I really enjoyed Perry Bacon Jr.’s article for FiveThirtyEight on the Republicans’ refusal to do an autopsy on the 2020 election cycle. It was very thorough and even where I thought Bacon was missing the script, he soon pivoted to cover those points, too. It’s a fine piece of analytical work and I highly recommend it.

If there’s anything that Bacon omitted, it’s the meaning of this right-wing intransigence for the rest of us. His article is very much a picture of the present, with little effort to game out where things might be headed or to find historical precedents or parallels.

The present is clear enough. Republicans just lost the trifecta, meaning the presidency and control of both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Yet, despite this, they aren’t having a conversation about how adapt or change strategies. Instead, they’re focused on suppressing left-wing votes. Bacon correctly identifies several factors that help explain this. For one, the elections were close and the Republicans actually exceeded expectations in House and Senate races, while also doing very well on the state level. For another, an autopsy usually involves a corpse, but Trump sounds like he wants to run for president again. This isn’t like 1988 when the Democrats had been shellacked in three straight presidential elections and had no obvious standard bearer. Back then, the left had to concede to the center that their way wasn’t producing results. Today, the right feels no similar compulsion to make concessions to the moderate wing.

Bacon also points out that neither the funders and operatives at the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth are clamoring for change. They’re still getting fealty on tax cuts and regulations, and they’ve long been comfortable with white/Christian identity politics. Likewise, the Republican base is still strongly supportive of Trump and the significant minority of dissenters has no organ to voice their views.

Although Bacon frames his point differently, he also states something I’ve said repeatedly over the sixteen years I’ve been blogging about American politics. The conservative movement arose at a time when the GOP was in permanent minority status on the congressional level, and they’re more comfortable being in the opposition than having the responsibility of governing. Given the option of swapping conservative beliefs for power, they’ll stick with their beliefs every time.

In theory, political parties are principally focused on winning elections, since that is how they gain power to implement their agendas. So why aren’t these activists and elected officials changing gears out of sheer self-preservation? One reason is that they are doing pretty well electorally without such changes. (More on that in a bit.)

But just as importantly, many of the key people and institutions in the Republican Party might prefer a risky and often-losing strategy to one that would really increase their chances of electoral victories. The path to Republicans becoming a majority party in America probably involves the GOP embracing cultural and demographic changes and pushing a more populist economic agenda that is less focused on tax cuts for the wealthy. But some of the most powerful blocs in the GOP are big donors who favor tax cuts, conservative Christian activists who are wary of expanding LGBTQ rights and an “own the libs” bloc exemplified by many Fox News personalities and elected officials such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are very critical of immigration and the Black Lives Matter movement. The big donors and conservative Christian activists have policy goals that are fairly unpopular but that they are deeply committed to (such as overturning Roe v. Wade) — so they aren’t going to bend for electoral reasons.

The frenzied focus on voter suppression in response to the 2020 elections really highlights this point and adds to it. Given a choice between democracy and changing their conservative beliefs, they’ll jettison democracy.

And that gets to the real heart of the matter. The conservative movement can operate within a fair representative system only so long as they have a fighting chance of winning a decent percentage of the time. But, faced with the prospect of having to change in order to compete, they will storm the Capitol and attack its police force rather than accept their fate.

At heart, this is a fascist movement, and the drift toward being a “working class” party both underscores this point and demonstrates the danger. For the right, “working class” means primarily “white” folks who are struggling economically in a changing economy. Conservatives appeal to these folks based on familiar fascist themes which rely on nostalgic ideas of national greatness, military prowess, and their centrality in the character of the nation. They aren’t clamoring to provide more economic security or opportunity to this segment of the electorate. That’s how the left organizes the working classes, regardless of race.

When the left doesn’t deliver adequately, it creates a vacuum that the fascists can fill. You can see the power of this in the fact that Trump actually improved his performance with working class blacks and Latinos in 2020 despite running the most unapologetically racist White House since Woodrow Wilson left office. Right-wing populism, even when it is geared heavily to the majority ethnic group is still populism, and it can and will peel off working class support for targeted minority groups.

I imagine there was a statistically detectable minority of German Jews who were proud when Hitler reclaimed territory from French control, orchestrated the Anschluss and won concessions from Neville Chamberlain at Munich. Left-wing elitism can alienate people of any color and anti-elitist messaging can make inroads where we least expect it. The danger is that people will go along with a political movement until it’s too late. In our present case, what’s at stake is the integrity of the electoral system itself. If the January 6 insurrection didn’t make this clear, it should have.

The way to disable this movement is to win over the support of working class voters. That’s what the New Deal accomplished, and it’s why America didn’t embrace fascism in the 1930’s. Back then, the left got a major assist from organized labor. Today, it’s being attempted in a different way, mainly through massive government spending on health, education and infrastructure. Hopefully, this will soon be followed up with strong antitrust enforcement that can help small town America regain its entrepreneurial potential.

If the left cedes populism to the right, we won’t have a democracy for long. I’ve warned about this for a decade now, but I feel like after January 6 it’s easier for people to understand my point. We’re not free to adopt a politics based mainly on identity and social issues and think we’ll avoid a fascist backlash. And we cannot assume we’ll prevail in that kind of fight.

The conservative movement is facing demographic death but they will not adapt or concede, so we must take preventative measures to safeguard the country rather than thinking we can roll right over them and keep the country running on schedule. That begins with not ceding the title of working class party to the Republicans.