The Tragedy of Today's Republican Party

 

The Tragedy of Today’s Republican Party

February 5, 2023

 

They still call it the Grand Old Party. I’ve never quite understood what was supposed to be grand about it, but it’s had that name for a long time, and people still use it, almost always as just by its initials with the definite article, the GOP. It began as the party of Abraham Lincoln, who was the first Republican president. There have been numerous Republican presidents since then. Of them only Teddy Roosevelt has been worth much, and he was quite problematic in his own ways. Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t too bad. Richard Nixon was of course the crook that he claimed not to be and one of the worst presidents in American history. Ronald Reagan was a disaster that we haven’t recovered from yet. George H. W. Bush was mediocre, which makes him good by Republican standards. His son George W. Bush was another Republican disaster, basically a war criminal for starting an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq. Today, the Republican Party has come completely off the rails. It is now the party of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Kevin McCarthy, world class obstructionist Mitch McConnell, and other perfectly deplorable political types. Then there are Republicans that make that clown car look relatively innocuous by comparison. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Exhibit B: Matt Gaetz. Exhibit C: George Santos.

In 2016 the Republican Party sold its soul, such as it was, to Donald Trump, a showman and shyster who gives not one good God damn for anyone but himself or for anything other than his sexual gratification and the size of the fortune he claims to have. He won the 2016 presidential election. He didn’t win the popular vote. His Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton did. The American federal system, however, gives disproportionate power to small population states. Trump won enough of them to win the electoral college vote and become president though a majority of American voters had chosen someone else. Trump and his enablers went on to a disastrous four-year administration that the country barely survived. Trump behaved so badly that he was impeached not once but twice. Only a purely political vote in the Senate and the requirement of a two-thirds vote to convict kept Trump from being convicted, removed from office, and barred from ever holding federal office again.

Trump ran for reelection in 2020. Once again he lost the popular vote. This time he also lost the electoral college vote. On election night, when it was clear that he had lost, Trump claimed that he had actually won the election by a lot. Thereafter he tried every legal trick (and some illegal ones) to overturn the result of a free and fair election that he had lost. He and his minions lost court cases that sought to change the result of the election something like sixty times. Some of his minions in some of the swing states he had lost dummied up false papers claiming the be their state’s electors when they weren’t and submitted them to the federal government. It escapes me how that cannot be a crime. Everything he tried failed, and it was obvious from the outset that they would fail because they were all frivolous at best and illegal at worst. It remains to be seen how many criminal indictments will come from these efforts and whether or not Trump himself will be indicted.

Then came January 6, 2021. That was the day Congress was to meet in joint session to fulfill its constitutional duty of confirming the electoral college vote. I’ll give just the broad outline of the events of that day. Every American who has paid even passing attention to the news knows what happened. In short, Trump and his fellow travelers, including the once respected Rudy Giuliani, whipped a crowd into a frenzy, then sent them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the US Capitol. They stormed the building, overwhelmed the Capitol police, broke in en masse, and threatened the life of every person legitimately in the building. Among those persons was Vice President Pence. The insurrectionists hated him especially because he wouldn’t go along with Trump’s demand that he use his position as president of the Senate to throw out enough electoral votes to give Trump a majority and thus the presidency. Some rioters had erected a makeshift gallows outside the Capitol. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” Thank God Pense, otherwise a thoroughly despicable, homophobic, right-wing politician, had the integrity not even to try to do what Trump wanted him to do.

The purpose of the insurrectionist mob that invaded the Capitol was to prevent Congress from making Joe Biden president by keeping it from confirming the electoral college vote. They managed to delay the vote though not keep it from happening. After a delay of several hours Congress reconvened and carried out its constitutional duty, though an appalling number of Republicans voted against certifying the election’s clearly legitimate outcome. Today, more than two years later, Trump (for inexplicable reasons not yet indicted for his numerous crimes) continues to claim that he actually won the 2020 election and that nefarious people somewhere, somehow, stole his victory from him.

Unfortunately, today Trump is not the only prominent Republican loon. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is getting a great deal of publicity pursuing a culturally reactionary policy that seeks not only to stop the progress of this country but to reverse it. He has a fetish about cross-dressers, making drag shows a particular target of his attacks. He has prohibited the teaching of the broad range of human sexuality in public schools with his “Don’t say gay” law. He wants to enclose the country’s horrendous history of racism in a cone of silence so today’s students will never learn about it. If they did, they might be able both to combat it and to see the dire necessity of doing so, something no white supremacist could tolerate. He is an anti-vax fanatic. There’s not way to know how many Floridians have died unnecessarily as a result of his lunatic campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines, but it surely must be a very substantial number. Despite all of that, it appears that this whack job may be the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2024 if Trump doesn’t stage a comeback and claim the nomination for himself.

DeSantis isn’t the only one. Tragically, the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 election. It’s a very thin majority, but it’s still a majority. They made the thoroughly despicable Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House. To get that position, for which he has lusted for years, McCarthy had to make Lord knows what promises to the truly insane members of the Republican caucus. I’ll mention just three of those crazies. Matt Gaetz of Florida is a right-wing extremist under investigation for sexual misconduct with a minor. George Santos, newly elected from New York, has told so many lies that he almost makes Donald Trump look honest, and that takes a lot of doing.

Then there is Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. She is a prime example of the insanity of the extremist wing of the already extremist Republican Party. She pushes Q-Anon conspiracy theories. She praises violent insurrectionists. She once called for the death of prominent Democratic politicians. She has promoted anti-Jewish and white supremacist conspiracy theories. She has likened the Democrats to Nazis. I’m no psychologist, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t lost contact with reality could say the things she says. Yet the voters of her Georgia district reelected her in 2022, and the other Republicans in Congress either support her or at least tolerate her.

The Republican majority in the House has no constructive agenda whatsoever. They threaten to refuse to raise the federal debt limit unless the Democrats agree to extreme cuts in Social Security and Medicare, never mind that we all pay for those benefits every time we get a paycheck or make a quarterly estimated tax deposit. Never mind that American public opinion strongly supports those federal programs. Never mind that those programs have their own source of funding, namely, our FICA payments, and have nothing to do with the national debt. These Republican legislators, if we can still call them that, plan to waste large amounts of governmental time and money investigating bogus charges that the Department of Justice has acted against Republicans for political reasons. They have no interest in actually governing. They just want to play to the deluded Republican base and keep various kinds of political BS alive and in the news so they can hold onto power.

The Republican loons at the national level have cohorts in many of the states. There is a type of Republican these days called an election denier. These are people who have bought Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election in a landslide but his victory somehow got stolen from him, or at least in public they support that lie. One of them was nearly elected governor of Arizona in 2022. A few of them have been elected secretary of state in various places, a position that puts them in charge of elections in their state. I can hardly imagine the trouble they will cause in future elections. I’m sure they will do whatever they can to disrupt that democratic process and get their preferred whack job candidates elected when the people of their state actually elect someone else.

Before I close I need to say that I know that there are still some decent people who are Republicans. One is Representative Carolyn Eslick, my neighbor in Sultan, Washington, who represents the Washington state legislative district where I live. I disagree with Carolyn’s politics, and she knows it. She is, however, a truly decent person doing what she believes is best for the people of Washington state. I disagree with her about what that is, but I like her as a person. So don’t get me wrong. I know that there still are some decent people who support traditional Republican policies of low taxes and small government.

Nonetheless, the state of the Republican Party at the national level and in many of the states is a true national tragedy. The leading national Republican politicians are all nuts. They are interested only in holding onto power and persecuting their political opponents in every way they can. The believe lie after lie. They may say in private that they know how bad Donald Trump really is, but in public they will not denounce him and work to distance their party from him. DeSantis may be even more dangerous than Trump. His policies are horrific, but he doesn’t come across as nearly as deranged as Trump does. He might therefore be able to inflict even more damage on the nation and the world than Trump could.

It is a political commonplace that the American political system needs two respectable political parties that advocate different policies and can compete honestly for the votes of the American people. We used to have two such parties, more or less. The Republican Party of Nelson Rockefeller and others of his ilk was nothing like the Republican Party of Donald Trump. Today we have one traditionally respectable political party, the Democrats, and one political party that has lost all credibility and claim to legitimacy, the Republican Party. Will the Republican Party ever recover from its current deplorable state? In his book The Soul of America historian Jon Meacham says that our country has survived and recovered from the many times when our lesser angels have seemed to be in control. I hope he’s right. Today, lesser angels are very much in control of the Republican party. Either that party must regain its bearings or it must be replaced by a new party not controlled by and beholden to lunatics the way the Republican party is today. I guess we’ll see what happens.