A couple weeks ago the Republican party looked to be on the verge of an internal war over its future. The issue was this: should the party fall in line behind the crooked, narcissistic ex-president, Donald Trump, or would it do better following the lead of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.
But alas, there was no war. The crook won without a fight. His final victory was confirmed yesterday when minority leader McConnell announced his surrender by saying he would “absolutely” support Trump if he were the GOP nominee in 2024. This promise of support came just 14 days after McConnell had described Trump as responsible for the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and referred to Trump’s behavior as “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”
But Trump’s behavior was not, apparently, so disgraceful that McConnell won’t hitch his wagon to the Trump star should this prove convenient in 2024.
So the GOP is now saying - pretty much openly - that racism, misogyny, religious bigotry and profiteering from the Oval Office are all cool. Not only cool, but the essential defining qualities of the party. The Republican party has no platform, no coherent ideology, no reason for existing except to promote the Cult of Trump.
There is still an embattled handful of Republican office holders who reject the Trump Cult, people like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. For them I feel a little sympathy, but only a little. They should have seen this coming. The collapsing of the GOP into a crude, irrational racist cult did not happen overnight. Different leaders from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan and even George H. W. Bush helped shape the party with its southern strategy, its ludicrous racist claims that “welfare queens” were filching money from hard-working whites, its Willie Horton ads, and so on.
The Republicans have woven themselves into a web of racism, misogyny, and religious bigotry so tangled and illogical that it now seems to welcome any form of idiocy that helps promote hatred toward liberals, or Democrats, or Hollywood, or any institution that doesn’t fully embrace the premises of the Cult. Witness the recent entry of QAnon follower, Marjorie Taylor Greene into the House of Representatives as a newly minted Republican Congresswoman. Her most notable statement so far: the claim that space lasers might have been responsible for the California wildfires of 2018. The implication was that the California High-Speed Rail project benefited from the fires and so did certain specific individuals and companies.
According to Newsweek: “Greene implied that the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish banking family frequently referred to in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric), space solar power company Solaren, and California officials all had a hand in profiting from the fires.”
Thanks GOP. We look forward to future speculations from Ms. Greene and other esteemed members of your caucus. When it comes to bigotry and hatred, you guys are tops.
Actually, some observers are wondering how much of a future the GOP has. Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, has compared today’s Republican party to the Communist party of the Soviet Union just before it collapsed under the weight of its own nonsensical pseudo-ideology. Nichols emphasizes that he is not calling Republicans communists. Rather, he argues that neither the Soviet Communists of the 1970s nor the Trumpian Republicans of today have an ideology. Each is (or was) a personality cult surrounded by a loyal following whose members promoted themselves by spouting leader-approved gibberish. In the Soviet case, to advance your prospects, you had to talk about NATO and American imperialism. For today’s Republicans it’s important to claim that Democrats are radical socialists aligned with dangerously violent antifa supporters.
I don’t
know if Nichols is right about the end of the GOP, but I hope he is. I’m not
against having a moderately conservative party vying for votes (if only they
would do so without suppressing the voters they don’t like). But what I can’t
abide is a party so unmoored from reality that many of its followers believe that
the Democrats are under the control of an elite group of Satan-worshiping
pedophiles. Good God.
Please Republicans, I’m begging you: get help.
