Eating Their Own

While I was in southeast Texas, every evening my mother turned on the television to watch the news. Sometimes we watched a few network television shows.

Surface Appearance

Whenever we had the television on a channel rather than streaming, we were bombarded with political advertising ahead of the primaries in Texas. They were relentless. Hardly any other commercials seemed able to get any air time.

The ads were practically all Republicans attacking Republicans.

I’ve paid attention to politics for decades and have never seen anything like the onslaught I witnessed.

The hottest contest was to unseat Dade Phelan, the current Speaker of the state House. His challenger is David Covey.

The main point of Covey’s ads? Phelan should kiss the Trump ring more than work on the job of being Speaker. He doesn’t attend Trump’s rallies. He hasn’t publicly sworn fealty to Trump. Covey will do whatever Trump wants and has Trump’s endorsement.

Governor Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton were in other ads endorsing Covey. We’ve all seen the deadly games Abbott is playing along the Texas border, blasting his way through the Constitution’s specification that foreign policy is the domain of the federal government, blocking Border Patrol from doing its job, unperturbed when his maneuvers left people stranded in the Rio Grande to die. We’ve also seen Paxton survive impeachment, but he still faces trial on felony securities fraud charges dating back to 2015 soon after he became AG. He went on to become under investigation by the FBI since autumn of 2020, and he faces a lawsuit by former employees for violating the Texas Whistleblowers Act. He tried unsuccessfully to use taxpayer funds to settle the lawsuit.

Don’t those sound like stellar people to have in your corner?

Attack ads against Phelan had the glossy production values of deep pockets. I understand a billionaire provides funding for them. The ads didn’t say much of anything about policy. One ad includes a prominent Covey endorser deliberately mispronouncing Phelan’s surname. It should sound like FEE lan. The ad was one part schoolyard ridicule, one part sly attempt to get people to subconsciously take the mispronunciation half a step further to rhyme his name with “felon.”

The team with someone actually facing felony charges (Ken Paxton) is trying to slur the incumbent with that word. Wow.

Phelan was fighting back. Some of his ads were glossy, such as the ones in which former Governor Rick Perry endorsed him. Some of Phelan’s ads talked about policy and about his position as Speaker putting southeast Texas in the room where decisions are made (instead of on the sidelines). The most effective ad was not so glossy and focused on Covey’s character, deftly laying out a pattern of dishonesty as his routine practice.

There were some ads about other primary races. The tone and content suggested they were pushing back against slurs and dirty tactics. But Phelan versus Covey was the main show.

What Does It Mean?

On one hand, watching the slugfest could be… entertaining? That’s what it could be if it were only a matter of Republicans eating their own. But it was mostly appalling.

I don’t say this because it was ugly (although it certainly was indeed). I say it was appalling because it is so obviously the leading wave of a political purge. Anyone who didn’t sleep through high school history class can recognize it.

Such purges become immensely bloody and far-reaching. They start within the party and sweep outward until the entire population of the country is affected.

In my family’s weekly online get-together, we talked about this in terms of echoing Germany in the 1930s to 1940s, which it does. But the extreme wing that has taken over the Republican party idolizes Russia even more than Germany.

Nazis undertook waves of purges. It wasn’t always done to “cleanse” the party. Purges were also used to get rid of anybody Hitler felt was too powerful, such as head of the SA (“brownshirts”) Ernst Röhm who was killed early on during the Night of the Long Knives. The scale of Germany’s purges wasn’t a fluke. The Great Purge after the Russian Revolution is believed to have included the execution of 750,000 people from 1936 through 1938, and sent a million people to gulags.

There have been other similarly horrific purges around the world. Chile, for example, which comes to mind because the new constitution there that cemented Pinochet in power was written by the same American who architected the plan Republican extremists applied to achieve the power they have now. (That was James Buchanan. To learn more about him and the plan that is spinning out so successfully now, I recommend reading Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean. It is based heavily on original source material and is extensively footnoted. Disclosure: This is an affiliate link.)

Watching political commercials in Texas, I want Dade Phelan to prevail over David Covey. I want any Republican still standing who is relatively sane and non-extremist to prevail over the extremists seeking to take them down. Right now the fight is at the ballot box. But I am keenly aware that January 6, 2021 was only a taste of what the extremists want to do. The horrible purges in Germany and Russia began with something like what I glimpsed in Texas. It was hard for people to think the early stages in those countries were serious—hard to believe until it was too late to stop the ensuing bloodbath.

The extremists’ ambitions are not limited to replacing the USA with an authoritarian regime. At CPAC last month, during a panel discussion Jack Posobiec said, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely.”

That puts the extremist agenda completely out in the open. Topple the USA and other democracies will fall too.

Republicans are eating their own. We shouldn’t just stand by to watch and marvel at the spectacle. We should stand in the way of extremists gaining more power. Right now, we can do it at the ballot box. If we don’t hold the line well enough there, other countries have shown us what to expect next.