Don't @ me about how I bungled the precise date at which it should have been obvious to any averagely intelligent observer that the GOP was a doomed racist shitpile hurtling its way irrevocably towards a rendezvous with monster like Trump. I've written hundreds of posts on the subject and I'm bored of the pedantry, so whatever your preferred date ("It was Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas you idiot!") we can all agree that at least one full generation has passed since it was painfully clear where they were headed.
But not for life-long Republican Mickey Edwards, whose short "My Life as a Republican" book report was published in The Bulwark last week.
It begins:
It was 1958. I had turned 21...
It arrives at the middle like this:
I have been a Republican for 62 years. I have been a Goldwater conservative, a Reagan conservative, and a W conservative.
And reaches its thematic conclusion with
And I have now left the Republican party. A party that has been at the center of my entire adult life. A party that defined me to others and to myself. It has become the opposite of what it was. It has become a cult idolizing a ruler, a trasher of institutions of democracy driven by falsehoods and hatreds.
And by "I have now left" Mr. Edwards literally mean last week.
There is no attempt to explain what happened to his party, or why it happened. In Mr. Edward's telling there is no hint of his party's relentless, accelerating, downward spiral which took place over the course of decades. Instead there is just a sudden, massive break -- like a femur being snapped in two. The Republican Party was cruising along doing just fine until, overnight and inexplicably, it became "a cult idolizing a ruler, a trasher of institutions of democracy driven by falsehoods and hatreds."
And now Mr. Edwards has parted company with his party. Which makes a body wonder whether the consensus opinion of Never Trumper high command is that cancelling his lifetime subscription to True Conservative magazine makes Mr. Edwards a Hero of the Resistance...
...or, to quote famous Teevee Never Trumper Rick Wilson:
Nobody is fooled by these last-second, come-to-Jesus conversions.
6 comments:
Just a comparison with my own career as a Republican if I can be so bold. I started in the Republican party in the 1960's, when I was 18. By the age of 19 I had gotten myself a permanent seat on the State Central committee of the Republican party where I lived. The leaders (including the national chairman of the Republican party) regarded me as one of two rising stars in the State. It took me all of 10 months to realize that the Republican party was a corrupt cesspool, and quit. The other guy ended up in prison in the Watergate scandal. All I can say to this jackass Edwards is, why did it take you 62 extra years to figure it out? It was so obvious even then.
the trick is to simply not connect the dots. to not draw a straight line between the goldwater, wallace, reagan, baby and daddy bush to trump...
the trick is to think crooked...the long way round; who knew? both sides! not me!
and then end up at the trump realization of 'i don't care for anyone but myself and i'm not ashamed of that, i'm happy, giddy, validated.'
he speaks to me means he speaks FOR me!
Driftglass is great (his writing is wonderful, and he deserves a much larger platform). And I broadly agree with him about the need for accountability among Never-Trumpers.
But ... I have a confession. I was a conservative Republican until I was 40 - certainly old enough to have known better, especially since my father was a liberal Democrat who would tell me things that I resisted then but that I now recognize were correct. It took the 2003 Iraq War to awaken me and to cause me to turn away from conservativism.
But even then my transition wasn't linear. I was attracted to libertarianism for about 5 years, until finally around 2009 my eyes became fully open and I saw that liberal Democrats were correct.
I know that I'm different from the people at Lincoln Project, who actively created the conservative monster, so perhaps I didn't need to be forgiven for my journey. But I just want to point out that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a step or two, and I'm glad that some of these people maybe are beginning their own journey to enlightenment.
You should look at this guy's body of work before you rant about someone. Edwards has been at the forefront of calls to change the party, calling out its death spiral and calling for ethics and principles for many years now, writing and speaking AGAINST the party vociferously. One can argue instead about whether you can best make change from the outside or the inside, but we need both. He finally gave up on trying to change things from the inside, and that can't be easy for someone who hoped to improved things and put so much into it. He would agree it's all detestable, and if you knew who you were talking about, you'd know he's actually trying to end the partisanship entirely!
Frank Luntz has some money to be made in wordsmithing and focus grouping rebranding the GOP.
Old Frank is accredited for , "I don't agree with Trump's crass vulgarity and rhetoric red meat.. But I agree with his policies"
So lets identify a couple of those agreeable policies.
- Telling the world at Helsinki that he believes Putin over American intelligence entire community".
- Immigration, kidnapping breast feeding babies from their mothers. Putting them isnn cages in places around the USA . never to be reunited again because no records were kept.
-Using big FOP government to reach into the Free Market and start a trade war.
- Socialism; Giving Farmers who lost their foreign market and lost sales / profits over trade war. Provided everyone else's money to cover those foreign market profit loses and do not even have to grow those crops.
-defining difference in socialism is OK for farmers and corporations but the working class need to get off their lazy asses and fo back to their jobs and work for a living. To the jobs that are not there anymore.
- After 8 years of fiscal conservatism and unable to afford even social security they said. They borrowed %2 trillion during that time of national debt to redistribute that money to the wealthy. Who won't buy there corporates stock back with the money and will give us all wage increases, create good paying jobs, Blah, blah.
=Propping up the stock market for wealthy players and pointing to it as a economic blessing for the poor.--
So many other policies' that are never ever going to be confronted individually or in bundles. It was just something to say that Frank Luntz told them would provide cover for the ugly underhanded votes for Trump they would take to give they wilting fig leaf to cover their most bashful parts.
I admire people who come to their senses and reject the lies of their cult, but we can't expect many cult members to do this. The process of creating the cult, the propaganda, has to be stopped. A democracy cannot survive the level of lying that exists in America. Even against the worst candidate and party imaginable the Dems could barely, barely get a majority in the Senate and actually LOST SEATS in the House.
Well-intentioned observers despair at the feeble messaging of the Democrats, telling them that to survive they MUST WIN seats (Bill Maher) and pass legislation so people can know how good Democratic policies are (Ezra Klein) because the voters cannot be counted on to see for themselves that Dem policies are good, and therefore vote Democratic. As Pelosi said "We have to pass the legislation so people can know what's in it." thereby inverting the democratic process of presenting policies and having the public approve or vote before legislating. Forget that because every liberal proposal is blown away in a hurricane of bullshyte. The bull is the problem and it has to be stopped. Canada just designated the Proud Boys an illegal hate group.
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