It's a snowy day across swaths of the country, so if you're snowbound (and even if you're not), we have some reading from our hometown newspaper for you. The only thing is, it's a bit lacking in diversity. That's because the topic in general is the death spiral of the rotted out Republican Party. These are just snippets, so please go to the links for the full articles/op ed.
Starting off with the Washington Post editorial, "Crawling Back to Mr. Trump," a consistent theme for the day emerges:
Days later, the era of glasnost seems to be ending. Senior Republicans are crawling back to Mr. Trump. The big lie of election fraud lives on...[snip]
Republicans should ask: What principle instructs them to bow to a man whom the country has rejected? How can they continue to excuse the attempted overturning of a fair and free election? What is the value of sitting in the Senate, or of being speaker of the House, if they continually humiliate themselves before a small, dishonest man leading their party to nowhere?
They had a chance, after Jan. 6, to reject their narrowing future as a party of lies and voter suppression and try, once again, to widen their appeal by standing for something positive. What a shame to throw that chance away. (our emphasis)
Dana Milbank puts an even finer point on the takeover of the party by the low-IQAnon Trumpists:
The supposed civil war within the Republican Party is over. The neo-Confederates have won.
Just three weeks ago, congressional GOP leaders set out to reclaim their party from President Donald Trump and his violent supporters. Trump had frequently emboldened white supremacists and domestic terrorists, but never more visibly than when he recruited and incited those who sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 — and then did nothing for hours as they rampaged, hunting for lawmakers, in hopes of overturning the election.
From that deadly spree emerged a glimmer of hope that Republicans would, finally, distance themselves from Trump. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) said Trump “bears responsibility” for the “attack on Congress by mob rioters” and for failing to “immediately denounce the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said that the violent attackers were “fed lies” and were “provoked by the president.” He let it be known that he might vote to convict Trump after an impeachment trial.
Yet just three weeks after feebly trying to quit Trump, they have relapsed. It’s as though Abraham Lincoln had offered the Union’s unconditional surrender after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.
Thanks to the cowardice of McCarthy and the perfidy of McConnell, the GOP now comprises two relatively harmonious factions: those who actively sabotage democracy, and those who tacitly condone the sabotage. Trump is gone; Trumpism reigns. (our emphasis)
Historian Robert Dalleck sees echoes to an earlier time when Republicans had to exile a crackpot fringe, whose descendants have now come back with a vengeance, and seem unlikely to be easily cast out:
It seems unlikely, but it’s happened once before. In the postwar decades, a slash-and-burn conspiratorial style took hold of the right wing, posing a challenge to several pillars of American democracy, including free and fair elections, the acceptance of facts in political debates and the peaceful transfer of power. Just as QAnon followers see a deep-state conspiracy to destroy Trump, some John Birch Society members viewed liberals as communist agents and dupes. The armed Minutemen of the 1960s echo in the gun-toting pro-Trump extremists in Charlottesville and Lansing, Mich. Talk radio kingpins such as Rush Limbaugh share a heritage with right-wing media stars Dan Smoot and Clarence Manion. And the Proud Boys share a sensibility with the white supremacists who formed Citizens’ Councils in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision desegregating schools.
By stigmatizing, punishing and outvoting the forces that wanted to burn it all down in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans ostracized them; the United States put a lid on the toxic stew of bigotry, conspiratorial thinking and White Christian identity politics, and defended democratic values like truth, equality and racial justice. It was a whole-of-society strategy, more effective than anything unfolding today. Clearly, it didn’t keep those forces at bay forever. But in the right circumstances, it could work again.
He concludes,
The postwar decades show how Trumpism emerged and how democratic society might turn it into a minority within the Republican Party. Only by imposing political consequences on Trump’s wackiest followers can Americans hope to loosen their grip on the GOP, a strategy that some Never Trump organizations (Republican Voters Against Trump, the Lincoln Project and the Republican Accountability Project) have grasped, even if they have found limited success so far.
It is never too late to intensify that effort. Anything that works to define anti-government extremists as toxic threats to our country is helpful. This work held off the far right for a time. And any period, short or long, that this fringe spends in the wilderness is a boon to American democracy.
We agree with the notion of imposing political consequences (as well as legal and financial ones) on these enemies of democracy, but we would argue that the time for their exorcism of the low-IQAnon fringe has come and gone.
A few conservative takes are also offered in the paper today. Here's cutesy writer Kathleen Parker's conclusion to "The GOP Isn't Doomed. It's Dead":
Going forward, not only will House Republicans be associated with a colleague who “liked” a Twitter post calling for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s murder. They’ll be attached to QAnon, which promotes the extraordinary fiction that Trump was leading a war against Satan-worshiping pedophiles and cannibals, whose leadership includes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and, oh, by the way, yours truly, as well as U2’s Bono.
To those Republicans who can read: You own all of this. The party isn’t doomed; it’s dead. The chance to move away from Trumpism, toward a more respectful, civilized approach to governance that acknowledges the realities of a diverse nation and that doesn’t surrender to the clenched fist, has slipped away. What comes next is anybody’s guess. But anyone who doesn’t speak out against the myths and lies of fringe groups, domestic terrorists and demagogues such as Trump deserves only defeat — and a lengthy exile in infamy. Good riddance.
In a case of "too little, too late," former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor echoes Sen. Mitt Romney's advice that Republicans should start telling their voters the truth. That would have been nice during the years Cantor was in power, where he and his caucus told vicious lies daily to their base (remember Obamacare "death panels"?). A lot more honesty and atoning is in order for you.
(Image: Oliver Munday, via Mother Jones)
