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**JANUARY 7, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Trumpin' Lumpen Republicans

When

**The Washington Post**runs its "Democrats Win Control of the Senate"
piece on page 6, as it did today, you know something big must be going
on.

As indeed it is. The conversion of the base and a good deal of the
superstructure of the Republican Party to a neo-Confederate rabble that
stormed the Capitol yesterday to prevent the certification of a
presidential election isn't merely news. As an uncharacteristically
eloquent Chuck Schumer noted yesterday, it enters history as yet another
Day of Infamy.

By now it's clear that the Trumpified Republican Party can trace its
roots to the Night Riders and Southern Filibusterers who blighted our
history for centuries. Josh Hawley's Missouri heritage runs straight
back to Quantrill's Raiders and the James gang, who, like Hawley
yesterday, wreaked deadly havoc in the cause of white supremacy.

The pivotal year in the creation of the modern Republican Party is 1964,
when Lyndon Johnson's lobbying for and signature on the Civil Rights
Bill cast the formerly Democratic Dixiecrats adrift, and when Barry
Goldwater, one of just six Republicans who voted against the bill, won
the Republican presidential nomination. With that, the 65-year
devolution of the Republican Party into a neo-Confederate, white
supremacist party of lumpen bigots and the lumpen rich began. While
Donald Trump has taken this transformation to greater depths with his
complete indifference to the concepts of equality before the law,
democracy, and majority rule, we must remember that this transformation
has been ongoing for more than half a century.

During that time, voter suppression, once the Jim Crow property of the
South, spread north as Republicans placed obstacles to minority voting
everywhere they could. The union-busting "right to work" laws of
Southern states-reincarnating the antebellum practice of Southern
slavery as a kinder, gentler disregard for worker rights-came to the
industrial heartland when Republicans with Dixiecrat values won control
there in the early 2000s. That Trump entered our current political
landscape by insisting that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and is
leaving it by inciting a Confederate flag-waving mob to disrupt the
ratification of the pro-civil rights Joe Biden is, of course, heinous,
but it's also just the latest developmental stage of the
transformation of the GOP into a dangerous thugocracy divorced from
reality.

Today, a number of prominent Republicans are looking in the mirror and
suddenly beholding what they've become. It's been clear to a lot of
us for a very long time.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Trumpism in Action!

Trump's Republican Convention, armed and dangerous, convenes at the
Capitol to overthrow democracy. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

Several U.S. Attorneys Vow to Prosecute Seditionists

But ones in jurisdictions with residents who stormed the Capitol did not
initially commit to use their authority under the law. BY MARCIA BROWN

The New Progressive Left Shows How to Deal With Sedition

The Squad, both old and new, immediately drafted a series of steps to
deal with Republican insurrectionists directly, rather than hoping
they'd just be nicer. BY ALEXANDER SAMMON

What It Means to Never Forget

The Republican Party is an Insurrection Party, and the insurrectionists
should be tarred with that for the rest of their lives. BY DAVID DAYEN

The Endgame

Once again, American democracy survived Donald Trump, but barely. Now,
let's get Trump out before he does more damage. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

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