The Democrats in Disarray! trope has been a favorite of the mainstream media for some time now. There are a lot of reasons they have pounded on it, often manufacturing the disarray in order, for instance, to prove their evenhandedness for, after all, both sides!.
It will be interesting to see if we’ll be hearing about Republicans in Disarray, for they most certainly appear to be.
A few days ago I posited that we might be seeing the beginning of Republicans eating their own, focusing on the current move in Texas to impeach Ken Paxton, something their doing now though he has been a known criminal for years.
Now, we have another example: Steve Bannon exhorting his griftees (new word, but if there are grifters there are of necessity griftees) not to donate to the RNC because that awful Kevin McCarthy didn’t tank the economy in service to fascism.
A few days before the final vote on the debt limit my wife was watching someone on TikTok who predicted that McCarthy would eventually cave because the money people behind him aren’t interested in destroying the economy in service to fascism. Not that they’re necessarily against fascism, they just don’t want to lose any money in the process. The argument sounded right to me, and I suspect that it was indeed such pressure that led McCarthy to go along with a deal in which he got a few fig leafs, but essentially caved. That, and the probability that destroying the economy might lead to him losing his job in 2024.
It seems highly likely that the full on fascists like Bannon, Greene, et. al., will continue to cause turmoil, (i.e., “disarray”) within the Republican ranks, by increasingly attacking the mere fascist enablers. It’s also highly likely that many Republican incumbents will spend as much time running away from other Republicans as they spend running against Democratic opponents.
It is to be hoped that the Democrats can take advantage of this. It will require that they speak with one voice. Unfortunately, that’s something they have been incapable of doing in the past, but maybe they’ve learned.
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