This Republican Party Is Not Worth Saving

[aubiefifty 18,231]

theatlantic.com

 

This Republican Party Is Not Worth Saving

Tom Nichols

8-10 minutes

---

No one should ever get a second chance to destroy the Constitution.

 

Author of The Death of Expertise

 

Alicia Tatone

I was a Republican for most of my adult life. I came of political age in 1980, and although I grew up in a working-class Democratic stronghold in Massachusetts, I found a home in Ronald Reagan’s GOP. Back then, the Republicans were a confident “party of ideas” (a compliment bestowed on them by one of their foes, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York), optimistic boosters of the American dream at home, and fierce opponents of the Soviet Union overseas. While the Democrats were the party of recrimination and retreat, the Republicans were the party of the future.

I understand the attachment to that GOP, even among those who have sworn to defeat Donald Trump, but the time for sentimentality is over. That party is long gone. Today the Republicans are the party of “American carnage” and Russian collusion, of scams, plots, and weapons-grade contempt for the rule of law. The only decent, sensible, and conservative position is to vote against this Republican Party at every level, and bring the sad final days of a once-great political institution to an end. Then build the party back up again—from scratch.

I’m not advocating for voting against the GOP merely to punish Republicans for Trump’s existence in their party. Rather, conservatives must finally accept that at this point Trump and the Republican Party are indistinguishable. Trump and his circle have gutted the old GOP and stuffed its empty husk with the Trump family’s paranoia and corruption.

George Packer: The corruption of the Republican Party

Indeed, the transformation of the GOP into a cult of personality is so complete that the Republicans didn’t even bother presenting a platform at their own convention. Like a group of ciphers at a meeting of SPECTRE, they nodded at whatever Number One told them to do, each of them fearing an extended pinkie finger pressing the button that would electrocute them into political oblivion.

Some Republicans, even while they grant that Trump is a sociopath and an idiot—and how unsettling that so many of them will stipulate to that—are willing to continue voting for Republican candidates because the GOP is nominally pro-life or because the administration’s judicial appointments show that the people around the president are doing what conservatives should want done.

But Trump’s few conservative achievements are meaningless when compared with his war on American democracy, a rampage that few Republicans have lifted a finger to stop. Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have turned the constitutional order and the rule of law into a joke. If you’re Roger Stone or Michael Flynn, the White House will arrange pardons, commutations, or even the outright betrayal of the Justice Department’s own lawyers. Felony convictions are for the little people. The Constitution is just busywork for chumps.

GOP representatives in the people’s house sneer at concepts such as oversight and the separation of powers. Rather than demand accountability from the executive branch on COVID-19, on the Hatch Act, on the Postal Service—on anything, really—they either repose in sullen silence or they take up the lance for the president and overwhelm committee hearings with Trumpian word salad.

Norm Ornstein: I’ve witnessed the decline of the Republican Party

Meanwhile, senators who swore to be “impartial” jurors refused to hear actual evidence during an impeachment trial. They confirmed a rogue’s gallery of incompetent henchmen and cronies to important positions. They continue to downplay Russian attacks on the U.S. political system and are now outfoxed by the likes of John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, a nonentity who has ruled that none of them, Republican or Democrat, should be allowed to ask any pesky questions about election security in person.

“But Gorsuch,” Republicans chirp when pressed about their party’s demise, as if Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh will saddle up and save us when elected Republicans refuse to stop Trump from finally turning the FBI into his private police force or Barr from using the Department of Homeland Security as the White House’s own Belarusian interior ministry. (Kavanaugh, who warned during his confirmation hearings that “what goes around comes around,” might be exactly the justice to put his stamp on such moves.)

Conservatives must also let go of fantasies about saving the “good” Republicans, a list that is virtually nonexistent. (You can’t count Mitt Romney more than once.) The occasional furrowed brow—a specialty of the feckless Susan Collins of Maine—is not enough. The few, like Romney, who have dared grasp at moments of sanity have been pilloried by Trump and other Republicans. In any case, Romney is chained to the GOP caucus, a crew that includes the jabbering Louie Gohmert and calculating Elise Stefanik in the House, and the sniveling Ted Cruz and amoral Mitch McConnell in the Senate.

Would-be Madisonians among the Republicans warn that no party should have untrammeled access to the levers of power—and especially not the Democrats. Yes, they say, we understand that Trump must go, but if Joe Biden is allowed to run the executive branch without a Republican Senate, America will become a one-party state that sooner or later will fall under the boot of the dreaded Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This faux constitutionalism is naked hypocrisy: I do not recall, during my days in the GOP, anyone on the right ever pleading that Americans should leave at least a few Democrats in office so that we Republicans would not go crazy and start force-feeding Ayn Rand or Friedrich Hayek to impressionable schoolchildren.

America needs two healthy political parties. So if the Republicans suffer a full-spectrum defeat in 2020, what comes next? At the least, a shattering loss should result in a wholesale purge of the Republican National Committee. Even donors who like what they got from Trump will not pour money into a losing proposition.

Annie Lowrey: The party of no content

In the long term, sensible conservatives—who believe in limited government and the prudent, constitutional stewardship of national power and resources—might feel safe to run for national office as Republicans again. Those at the local level who were bullied into silence by their state organizations might be able to come out of hiding and challenge the people who led them to disaster.

Reconstructing the GOP—or any center-right party that might one day replace it—will take a long time, and the process will be painful. The remaining opportunists in the GOP will try to avert any kind of reform by making a last-ditch lunge to the right to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s culture warring and race-baiting. In the short term, the party might become smaller and more extreme, even as it loses seats. So be it. The hardening of the GOP into a toxic conglomeration of hucksters, quislings, racists, theocrats, and cultists is already happening. The party gladly accepted support from white supremacists and the Russian secret services, and now welcomes QAnon kooks into its caucus. Conservatives must learn that the only way out of “the wilderness” is first to vanquish those who led them there.

No person should ever get a second chance to destroy the Constitution. Trump has brought the United States to the brink of civil catastrophe, and the Republican Party has protected him from the consequences of all his immoral and illegal actions more ably than even Fred Trump did. Conservatives need to put the current Republican Party out of its—and our—misery.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

 

[DKW 86 7,899]

Ditto. For me, that breaking point came in 2005 with Bush43. They are nothing they proclaim or think themselves to be. No one can tell me otherwise. I listened to the Words and Promises. They meant absolutely not one word of it, NOT ONE WORD. 

Reagans Ideas worked for 1980 and 84. They do not translate into 2020. We are in a completely different time. Different issues. Different circumstances. 
Recommending 1980 answers for 2020 is just fricking insane. 

[AUDub 11,842]

Tom is a good follow on Twitter, for those interested in such things. 

[aubiefifty 18,231]

13 minutes ago, AUDub said:

Tom is a good follow on Twitter, for those interested in such things. 

i hate to admit this but i have no idea about how twitter works or who you can follow etc. i always thought it would be interesting but i also figured it would run my cell phone battery down quicker. shrugs. i a am probably missing some fun stuff.

[AUDub 11,842]

You're missing a lot if you're only reading his articles. He's ascerbic, sharp as a tack and witty as hell. 

[homersapien 12,230]

After Trump loses there will be a battle royal in the Republican party. 

There are about 10-12 Republicans lining up to run in 2024.  But no one knows what Trump will do in 2024.  The next four years will be a pivotal period for the survival of the party. 

If the Trump wing maintains their power in the party,  it could become irrelevant for a very long time, especially with the loss of the senate, which I pray happens.  

[AUwent 3,831]

3 hours ago, homersapien said:

After Trump loses there will be a battle royal in the Republican party. 

There are about 10-12 Republicans lining up to run in 2024.  But no one knows what Trump will do in 2024.  The next four years will be a pivotal period for the survival of the party. 

If the Trump wing maintains their power in the party,  it could become irrelevant for a very long time, especially with the loss of the senate, which I pray happens.  

I hope you're right, but I remember people saying this sort of thing when the Tea Party rose to power. Republicans shut down the government in 2013 to try to get Obamacare defunded. People were talking a long-term Dem supermajority. 2014, massive GOP gains in the Senate and 2016, complete GOP control. They have earned a complete expulsion from leadership in the presidency, house and Senate for at least the next six years with their incompetence/neglect in this crisis, but I'm very, very skeptical that's going to happen after seeing the Obama presidency.

[SaturdayGT 719]

So why do I get the feeling that...like everyone knows knows Trump will win, but they pretend that Biden has it in the bag...like any other result would be preposterous... that way they can have some sort of legitimacy to cry "Russian interference!!!" Or whatever sorta foul to delegitimise Trumps 2nd term?...it feels way too easy to predict

[Mikey 16,781]

If the Pubbies aren't worth saving then the Demmies certainly aren't worth saving. The Dems are more corrupt by far.

[homersapien 12,230]

1 hour ago, Mikey said:

If the Pubbies aren't worth saving then the Demmies certainly aren't worth saving. The Dems are more corrupt by far.

The Corruption of the Republican Party

The GOP is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.

 

December 14, 2018

Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.

I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind we’ve just seen in North Carolina—after all, the alleged fraudster employed by the Republican candidate for Congress hired himself out to Democrats in 2010.

And I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration, that many of his closest advisers are facing prison time, that Donald Trump himself might have to stay in office just to avoid prosecution, that he could be exposed by the special counsel and the incoming House majority as the most corrupt president in American history. Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.

David Frum: The Republican Party moves beyond hypocrisy

The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” His campaign lit a fire of excitement that spread to millions of readers through the pages of two self-published prophesies of the apocalypse, Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo and John A. Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason. According to these mega-sellers, the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.

William F. Buckley—the movement’s Max Eastman, its most brilliant pamphleteer—predicted Goldwater’s landslide defeat. His candidacy, like the revolution of 1905, had come too soon, but it foretold the victory to come. At a Young Americans for Freedom convention, Buckley exhorted an audience of true-believing cadres to think beyond November: “Presuppose that the fiery little body of dissenters, of which you are a shining meteor, suddenly spun off no less than a majority of all the American people, who suddenly overcome a generation’s entrenched lassitude, suddenly penetrated to the true meaning of freedom in society where the truth is occluded by the verbose mystification of thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of books, a million miles of newsprint.” Then Goldwater’s inevitable defeat would turn into “the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future, if there is a future.”

The insurgents were agents of history, and history was long. To avoid despair, they needed the clarity that only ideology (“the truth”) can give. The task in 1964 was to recruit and train conservative followers. Then established institutions that concealed the truth—schools, universities, newspapers, the Republican Party itself—would have to be swept away and replaced or entered and cleansed. Eventually Buckley imagined an electoral majority; but these were not the words and ideas of democratic politics, with its ungainly coalitions and unsatisfying compromises.

During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape. One feature—detailed in Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein’s account of the origins of the New Right—was liberals’ inability to see, let alone take seriously enough to understand, what was happening around the country. For their part, conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas. Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights. Even Buckley once defended Jim Crow with the claim that black Americans were too “backward” for self-government. Eventually he changed his views, but modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.

Peter Beinart: Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt

It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.

Reagan commanded a revolution, but he himself didn’t have a revolutionary character. He didn’t think the public needed to be indoctrinated and organized, only heard.

But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them. The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich, who had come to Congress two years before Reagan became president, with the avowed aim of overthrowing the established Republican leadership and shaping the minority party into a fighting force that could break Democratic rule by shattering what he called the “corrupt left-wing machine.” Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?

Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom—unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

Tom Nichols: Why I’m leaving the Republican party

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative—from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party. Eight years later, it culminated in Trump’s victory, an insurgency within the party itself—because revolutions tend to be self-devouring (“I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” Gingrich declared in 1998 when he quit the House). In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, liberals failed to see it coming and couldn’t grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in democracy.

The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party:

Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/

 

[homersapien 12,230]

10 hours ago, SaturdayGT said:

So why do I get the feeling that...like everyone knows knows Trump will win, but they pretend that Biden has it in the bag...like any other result would be preposterous... that way they can have some sort of legitimacy to cry "Russian interference!!!" Or whatever sorta foul to delegitimise Trumps 2nd term?...it feels way too easy to predict

So, you are speculating on Democrats causing foul while Trump is openly shouting "Democrats are trying to rig the election".  I think your concerns are misdirected. 

But here's a prediction on my part:

Trump will declare victory on election night because he will probably be ahead.  After the mail-in votes are counted over the next few days, he will fall behind and lose.  You can count on Trump to challenge the results and likely foment violence.

[creed 1,787]

Smart money says Robert Mueller will lead another special counsel investigation that will lead to little a year and a half later. In the interim Biden or Trump will be grilled by the opposing media sending the their respective easily influenced minions into mental paralysis for at least 4 years. 

[Mikey 16,781]

5 hours ago, homersapien said:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/

More garbage from the discredited Atlantic ? Next time try Mother Jones for variety

[Mikey 16,781]

5 hours ago, creed said:

Smart money says Robert Mueller will lead another special counsel investigation that will lead to little a year and a half later. In the interim Biden or Trump will be grilled by the opposing media sending the their respective easily influenced minions into mental paralysis for at least 4 years. 

Is there an over/under on how many phones the next bunch of disreputables will scrub?

[IronMan70 3,322]

What is not worth saving is the ruling class establishment of the Democrats and Republicans.  Some people still haven't figured out the real enemy. 

[wdefromtx 3,610]

2 hours ago, IronMan70 said:

What is not worth saving is the ruling class establishment of the Democrats and Republicans.  Some people still haven't figured out the real enemy. 

They have been brainwashed to just think it is the other side of the aisle.

[Grumps 3,706]

Why not just outlaw the republican party? It serves no purpose for a bunch of indecent deplorables to be able to be a part of this country. They should change their way of thinking or leave, right?

[SaturdayGT 719]

9 hours ago, homersapien said:

So, you are speculating on Democrats causing foul while Trump is openly shouting "Democrats are trying to rig the election".  I think your concerns are misdirected. 

But here's a prediction on my part:

Trump will declare victory on election night because he will probably be ahead.  After the mail-in votes are counted over the next few days, he will fall behind and lose.  You can count on Trump to challenge the results and likely foment violence.

  Yeah, I've heard the " weeks afterwards when the mail in votes come in" story...its been building up......ehh...Your way too smart to not see how questionable mail in voting is.  You could never pull off enough sincerity to even marginally sell the idea that you think mail in voting would be a fair democratic way of electing a president in such a time. ..not to me anyways.

[SaturdayGT 719]

2 minutes ago, Grumps said:

Why not just outlaw the republican party? It serves no purpose for a bunch of indecent deplorables to be able to be a part of this country. They should change their way of thinking or leave, right?

oh thats coming. ....maybe not by law, but I'm sure you've seen where government officials have encouraged harassment to known Republicans in public places...and we see it every where now. ...who knows, 10 years from now, reuplicans may be branded with stars and deemed an inferior group in society....

[Grumps 3,706]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/03/its-not-just-trump-all-republicans-must-go/?fbclid=IwAR2PQvq1SMcMyMPTpBOQBGsbFuwNwlij3diP_xKA5PPuWWIOmKULaLjvX3k

 

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It’s not just Trump. All Republicans must go.

[homersapien 12,230]

19 hours ago, SaturdayGT said:

  Yeah, I've heard the " weeks afterwards when the mail in votes come in" story...its been building up......ehh...Your way too smart to not see how questionable mail in voting is.  You could never pull off enough sincerity to even marginally sell the idea that you think mail in voting would be a fair democratic way of electing a president in such a time. ..not to me anyways.

I certainly can agree with that.   I'd put you in the QAnon class.

But I don't know what you mean by "You could never pull off enough sincerity to even marginally sell the idea...."   which makes no sense at all.