This is what it would’ve looked like if David Duke had won the presidency in 1988.

When the former KKK grand wizard ran for the nation’s highest office that year, he was laughed off as an afterthought. We thought — we knew — that no one who didn’t wear a white hood or a shaved head would ever support Duke’s candidacy.

We couldn’t have imagined that someone worse than David Duke would win the presidency, ushering bigotry and hate through the front door of the White House, and, this week, through the broken windows of the Capitol.

And still, the Republican Party won’t repudiate Donald Trump.

Public shame

I’m optimistic enough to believe that most Republicans aren’t white racists, but I’m aware enough to realize there are more there now than there were back in 1988.

There are those who say it’s a mistake to ban them from mainstream social media because “they’ll go underground, where they’re harder to track.” These people must be blind. They obviously haven’t seen how these groups have grown in size and brazenness over the past four years, since they and their feckless leader have been broadcasting their message far and wide.

Yes, they’ll be pushed back underground, but that’s where we want them. We don’t want to hear their vile filth. We don’t want it, or them, normalized in any way, shape, or form. They might be a little harder to track, but it will be a lot harder for them to recruit new minions — and send huge numbers of them rampaging toward the seats of our federal and state governments.

The idea that pushing them back underground is somehow a bad thing borders on delusional, because since they’ve come out of the woodwork, their numbers have grown to an extent that they could take over the Capitol, the Republican Party, and the nation. They’re holding us hostage now, the same way they held lawmakers hostage in the Capitol on the day of Donald Trump’s insurrection.

Republican panic

The problem Republicans face is twofold:

First, it’s not just white nationalists and racists who support Trump. There are people within the party who support him passionately for other reasons, but it’s become difficult to separate the two.

Second, the party’s national influence is shrinking in relationship to the Democrats. Republicans have lost seven of the last eight popular votes for president, which is why they’re so desperate to curtail our voting rights. They know that, in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham, “If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”

Republican panic over this state of affairs was there before Trump came along. The party has long sought to suppress the vote before elections. Trump was simply able to exploit it in an attempt to overthrow the results afterward.

GOP held hostage

The panic associated with Republican decline illustrates why white nationalists now control the party. They and “establishment” Republicans share the fear that American as they know it (with them in control) is slipping away from them because their numbers are shrinking while the opposition is growing.

The establishment realized the most passionate and galvanizing voices were on the far right, so they defended those voices — under the guise of defending “free speech” — to recruit more members to their cause. Whether those members were traditional conservatives or white nationalists didn’t matter, as long as they propped up the GOP’s dwindling power base.

What has happened is the same thing that happens in a parliamentary government: The Republican Party as we knew it in the 1980s through 2004 has become too weak to hold power by itself. So it has been forced to form a coalition with a “minority party” called the KKK, the Proud Boys, and other white nationalist/Aryan groups in order to stay in control.

And in the process, they’ve been not just compromised but taken hostage by these extremists, because they know that, without them, the party won’t be big enough to collapse. The Republicans sought to build a “big tent” by attracting Hispanics, women, and others in the early 2000s failed; so now they’ve created a big tent that includes white nationalists instead.

Living in fear

They’ve also accepted the premise, long held by these traitors to both our culture and our form of government, that the only way to maintain power in the long run is to cheat, to bully, and, if necessary, to seize and hold power by force of arms. Just as they invoke the First Amendment to protect hate speech, they cling to the Second Amendment — not to protect themselves from burglars or hunt big game, but to form militias that can overthrow the government if they don’t like what it’s doing.

This is the modern Republican Party, and it’s being held hostage by these extremists (euphemistically referred to as “the base”) just as surely as lawmakers were held hostage in the Capitol on Jan. 6.

We’ve long assumed that Republicans won’t break with Donald Trump because they’re scared for their political futures. They don’t want to be “primaried.”

It’s gone past that.

They’re no longer scared of losing their seats in Congress, they’re scared for their lives. They’re worried that these gun-toting nut jobs won’t just vote them out of office. They’ll kill them. That’s what they wanted to do to Mike Pence, shouting at the top of their lungs, “Hang Mike Pence!” after he refused to illegally undermine the count of the Electoral College votes.

Pence has been perhaps the most craven political coward of the past four years, bowing and scraping before Trump like a court jester. Did anyone really think a sycophant like Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment with the knowledge he was risking not just his political future, but his life, having been chased into the basement of the Capitol by a rampaging mob?

Get real.

No quarter

Republicans are now held hostage to white nationalist traitors, afraid for their political careers and their lives.

We may not like the establishment Republican Party that led us into the Iraq War under false pretenses and destroyed our economy in the Great Recession. But it’s better than a Republican Party controlled by bigots and insurrectionists in thrall to Donald Trump, and we must free it from its captors without delay by showing no mercy against those hateful people; by giving them no quarter.

We must repudiate white nationalism in no uncertain terms, shut down their ability to communicate with one another, shame them, rebuke them, expel them from polite society. We cannot allow them to hide behind false interpretations of the Constitution’s first two amendments. We must root them out, arrest them, and destroy their power base.

If we don’t, they’ll destroy us. They’ve already shown that’s exactly what they want to do.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we still have a republic. The time is now to preserve it.