The Daily Beast Podcast - Jelani Cobb: Jan. 6 Was the Beginning of GOP’s Mess, Not Ending

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

It’s not hard to see that the Republican party was the Party of Trump during the four years he was president. But what kind of party are they now? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. “When you looked at the platform for the 2020 election, they didn't create one,” says New Yorker writer and professor Jelani Cobb. There is one thing about today’s GOP, however, that is very clear: “They've doubled and tripled down on a type of politics that is very appealing to disgruntled white people or white identity politics.” If history repeats itself, as it often does, this tactic will bite them in their behinds. In this episode of The New Abnormal, Jelani chats with Molly Jong-Fast about the major similarities he sees between the current state of the GOP and parties of the past that no longer exist. Oof. “The Republican party [are] the modern version of the Whigs,” he explains. “They broke apart over debates about the expansion of slavery, and they could not figure out where they stood on these fundamental questions. They were incoherent internally. And so what was notable to me was the extent to which all those dynamics are present within the current Republican party.” And capitalizing on “white desperation,” is one of the ways it’s trying to remain in power, he adds. This explains the Jan. 6 riots and there’s some bad news: “It might be reasonable to look at January 6th as the onset of a particular kind of political violence rather than the culmination of something that's already concluded,” he says. Then! Molly asks Jelani about the Voting Rights Act and its fate, and he shares a history nugget that many people might not know about (Abraham Lincoln basically gave Black people the right to vote to offset white supremacists in the South, which he saw as a “direct threat to American democracy.”) History strikes again. “A lot more is at stake than we generally acknowledge,” says Jelani. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another members-only Beast Inside episode of The Daily Beast, the New abnormal. And we thank you so much for being here. Today we're delighted to have an extra special guest with Jalani Cobb from The New Yorker. Jalani has written so many great articles, but today we want to talk to him particularly about his latest on the Republican Party and how it could cease to exist, as well as what the upcoming voter rights bill means for people. Welcome, Jalani. Thank you. I'm so happy to have you. I'm a huge fan, and I always, I feel like you write what I would write if I were smarter and a better writer.

And also had a real history background, which you can tell. You have an amazing piece in The New Yorker this week. Can we talk a little bit about it? Sure. What gave you this idea to write this piece? So, you know, we were having a conversation about where coverage needed to go, and this was last year. I should say that we, it was a New Yorker editorial meeting. And I was thinking about this saying, like, we can't predict the future, you know, of American politics.

But we have enough of a track record to look backward and see if there are overlapping dynamics or similar dynamics. And, you know, I thought about it and just popped into my head and said, is the Republican Party the modern version of the Whigs? And, you know, one of the things that most people don't know is that, you know, we talk about the two-party system in the United States. states. And obviously, that's not prescribed by the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't say anything about a two-party system. And as a matter of fact, the founders were opposed to political parties. They thought that parties would bring about the destruction of democracy immediately. And so I thought about, like, we should talk about this. And even if the Republican Party is not going to collapse the way the Whigs did or the federalists did, you know, our two-publicans. We're not going to collapse, you know,

our two-party system has fallen apart twice before, you know, in 1812, and then around 1812, and then in 1854, even if that's not what's going to happen, it's worth thinking about the extent to which the dynamics that have brought about the demise of major political parties are present in our current day politics. And so that's kind of how it got started. And it was one of those interesting moments because, you know, in the editorial meeting you're supposed to come with your ideas and, you know, articulate them. There's this kind of round robin and I came in that day and I had nothing. As we were sitting there, I was like, I hope something pops into my head before they get to me. And so I was basically really funny, which is like the first of those meetings I ever went to, I was seated to David Remnick's right. And I just happened to sit there and he came in and sat in the seat next to me. So when they started, he was like, like, who'd like to go first? How about you, Jelani? And I just said, seriously? Okay, well, then we'll start to my left.

You started as an academic. Yeah, I mean, I'm still an academic in some ways. I had this kind of split vision of the world, which has persisted since undergrad. You know, I really was interested in journalism. And I also was interested in journalism and other forms of writing. And I also was interested in history. And I didn't know if I wanted to be an academic historian or journalist. And I thought those two things were mutually exclusive. And so I've been very fortunate in the fact that I've been able to do both of those things in my career. I'm married to a laps academic. I spend a lot of time thinking about all of the smart academics I know. And I actually

feel like with your writing, you have this historical knowledge that's amazing. Thank you. You are able to use it in a way that that's really, I think, should be the goal of all of us. So I'm curious to know, personally, I mean, do you think this could happen? Here's the kind of summary of it. The first political party to fall apart with the federalists. Right. And they died largely because they were really sequestered in the northeastern United States. And as the country expanded westward,

they weren't able to appeal to broader demographics. And, you know, they also opposed the war of 1812, which turned out to be, you know, really popular. And the second, you know, other parties came and went. We essentially had one party rule from 1812 until almost 1828 or so. And, you know, that was the Jefferson's Democratic Republican Party. That party broke apart because of some, you know, particulars in the 1824 election. And then we got one short-lived version, the National Republicans, that faded out quickly. And the other version of it was the Democrats, which is the party that we have now.

And then in 1854, the Whigs, who were, you know, the second party, you know, the Democrats were, you know, one and the Wigs were the other major party. They broke apart over debates about the expansion of slavery. And they could not figure out where they stood on these fundamental. questions. They would incoherent internally. And so what was notable to me was the extent to which all those dynamics are present within the current Republican Party. Yeah. That there have been, even, you know, when you looked at the platform for the 2020 election, they didn't create one. Right. You know, Trump was the platform. They recycled the one from 2016, but that's like, you know, turning in a paper that you wrote for a previous class.

You're not going to bother to do anything that relates to the developments of the past four years. Donald Trump is our agenda, which meant all the things that the Republicans traditionally stood for or said they stood for. I'm old enough to remember when they believed in free trade. And all of a sudden, we're having tariff fights or old enough to believe, and just lots of things. We could walk through lots of things that did not adhere, that they did not adhere to in the Trump era. Beyond that, they've doubled and tripled down on a type of politics that is very appealing to disgruntled white people or white identity politics, but not very appealing to other groups of people. And the political problem here is that the people you are appealing to most significantly are a shrinking part of the electorate. Same thing that happened with the federalists.

And so, you know, white people in 1996 were 85% of the electorate. In the last election, they were about 62% and falling. And so we see that the growth communities are communities of color and communities even, you know, outside the South, you know, where the GOP is heavily, you know, centered. And so you're looking around going, what's the strategy? What's the growth strategy here? The one thing that the Republicans have in their favor is the fact that they're all these minoritarian dynamics in American politics. And Jamel Bowie from The New York Times.

I was hoping we could talk about that. Yeah, go on. Sorry to interrupt you. Oh, yeah. Jamel Bowie wrote a piece disagreeing with me. And I immediately went to his house and began assaulting him. And after the end of the fight, I conceded that he made some good points. But, you know, he did point out, you know, some of these things, too, the kind of

minority elements in American politics that allow the GOP to wield power, even as effectively a minority party. And the last thing I'll say about this, one last thing is that one other aspect that we don't talk about much is the Republican Party in the 20th century. Like, most of us don't know that the Republicans were a congressional minority from 1932 to 1972, with the exception of two years. They remained a minority in Congress for four decades. And that is a kind of possibility, even if the party didn't break apart, they could very well be creating, recreating the kind of status that they had in the middle third or the 20th century.

I would not hate that. I think a lot of people say that. But here's the problem. Before we kind of embrace that. Yeah. The problem is that we are looking at an emerging. emerging politic of white anxiety and desperation. Yeah.

And if you have people, as was indicated by this poll, you know, significant numbers of Republicans who felt that violence might be necessary to quote unquote defend the American way of life, if you have a really disgruntled minority that feels, and an entitled one, that feels that it can no longer exert its will through popular politics, Well, that's an incentive for them to turn into violence. And so we've been thinking about January 6th as a culmination of all of Trump's lies, all of his divisiveness, all of his belligerents, all of his demagoguery, and all of it kind of the pinnacle of all that happened on January 6th. But it might be reasonable to look at January 6th as the onset of a particular kind of political violence,

rather than the culmination of something that's already concluded. Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's, it feels like there's a possibility for a sort of Northern Ireland, slow rolling civil war. Low-grade fever, right, exactly, of conflict. Yeah, no, I think that's right. We've talked about the FBI in relation to my grandfather a little bit. By the way, your grandfather's memoir being read

is literally on my shelf in front of me right now. If this were a video, we were like video, having a video conversation, I could pull it off the shelf and show you. I wish there were more about Paul. I did some reading about Paul Robson and the Peakscale Riot. And I wish there were more. His communism was used to kind of erase him. Oh, yeah. You know, Amiri Baraka, I'm going to butcher this line, but Amiri Baraka had this great line where he said that people have been.

dissed. These people have been dissed by the government, and the worst kind of diss is making you disappear. You know, Robson went from being this astoundingly well-known, astoundingly popular person to being a non-entity. They removed him from public life, refused to let him travel abroad, denied him a passport, and essentially made him a domestic prisoner and a pariah in his own country. And, you know, for raising questions that you should have been obvious, you know, all along. And so, I mean, I think that the kind of generational connection that people had in very many instances on the left with Stalin, obviously that's not something that people, and kind of with a sense of humanity or humanitarian concerns, no one's going to hold up Stalin as an exemplar.

but I think we have conveniently absolved ourselves of the history that would make people look to the East for a humanitarian model in the first place. What were people looking to get past? We almost proceed as if genocide didn't start this country. The kickoff of the country was like, first we get rid of all the Native Americans. And so, yeah, and I think that that's part of a country. that we really don't have very much. Yeah, no, I mean, that whole, it feels like that whole, that whole time period is just not talked about so much.

And I feel like some of it is because it's, it's so complicated. Mm-hmm. Well, I think it's kind of like being able to hold two things in tension because, and this is something that frustrates me, you know, in my conversations with people on the left, which is that we seem to be either. willing to grapple with the catastrophic immorality of the West and the capitalist system for what it did to enslaved Africans, what it did to indigenous people, what it did to generations and generations of labor, you know, what it did to the environment, et cetera, all those things. We're kind of very clear about them. Or we can grapple with the catastrophic immorality of the Soviet system and what it did in the gulag, you know, what it did, I mean, the entirety of it, you know, all the things,

all the collect agricultural collectivism in China and the millions of people who died, you know, Stalin's collectivism and the two or three million Georgians who died, etc. And I have steadfastly said, why do we have to choose between two temporal systems as human being? It's true. Right, like, why does it have to be one of the other? Obviously, I'm not interested in absolving any system that produced slavery, but I don't want to defend one that produced the gulag either. It's true. So now Democrats have the Senate, the House, and the presidency, and there are two voting rights bills, H.R. 1 and H.R. 4, which is the John Lewis Act, that just are about to pass the House and hopefully go to the Senate.

Do you see a world where Democrats are able to shore up voting rights? Yes. Question mark. It's like yes-ish. Right. The reason being, if I can kind of do just a kind of quick historical sure, and I wrote about this in The New Yorker, you know, if we look at the purpose of black voting, for the reason that black people were enfranchised after the end of the Civil War.

And Eric Foner talks about this in one of his more recent books. It might be his most recent book, the second founding, which is about specifically the passage and ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and how that kind of recreated American democracy. And around the 15th Amendment, there was all of this wrangling about whether or not, the 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote. There's all this wrangling about whether or not it should happen. Part of it was partisan politics.

Republicans pushed in Ohio for enfranchising black voters only to see white voters bolt and support Democrats. And this is in Ohio. But at the same time, Lincoln, before his assassination, recognized that some sort of black suffrage was a necessity. The reason being that with a reasonable person, presumption that if you gave black people the right to vote, overwhelmingly those populations were in the South and that they would not vote for the same party as the former slaveholders voted for, which would have been

the Democrats at that time. And they would create a offset to the South's political power. One of the primary concerns of national politics, national Republican politics at that point, was to prevent the South from gaining enough political power to rip the country. and half again, as it had done between 1861 and 1865. So the idea is that, well, if we create this whole class of Republican voters in the South, there'll be a natural offset. So to summarize it, essentially, black people got the right to vote as a means of forestalling a white supremacist movement that was a direct threat to American democracy. Fast forward, 2020. Over the course of that week, where we're watching these returns come in from Georgia,

and particularly from Fulton County, which is where Atlanta, most of Atlanta, sits in Fulton County. And that is one of the black population centers in the state. I looked and said, 150 years later, this is the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, 150 years later,

black voters in Georgia are being called upon to do the exact same thing that they were called upon to do in 1870, which is use their votes to counter a white supremacist movement that was a threat to the well-being of American democracy. And so those are the dynamics that are at stake. And those are the things, I should say, that are at stake. And the way that black voting, it started, you know, in reconstruction, but then ended

because people were physically intimidated. People used all sorts of mechanisms to prevent access to the ballot and black access to the ballot. All the rights and freedoms enshrined and those amendments were chipped away at through kind of judicial homicide, a tide of judicial rulings and decisions that gutted the 14th Amendment and effectively the 15th Amendment. These bills are very important. But what happens with this judiciary, which has been shaped by all of these appointments that Donald Trump made, the Supreme Court, which is as heavily conservative as it has ever been, and will these protections for voting rights be able to stand in that system? And so one of the things that people don't

talk about, but the future of our democracy depends upon equal access to the ballot. And in order to make that happen, they may have to expand the judiciary. They may even need to expand the Supreme Court, which would be the most contentious aspect of this. And the last last thing that I'll say is that I've talked about this in terms of African Americans, but over the growth, from 1965 forward, from the point where we get the Voting Rights Act, that act has grown to protect the voting rights of lots of different groups of people, including immigrant voters. You know, one of the things that the Voting Rights Act stipulates is that if your population is above a certain kind of trigger percentage, you have to have ballot materials in the language that that population, speaks. And so, right, if you're in a heavily Spanish-speaking community, you have to have Spanish ballots. If you are in a community where there's a significant Haitian Creole speaking population, you have to have ballot materials in that language. And so it protects the rights of immigrant voters and voter access. It has been key to the rights of Native American voters. And so a lot more

is at stake than we generally acknowledge in thinking about this. Thank you so much. Thank you. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast.

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