Book Review: ‘Finish What We Started,’ by Isaac Arnsdorf

In the months leading up to the 2022 midterms, Petsas was formally reprimanded by her new MAGA colleagues and saw her preferred Republican candidate for Arizona governor get trounced in the primaries by the election-denying, Trump-endorsed Kari Lake; Grubbs, meanwhile, seemed to be flying high on MAGA fumes until she began to grasp “how much more complicated things are, how much you couldn’t see from outside, how there are always unintended consequences.” She still “loved” Trump, but unlike the hard-liners, “she did not worship him.” Arnsdorf describes her growing discomfort with efforts to purge the party’s ranks of anyone who doesn’t toe the new line. Her attempt to speak up for an embattled state chairman gets her booted off a “patriots” group chat.

Arnsdorf mostly hangs back, presenting his subjects’ thoughts in free indirect style. His stated aim is to convey “what makes them believe, what motivates them, what stirs them to action.” Petsas seems baffled by the takeover of her party and clings to the old mode of doing things. Incredulous that the MAGA wing doesn’t think of her as a “real Republican,” she emphasizes her decades of experience as an insider — when that lengthy tenure is obviously considered a mark against her.

Grubbs, for her part, is initially fueled by a sense that official explanations for political results she doesn’t like seem very, very fishy. After Jan. 6, she blasted out a message to her Facebook group: “All. DO NOT BELIEVE THE NEWS. Trump people are not violent. The Capitol protest was fine until Antifa co-opted and committed violence.” She suggests she’s mellowed a bit since becoming a county chair, but mellower MAGA still runs hot. At Georgia’s state Republican convention in 2023, she poses for a photo with Trump and gets a hug from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Grubbs deems it “one of the happiest days of her life.”

Arnsdorf’s book arrives at a moment when Democrats are warning that Trump and the MAGA movement are seeking to end democracy as we know it — and Trump, in his usual I’m-rubber-you’re-glue way, has started to fling the accusation right back. Another new book, “Minority Rule,” by Ari Berman, traces in methodical detail the long history of white conservatives deploying all kinds of technical maneuvers to counter the democratic effects of a diversifying country. Jacob Heilbrunn’s excellent “America Last” recounts the American right’s “proclivity for authoritarianism” as reflected in a long record of admiration for foreign dictators. Reading these three books together will give you a sense of how the Republican Party has landed on a plan to entrench power in a pincer movement: minority rule on the one hand and mass radicalization on the other.

It’s a shrewdly cynical way to hedge one’s bets. Bannon’s extravagant bluffing — “We’re two-thirds of the nation!” he bragged at CPAC — can’t hide the fact that MAGA extremism is still terribly unpopular. An NBC News poll last year put the share of Americans with a favorable view of the MAGA movement at a meager 24 percent. But consolidating power whenever possible can allow the faithful to “feel some wins,” Arnsdorf writes. Bannon, by constantly telling his listeners that they’re the culmination of democracy instead of its death knell, is feeding them a useful and invigorating delusion. The precinct strategy has become another way of energizing the base.