Tom Nichols: Goal of Today’s GOP Is Minority Rule

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Thank you. Well, as the U.S. midterm elections approach, our next guest is asking what it means to be a conservative in the Trump era. Tom Nichols is a contributing writer for “The Atlantic” and tackles this question in his latest piece. He joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the current state of the Republican Party.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Tom Nichols, thanks so much for joining us. Now, you are a — died in the wool conservative. And yet, your recent column sort of takes a look at what that even means in this era. Why are we at this point where someone who has held a steadfast to their beliefs for so long is questioning these things?

TOM NICHOLS, WRITER, THE ATLANTIC CONTRIBUTING: Well, I am not questioning all of my beliefs about being a conservative in the sense of a smaller government or a strong national defense, but the conservative movement, and particular, the conservative home in the Republican Party has completely fractured into something that I don’t think conservatives would recognize. The people who think of themselves as conservatives or describe themselves as conservative today are the very opposite of conservative. They are in favor of big government, strong that executive power, imposing their values by judicial fiat, all things that they used to accuse people on the left of doing, which is somewhat ironic that the conservatives have become — or the Republican Party and the people in it who call themselves conservatives have become the party of big government, big government spending, isolationism. And so, I think for anyone who was a conservative, even a center-right conservative in the 1970s or 1980s, this is not something any of us would recognize as conservatism.

SREENIVASAN: In the piece, you lay out kind of your two key questions that you ask yourself before figuring out where you stand on something. Explain to the audience kind of how you came up with those questions and what they are.

NICHOLS: Well, what I did was I pushed aside policy differences, and I know that is hard to do for anybody in a coalition. Political coalitions are difficult because you don’t get the things you want. And so, rather than ask, do I agree or disagree on any one policy, I only asked two questions. Does — when voting, does a particular issue strengthen or weaken the institutional Republican Party in its — I would say, in its quest to become on authoritarian minority governing party? And the second is, with any particular politician, with whom will of this person caucus? Is this politician going to vote to make Kevin McCarthy the Speaker of the House or Mitch McConnell the majority leader in the Senate? And if the answer is that this policy strengthens the Republicans or this person is going to caucus with the Republicans and make that party institutionally stronger for the next time it takes a run at attacking the constitution, then I think that my guideline for those two questions is to vote against anybody who would strengthen that party or caucus with its leaders.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you’ve got a quote I want to read out. It says, I will root for GOP defeats on policy even where I might otherwise agree with them. The Institutional Republican Party must be weak enough so that it can’t carry out the larger project of undermining our elections and curtailing our rights as citizens. Put that in some context for us.

NICHOLS: I think the Republican Party has lost its faith and its ability to convince anyone to buy anything it is selling. The current Republican Party doesn’t stand for anything. They are 20 platform amounted to whatever Donald Trump says. They didn’t even — I mean, a political party that didn’t even bother to write a platform. You know, it was really — if you think about how strikingly authoritarian and coltish that is, because I don’t think they really believe and what they are selling and I don’t think they have any faith that they can make anybody else believe it either. And so, their answer is suppressing the vote, put — make it harder to vote, put through measures like the one that is about to go to the Supreme Court where the legislature can simply decide who wins the electoral votes no matter what the will of the people might be in that particular state. And I think their goal is minority rule, less democracy, authoritarian measures that are meant to constrain individual freedom. The Republicans back during the Cold War especially were about more freedom and smaller government rather than the last freedom and bigger government. And I think they are doing that because they realize that if any kind of fair national test their ideas would fail to win a majority. And I think that they’ve just given up on that. They have given up on the idea of winning a majority. And now, they are going to use the courts and careful manipulation of voting rules to see how long they can prolong the unnatural condition of minority rule. And that is anti-constitutional, it’s undemocratic, it’s un-American.

SREENIVASAN: Well, you mentioned the courts. And you have written a long time ago that you thought that the Roe decision was at the hands of an activist court. And we are speaking now not too long after the Dobbs decision. And you said that, essentially, now, we have another act of this court. Tell us about how you wrestle with your own thinking on abortion.

NICHOLS: Well, there’s two parts to that. One is the legal problem that even Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrestled with about the way Roe was decided, that a court in the ’70s said — the Supreme Court in the ’70s said, this somehow should be legal and we are going to figure out why it ought to be legal. And again, when you have even liberal justices saying, yes, that probably wasn’t the best foundation for creating this right, you know, there is a problem. On the other hand, I think the court in 2022 had, at least, three members on it in the majority who said, we just don’t like abortion and we don’t really care about how things were decided one way or another. We just don’t think abortion should be — we want to give it back to the states knowing, of course, what exactly a lot of the states were going to do with it, and I don’t think that is any better of a reason, especially once you have instituted a right for 50 years that people have woven into kind of the set of rights in America, you know, to simply remove it because the majority now feels confident enough in their own beliefs to do that, I think is dangerous For myself, I have always struggled with this because my mother was the — nearly died from an illegal abortion. And I don’t know, you know, what — I think what I have always said about that, once I learned that, I didn’t learn that until I was in my 30s. And I have said, you know, I don’t know whether her choice was the right choice or wrong choice. It is a choice though that I think only she could make and I want that choice to rest with her. Looking back now, I didn’t find out about this until after my mother had passed away. And I came to the conclusion that whatever the content of that choice, no one should have made it for my mother but my mother. And that’s where I stand on it now to say, this is not — this is a woman’s decision, not the decision of the Supreme Court or anybody else.

SREENIVASAN: What are you concerned that this court could do? I mean, play out the scenario, not necessarily kind of the worst-case or a hypothetical, but I think there’s a lot of legal minds right now looking at the way that the court has written their opinions and saying, here are the things that can and reasonably happen the way that the court is thinking today? So, fast forward 20 years with the same bench. What do you see?

NICHOLS: You know, I don’t know. I mean, it depends on how much the court is like somebody like Justice Thomas who says, yes, let’s revisit everything about privacy. You know, privacy is not in the constitution. And yet, you know, as Justice Brandeis said, one of the most essential freedoms in our country is, the freedom to be left alone. But once you decide that the state — and again, this is what I mean about being completely unconservative. Once you decide that the state can regulate so many aspects of your life from decisions with your doctor all the way to who you can marry, what you can do in the privacy of your bedroom, whether what you can buy in a drugstore when it comes to contraception. You know, when Justice Thomas says, yes, we have to revisit all of those things, that is pretty unnerving. I think a lot of this is just the kind of sense of — that there would be a lot of decisions that are just a matter of getting even with people for decisions that were lost over the years. There is a huge amount of resentment and a grievance in the Republican Party that has taken the place of any kind of ideological content. It is now nearly about — a sense of injury and grievance and envy and anger. And that, to me, seems to be now driving at least some of these court decisions. As I wrote in another piece in “The Atlantic” a few weeks ago, I just assumed that all bad things in American life are going to be announced with the phrase, in a six to three decision because of that.

SREENIVASAN: Do we have a patchwork of states that represent the two Americas if the court continues on this trajectory?

NICHOLS: Well, I think if democracy begins to fail in the United States, it will fail, Hari, as you pointed out, in a patchwork, that in some states it will be 2022. In other states it’s going to be 1954, especially if you are a woman or a person of color, you know, that your rights will be contingent on what your locality or your state or district court thinks your rights are. And that the power of the federal government to enforce the constitution, which I think is what we all — that should be the main job of the federal government, to protect the country, enforce the constitution, I think that will become spotty. I don’t — I think this notion that democracy collapses everywhere all at once in some kind of civil war, we are not that kind of country. We don’t have — we don’t really have red and blue states. We have red states with blue cities. And blue states with red rural and suburban areas in them. And so, I think what you really look at when you see democracy collapse is a kind of uneven and patchy collapse of democracy where, you know, depending on who you are and which civil authorities you happen to get crosswise with at any given moment, your rights are — your constitutional rights are up for grabs. And I think that’s — that would be a tragedy but I think that is where we are headed if this — if we do not roll this back.

SREENIVASAN: Many Americans have been watching one episode or another, so to speak, of the January 6th hearings, going into this September break. What’s struck you?

NICHOLS: The clarity of what happened, I think, is what struck me. The — you know, January 6th Committee has put together a very effective narrative using Republicans, using people who served Donald Trump. There is no way to somehow claim that this was a stacked deck or a bunch of Democrats or, you know, liberals speechifying against Donald Trump. I mean, when you have Donald Trump’s attorney general, when you have, you know, Donald Trump’s White House staff, telling you point blank that this was a planned coup against the constitution and it is with electoral processes, what’s strikes me about that is, not just the clarity of that, but how it’s still — although it’s moving the needle with some Republicans, it still can’t dent this incredible kind of loose site bubble that surrounds so many Republicans that is impenetrable by facts. And again, this is partly why I — certainly why I left the Republicans and why I’m not sure I even call myself a conservative. I mean, if this — if conservatives stand for anything, it’s for order and the rule of law, and for the application of the constitution without favor and without hesitation. And Republicans now, it seems to me that the constitution matters unless it’s an inconvenient obstacle to taking power. And I mean, this — watching the January 6th hearings, you would think by the end of it, this should be a national crisis. This is Watergate on steroids. This is beyond anything we have ever seen in the United States. And I’m just concerned that millions of Americans, including millions of ordinary Americans who are not Republicans, but that are just watching this are kind of shrugging and saying, well, you know, what are you going to do? And I think if we really were a more engaged country, we would realize that this is an existential political crisis and one that is not over.

SREENIVASAN: There were recent announcements by 5:38 (ph) and I want to get the numbers right here, it says, of the 340 Republican nominees for Senate, house, governor, attorney general, secretary of state so far, again, of the 340 of those that they are counting, 120 are full blown election deniers. Another 48 have expressed doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. What do you think about this? Because, as you mentioned, there are so many people who can’t seem to be bothered with this or don’t see this for the crisis that it is, and they are electing, some of them are electing people, or at least they want their representative to not believe it or that this is the reality that we all live in. They want to live in a big lie.

NICHOLS: Yes. There are two separate problems here. One is that there are so many of these local officials who are dedicated to the big lie, which means that, you know, in a state like Pennsylvania where the Republican candidate for governor has basically said, if I don’t like the outcome of the election, I might seize voting machines. You know, this could provoke a crisis on the ground in the next elections that will lead to violence. This is really dangerous. And I think it’s especially heartbreaking because in the United States, we control our own elections right down into the grassroots. The people who believe the big lie somehow believe that their friends and neighbors who volunteered to go and spend their nights, you know, collecting ballots and running voting machines are all part of some grand conspiracy. I mean, it is really incredibly toxic and poisonous. But the second problem with it, and I’m going to take Democrats to task here, is how many people don’t care about state and local elections and then, are shocked when they find out that their state legislature, their state legislature or their city council or their election officials turn out to be a bunch of, you know, big lie believing cooks. People have to really pay attention. I worked in state government. I worked for a Democrat, in fact, in the days when we could still be that bipartisan in Massachusetts for two and a half years. State government, there is a huge amount of power resonant in state government in the American federal system. And yet, I think a lot of people have gotten into their heads that as long as they vote for president, and their guy for president wins, then everything is going to be OK. It doesn’t work that way. You have to show up for every election. You have to vote in every — for every seat, right down to dog catcher because all of those parts of our government all work together during an election. And I think there are a lot of folks, particularly on the left, who have gotten it into their head that the presidency is really the only thing that matters. And I’m hoping that that trend reverses itself in November and in November 24.

SREENIVASAN: Tom Nichols, thanks so much for joining us.

NICHOLS: Thank you.