastructure to protect democracy.