Cultishness, Social Comfort, or Fear of Violence: Why Not All Three?

Because of the endless churn of the news cycle, the capitulation by three lame-duck Republican Senators to the Todd Blanche nomination not even three weeks ago is now very old news.  In a Dorf on Law column last week, I discussed those three poseurs -- Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis -- who preened about for a few weeks claiming that they might possibly, maybe oppose the obviously corrupt and dangerously anti-constitutional Blanche as (non-Acting) Attorney General.  They all made plenty of noise and then, completely predictably, fell in line.

Why come back to that today?  After all, the world now must contend with a declared trade war between Canada and the United States, as well as [quickly reloading the main page of the New York Times website to see what fresh hell awaits] the evil expansion of ICE activities to deport record numbers of powerless people (now specifically targeting people who are not criminals, thus no longer even pretending to go after "the worst of the worst"), threats to rig the US midterm elections, and everything else.

The short answer is that I ended last week's column with a rhetorical-ish question to which I planned to return, and I am nothing if not dogged.  Before I get back to that question, however, I should emphasize the unique procedural fact about the Blanche nomination that I mentioned last week: Nothing was ultimately at stake.  That is, during the brief time that the Three Stooges were pretending to be clever operators ("Oh, a wise guy, eh?"), Donald Trump announced that even if the nomination failed, Trump would simply keep Blanche in the office as Acting AG, as had been the case since Trump fired Pam Bondi in April.

This oddity does make it somewhat more difficult to assess what counts as a smart move in the Blanche nomination fight.  My take has been that it should have turned the decision on how to vote into a free pass for any Republican who wanted to look statesmanlike.  On the other hand, it arguably means that there was no reason to risk whatever downside might come from defying Trump.  "Why spend even a farthing for naught?" one might reasonably ask.

Even if that is the better way to think about it, however, that merely puts us back where we started, because it requires asking exactly what it was that any potentially dissenting senator would be risking.  What was the farthing, the shilling, or the pound?  The three men in question were particularly interesting specimens, because the one big fear that everyone talks about openly -- being driven out of public office by a vindictive Trump -- had already happened in spades to Cassidy and Cornyn, while Tillis announced that he would not even try to run for reelection after Trump attacked him last year.

In essence, I boiled it down to two possible explanations (deliberately leaving aside the possibility that they are true MAGA believers), and because those three men's votes could not be explained by the relatively unscary option, I ended the column with this: "[T]hese dead men walking could not even stand up and make the easiest call in the world.  What makes them still so afraid?  What other explanations remain?"  Why do I say that I had reduced the possibilities to only two explanations?  Because I noted that Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (who did vote against Blanche, albeit not as the deciding vote) had talked last year about everyone being anxious about Trumpian retaliation, and I surmised that she meant something more than mean tweets and threats to back challengers in primaries.  That is, violence.

In retrospect, using the phrase "dead men walking" at exactly the moment when I was trying to distinguish between the deaths of political careers and more literal deaths was a bit on the nose.  In any event, it is important to consider whether there are other possibilities, and then to return to why I still find fear of literal violence to be the most important explanation.

The day after I published that column, I had the dumb luck to stumble upon an interview of the famed political scientist Norman Ornstein, who made his name mostly during his time at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and who teamed with co-author Thomas E. Mann of Brookings to write a bombshell op-ed in 2012, "Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem," which made a splash as part of the rollout of their book It's Even Worse Than It Looks.  Their uncompromising language was notable, especially coming from two very centrist/center-right commentators: "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Ornstein's interview on Zeteo with John Harwood (formerly of The Wall Street Journal and CNN, among other very mainstream outlets) is almost forty-seven minutes long -- and very much worth the time -- and covers a wide range of topics, but I want to focus on two things he said that specifically relate to my not-actually-rhetorical question: What other explanations remain?

Harwood directly asked Ornstein about my Three Stooges and the Blanche debacle.  Ornstein first offers  (starting at the 7:03 mark) an explanation that mashes together the behavior of cults with the behavior of people who merely want to live pleasant lives:  "I think there are a couple of reasons for this.  The single largest one is ... you have to look at the nature of a cult.  In a cult, the pressure to avoid being shunned or excommunicated is enormous."

Ornstein then, however, recalls how former Ohio Senator Rob Portman had been a Republican cultist and decided to leave office and retire to Cincinnati.  Ornstein notes that Portman was not going to become a lobbyist or anything that would require continuing to cozy up to Republican power brokers, but Portman went home and "doesn't change a thing" -- that is, he did not suddenly say something like, "Whew, now I don't have to be the crazy liar that I needed to be while I cared about a political career, so now I can set the record straight and say what I honestly think."

Again, Portman did not do that, instead choosing to say nothing.  Ornstein first offers this partial explanation:

Rob goes back, and he is going to go out and play golf with his friends ... and then have lunch at the country club, and then at night, he and his wife and a few couples might go to the City Club for dinner, and they'll be surrounded by the people they've been around for their entire lives.  And the idea that they'd walk into a room and be met with hisses or cries of "Traitor!" or have friends refuse to talk to them was just too much.

Again, I think that Ornstein is conflating cults with the more normal demands of polite society, but in Portman's case, I think that both stories happen to fit.  In any case, Ornstein is clearly saying that there are social pressures that are simply too strong for most people to resist.  After I published my column, I received an email from a reader who thought possibly that "all of them may attend the same church."  I honestly have no idea whether that is true, but they all certainly worship at the alter of going along to get along.

The same reader also suggested that "they believe Blanche is the man for the job to keep 'the world they know' in place.  They are still old wealthy-white guys, who want to keep what they have."  Although I do not see how Blanche as AG per se is necessary to allow them to keep what they have, the telling point is that voting for Blanche is necessary -- that is, not because of what any particular Cabinet member might do, but to avoid the social ostracism that Ornstein colorfully describes (regarding some of the least colorful people on earth).

But we now return to the main event, because Ornstein confirms my suspicions about the physical dangers of crossing Trump (starting at 8:50):

Donald Trump ... uses death threats, threats of violence against the family.  And he doesn't have to do it directly.  It is the same as in a crime family.  'It would be a shame if something were to happen to your family.  Be a shame if something happened to your horse.'  ... We know that when [Cassidy] cast the deciding vote for RFKJr ... that there were all kinds of stories from his colleagues that his family faced serious threats.  I have little doubt ... that when it came to voting for Todd Blanche ... that he was fearful.

To be clear, Ornstein is not saying anything new here (and I doubt that he would claim to be doing so), but it is interesting to have someone as plugged into DC culture as he is sharing what he has heard from and about scared pols.  His version of events does, after all, fit into what Mitt Romney revealed (far too late) about the threats that his then-fellow Republican senators faced in the post-January 6 Trump impeachment trial.  In my October 5, 2023 Dorf on Law column, I quoted a report from The Atlantic:

[D]uring the Senate trial, [w]hen one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.

Ornstein went out of his way to add this, regarding Cassidy specifically but ultimately about all of the Republicans who will not stand up to Trump:

My sympathy in this case is, shall we say, extremely limited. ...  If you've decided you want to be a member of the United States Senate, and you can't do the right thing -- and in fact you decide to do what you know is ... the wrong thing -- ... you don't belong there in the first place.  And instead of casting those votes, you should've just said, "No I'm leaving."

I happen to agree with Ornstein, but I do concede that talk is cheap.  I have no way of knowing what the threats are that Cassidy and others have faced, and I cannot possibly know how I would respond if anyone I cared about were threatened in those ways.  Even so, many people have defied Trump and lived to tell the tale.  But as Ornstein's first explanation makes clear, if Cassidy had refused to cast a vote on Blanche, he still would have been kicked out of whatever his version of polite society might be.

When I asked last week what other explanations remain for cowardice and sycophancy after political viability is off the table, I ignored the social side of the story.  But in any event, both ostracism and the threat of real violence are apparently palpable for those people, and that explains quite a lot about the United States in 2026.

- Neil H. Buchanan