Like climate change, the madness of the Republican party is man-made.
Like climate change, the conditions that created a Republican party base stupid enough and racist enough to manifest a calamity like Trump were a long time in the making.
Like climate change, all along the way there were ample signs warning where the Republican party was headed and how dangerous it would become.
Like climate change, the warning signs kept getting clearer and scarier.
Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the deeper into denial the professional Conservative denialists sank.
Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the more those trying to make the public pay attention to the impending disaster were ignored or shouted down or blame-shifted or "whatabouted" to the margins.
Like climate change, there are huge, monied interests with vast resources funding Conservative denialism.
Like climate change, the acceleration of the wild lethality of the Republican party exactly fit with the warnings that professional Conservative denialists had been loudly dismissing all along.
Like climate change, once the wild lethality of the monsters and quislings and cowards which the Republican party has manifested became too catastrophic to ignore, most professional Conservative denialists went right on making a living pretending that none of this was happening. (A few professional Conservative denialists began to recognize the catastrophe for what it was, but still swear that it all began spontaneously and without warning in 2016.)
Like climate change, the destructive power of one or two or even three violent, "once in a century" events, while, tragic, are no longer the issue. Because...
Like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, the terrible damage done to our democracy by Hurricane Trump will someday come to an end, but the environment which manifested that particular monster has now changed irrevocably. There will be more and worse monsters slouching out of the GOP's political whelping box for the foreseeable future. In fact, they are with us today, all over the country, itching for their chance to unleash their particular brand of ruin upon us.
However, unlike climate change, the transformation of the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags was not the poisonous byproduct of some other process or industry. Something that could at least be mitigated if, collectively, we mounted an urgent, spirited and ongoing campaign to do so. This is not the case in the Republican party.
In the Republican party, polluting our politics and zombifying the base was the point. And having achieved all they set out to do, the majority of the party is perfectly content with what they have become, while the tiny minority who have been cast out of the party dream of lifeboats.
From The Bulwark:
Romney Winks
Mitt Romney is getting a little tired of you asking him whether he’s going to endorse Kamala Harris. He wonders: Can’t you people read between the lines?
“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,” Romney said at an event in Utah yesterday. “And you’re going to have to do the very difficult calculation of what that would mean.”
The Utah senator has never before implied so strongly that he’s actively rooting for Kamala Harris. What remains fascinating is that he still won’t say it out loud.
He says his reticence is deliberate. “There’s a good shot that the Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt and reoriented, either after this election, or if Donald Trump is reelected, after he’s the president,” Romney went on, as is his habit. “I believe I will have more influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I’ve said it. I’m not planning on changing the way I’ve described it.”...
This is madness, and to their credit, the author says as much.
Why he thinks the GOP will be headed for reorientation if Trump wins again, rather than for four more years of lockstep devotion to the least of Dear Leader’s whims, we couldn’t begin to tell you. ..
The pose Romney is striking here is a common one for many anti-Trump Republicans, ex-Republicans, and conservatives—even ones whose primary political goal is somehow finding a way to move the Republican Party past Trump. These people are open, ideologically, to the premise that Harris would be a far better, safer president than a re-elected Trump. But they’re also still trying to maintain their credibility and moral authority in a coalition whose current sole bedrock principle is the Democrats are always worse.
Ultimately, the little Fig Leaf Gavotte that Romney is doing here -- and that so many other Never Trumpers have done and are still doing-- is, at once, boring, sad and darkly hilarious.
They brought this on themselves, and now they want someone or something to save them from the disaster which their ambition, their hubris and their patrician I-don't-want-to-know-what-goes-on-down-in-the-bowels-of-the-party cowardice created.
But nothing can save them, because by their own hand the ambient political environment of their party has accelerated beyond their ability harness and use it. They cling to flotsam on a storm-tossed sea they manufactured, and dream of lifeboats.
Sometimes those lifeboats are flimsy, made from simperingly parsed words about not supporting a tyrant but not endorsing the not-tyrant.
Other lifeboats are to be found on teevee and in the op-ed pages of American newspapers, where whitewashing and rehabbing the reputations of recently-former Republicans has become an integral part of every legacy medis corporation's business plan. Or in dreams of using their now-outsized media presence to reshape the ambient environment of the Democratic party to suit their tastes.
Other times those dreams take the shape of an entire armada of lifeboats, waiting like so many cruise ships docked nose-to-tail at Cozumel, for the immediate crisis to pass. Then, once the skies have cleared, presumably under the leadership of newly-minted Hero of the Resistance, Admiral Liz Cheney, the luxury fleet will sail back to power, and back to calling Democrats baby-murderers and "the face of pure evil".
But there is no sailing back to 1980 or 1984 or 2000 in glory. First, because all of that is gone for good. And second, and because all of those nostalgia-swaddled Republican landmarks were actually the warning signs along the road to the malignant political ecosystem which not only spawned Hurricane Trump, but is already busy gestating the next monster...
...and the next...
...and the next.
Which is why we...
No comments:
Post a Comment