Jonathan Bernstein: Hunter Biden plea deal pumps up Republican paranoia

Republican reaction to Hunter Biden’s plea deal on tax and gun charges demonstrates the paranoia that has gripped many in the party. GOP leaders seem convinced of what U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik called the “politicization and weaponization of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice.”

Nor is it just about President Biden and his team. Republicans have taken to complaining that the FBI and career bureaucrats in the Justice Department are biased against them. It’s not that they would do anything differently if they were in power. As several analysts have noted, Republicans argue that there is no such thing as objective justice. Former president Donald Trump promises to “lock up” his political enemies, not restore neutrality.

Republican demonization of the FBI and the Justice Department became part of standard Republican rhetoric only after Trump was elected in 2016. Historically, most complaints about the FBI have been made by those who believe the agency is too conservative, too male, and too white. This is, after all, the same FBI that spied on Martin Luther King Jr. and infiltrated antiwar groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Even when extremist militia groups turned against the agency in the 1990s, few mainstream Republicans took that as a sign that the bureau was hopelessly biased against them. That didn’t happen until Trump decided that the DOJ and FBI (including the people he himself had appointed) were out to get him.

It’s similar to the attitudes Republicans have had toward the media for more than 50 years – that major mainstream newspapers and broadcast outlets claiming to be nonpartisan are in fact aligned against them. In reality, academic researchers have generally found little or no partisan bias. The nonpartisan news media aren’t perfectly objective (no such thing is possible), but media biases are explained by such things as the economic self-interest of for-profit outlets and norms of neutrality that sometimes produce results that one or the other party likes.

Of course, that convinces no one, in part because those same Republicans have concluded that academia is also biased against them. Even apart from that, it’s easy to generalize any perceived unfairness.

Applying the idea that partisan bias is everywhere to federal law enforcement fits well with older Republican Party positions such as its emphasis on “law and order” or, in more recent iterations, its mantra of “back the blue.” Some see hypocrisy in Republican insistence on unconditional support of police while opposing or even promoting defunding the FBI, but we should understand it through partisanship. Law and order has from the days of Richard Nixon always been about opposing whatever group Republicans oppose. “Back the blue” should be interpreted not as a general statement in favor of law enforcement but instead a position of supporting those law enforcement personnel and organizations – sheriffs and Border Patrol and rank-and-file local police – who align themselves with Republicans. When people or organizations don’t do that, such as the Capitol police officers who defended the Constitution against Jan. 6 rioters, then they aren’t part of the “us” that should be backed.

That Republicans have latched on to partisan bias as an explanation in multiple areas is unusually dangerous, and not just because applying it to criminal justice undermines the rule of law. There’s no rule of law if law enforcement is simply supporting one party or the other. Nor is the core problem that the entire story about Republican persecution by the FBI and Justice Department is pure fantasy. Hunter Biden underwent years of investigation by a Republican-appointed prosecutor and was charged despite his father sitting in the White House.

To understand why this Republican mind-set is so dangerous, we turn to James Madison. Eighteenth-century theorists believed that republics could not last because majority rule inevitably produced oppressed minorities who were willing to invite autocratic or even foreign rule rather than remain perpetually outnumbered in a system that favors the majority. Madison’s breakthrough idea was that in an “extended” republic – a very large democracy – true majorities would never form because people would have such wildly varying interests. Any apparent majority would really be just a coalition of groups that could be reshuffled to produce different majorities, meaning no true majority and no permanently oppressed minorities.

Madison assumed a true majority was unlikely or even impossible, but could form. Normally in an extended republic, different people care about different policies. For most of us most policy questions are just not that important. But if everyone agrees that a single policy question is extremely important, then a majority and a minority will, contrary to Madison’s theory, develop around it, and the republic will be in trouble. That’s basically the story of the Civil War.

Majorities can also form through partisanship. If we all become extreme partisans, then a majority and a minority will form around that and the minority will reject democratic processes that promise them only perpetual losses. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot closer to it than was the case in the past. Republican grievance politics that insist that everything is governed by partisanship – what’s taught in schools, what’s covered in the media, what climate scientists say and who gets indicted – makes politics terribly frightening to anyone who thinks they might be outnumbered. And, as Madison warned, once there’s a real majority and a real minority, democratic politics is no longer stable. Or, in the long run, even possible.

That’s the kind of fear that leads people to storm the Capitol to try to overturn elections.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.