Doug Jones shows that the only way to fight the cabal of the crazy is with a 'coalition of the decent'

(NOTE: I revised this post after I found out that I had been deceived by a fellow McMullin supporter into thinking that Doug Jones was pro-life. I'm still glad he beat Roy Moore. But if I lived in Alabama, I myself would have been unable to vote for Jones for that reason).

According to a recent poll, one-fifth of Republicans (I was one of them, back when I considered myself a Republican) refused to support Donald Trump last year, and continue to refuse to support him. 23% more supported him in 2016, but will not support him again. 

That's roughly 43% of Republicans. On one hand, I cannot begin to express how heartened I am by that. I was beginning to think that the heritage of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Ike had vanished from their party. Intelligent Republicans- decent people- continue to make excuses for a man whose unfitness for the presidency was obvious to anybody who actually knew anything about him back in 2016, and is even more obvious now.

The trouble is that this means that 57% of Republicans continue to back him despite his association with Bannonism and the darkest strains of the authoritarian, racist, extreme, quasi-fascist, stone crazy, nativist Right. That's why I- apparently unlike Evan McMullin- think that the soul of the Republican party is not merely in danger, but is already lost.

Another poll says that only two-thirds of white Republicans continue to support Trump. There are some which claim that his support among Republicans remains as high as 83%,  But while there are disagreements as to the rate of flow, it seems clear that the President is hemorrhaging support among members of his own party.

I am not surprised. There are just too many decent and intelligent Republicans for such a thing not to happen, given the incapacity, instability, and essential indecency of the president. I've been waiting for this.  The dismaying thing is that it's taken this long and that even now that the process is so slow. One thing is certain: when even a Fox News poll (Trumpkins, I'm afraid, won't be able to dismiss this one as "fake news") shows the president's approval rating at a historically low 38%, the scenario I envisioned last year seems clearly to be playing out as predicted (other polls show it much lower; a few show it slightly higher).

The nomination of Donald Trump compromised the party in ways that it would have been hard for it to have come back from even if he had lost last November. It exposed the moral and ideological rot in the GOP, and just how deeply it has penetrated.  Even after nominating Donald Trump and going down to defeat with him, the Republican party would have had to completely repudiate him and the alt-right, nativist extremism he represents and thoroughly disassociate itself from both to be taken seriously as an American political party again. It soiled itself by becoming the party of Trump. It contaminated itself in ways which required that it be purged of the poison which had taken it over, however temporarily, before it would be fit to compete among decent folks again.

The Trump victory compounded the problem.  It exaggerated the already disastrous polarization of American politics to the point where an amazing number of Americans- especially Republicans- assume that one must either be a supporter of Trump or some sort of a pro-abortion Democrat.  In his article linked to above, Evan doesn't seem any too optimistic about the future of the Republican party,  either.  He is exactly right: "If the GOP is to be saved, it will require an unconditional rejection of Trump, Bannon, and Moore."

That isn't going to happen, despite the fact that Moore is no longer in the equation.  Trump's election, as I feared, has broken Humpty Dumpty. Never again will the dark underside of the Republican coalition be hidden. Bannonism and the alt-right, with all the tinfoil-hat conspiracy mongering and authoritarian, nativist, racist craziness which formed the core of Donald Trump's drive to the Republican nomination last year, is too big and too powerful a part of the Republican identity to be purged at this point. As nice as it would be to think that decent Republicans might rally behind, say, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and deny Mr. Trump renomination, for most Republicans Donald Trump has become the face of the Republican party, and even after his defeat in 2020 not only the moral stain but the influence of what the Trump candidacy caused to emerge will remain. The Republican party will not be able to purge itself of it without tearing itself apart, and the sad and sorry fact is that even now a majority of Republicans side with it, however equivocally and reluctantly.

And that will not change. No challenge of Mr. Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination can possibly succeed as long as he remains the only real antithesis to people like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the eyes of ordinarily decent and reasonable Republicans radically polarized to the point that all nuance and sense of proportion have been lost.

The Democrats will probably retake both Houses of Congress next year. Granted, I didn't believe there was any chance- even given the toxic alternative of Hillary Clinton- that the American people would ever elect Trump last year. But unless the Democratic party goes completely bonkers, the American people are simply too decent to make the same mistake twice. Donald Trump will be crushed in 2020, and the Democrats will retain both Congress and the White House for a generation. In that generation, either a new opposition party will have to emerge or the Republicans will have to find a way to purge the very tendency which dominates the party right now, and for most of its members defines it. It cannot have a will have a realistic chance of being taken seriously as a governing party again until that happens.

I believed last year that even given the vacancy on the Supreme Court, four years of Hillary Clinton followed by the almost certain election of a responsible, competent, mainstream conservative Republican in 2020 would, in the long run, produce a better result than four years of Donald Trump followed by a White House, a Congress, and every Supreme Court nomination made for the next twenty years being irretrievably liberal and Democratic.  But Republicans wouldn't listen, and the latter now seems inevitable.

If America is going to be spared that fate, something like the "coalition of the decent" which rejected Roy Moore and elected a Democrat in his place is going to have to come together on a national level. Doug Jones's support of Roe v. Wade would have been a deal-breaker for me if I  had lived in Alabama, and it would have been a deal-breaker for most of my fellow refugees from the Republican party.  Alas, despite my immediate reaction, I don't think the defeat of Roy Moore can provide a model of what has to happen at the national level of a "coalition of the decent" is going to reclaim the nation from Trumpism. Abortion and other hot-button issues will continue to divide the Center, and the crazies on the Left, too form an important part of the opposition to our regrettable Chief Executive.

But the crazies of one end of the spectrum or the other will continue to run this country until those of us in the middle recognize that despite our ideological disagreement with people in the other party and on the other side of the spectrum the division that matters at this moment in American history is not so much betweem Republican and  Democrat or liberal and conservative, but betweendecent, responsible Americans who are willing to discuss and compromise with those who disagree with them in order to achieve our common goals and the rabid ideological purists and delusional extremists who define both parties and both sides of the political spectrum right now, and who gave us both Donald Trump  whatever extremist left-wing nightmare succeeds him.

Roy Moore did not emerge out of a vacuum. And neither did Donald Trump.

Doug Jones was not elected in the natural course of events, but because people of various political tendencies decided that they deserved better than Roy Moore as their U.S. senator, that character matters, that good judgment is necessary and that what ails us as a nation requires wholesome medicine to cure it rather than populist snake oil. And that's a place to start.