The GOP's updated emblem: the pink elephant
Remember when they believed that Russia waging wars of aggression on its neighbors was bad and that tariffs- which nearly always backfired, and were an affront to the cardinal Republican principle of free trade- were a mistake?
Remember when Republicans thought that when North Korean leaders brutally oppressed their own people, criminalized Christianity, and terrorized anyone even thinking of dissent into silence, this put them so far beyond the pale that North Korea needed to be treated as a pariah state, and would have been enraged at the thought of legitimizing the most brutal regime on the planet by hailing a "deal" in which it gave nothing but empty promises it had broken many times before, and absolutely apoplectic about the American president who had done such a thing going on North Korean radio to betray the Christian martyrs and confessors and all the other oppressed dissenters in that hellish nation by glorifying and singing the praises of a monster, a modern Nero?
Remember when Republicans were the ones who wanted to militantly stand against Russian attempts to act against American interests, and would have been the first to respond with resolute and righteous indignation at the notion of a foreign intelligence agency seeking to suborn the American electoral process, instead of following their leader in defending these enemies until such a posture became impossible and then implausibly lying about having done so in the very presence of that enemy only days before?
Remember when the FBI and the CIA had greater credibility in the eyes of Republicans than the Russian FSB? Remember when they would have been livid at the idea of a sitting American president who has hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other unfriendly nations? Remember when they would have wondered what a president was who refused to follow custom and precedent and releasing his personal income tax returns, instead of defending him?
Remember when they would have been especially outraged if that president had a long and well-established history as a profoundly unethical businessman who had been forced to pay millions as the result of a civil RICO judgment in between his election and his inauguration?
Remember when multiple guilty pleas by a candidate's staff on charges of lying to the FBI regarding contacts with Russian agents concerning the obtaining of compromising information on an opposing candidate obtained through espionage would have prompted questions among Republicans about what they had been trying to hide, and several indictments of high officials in that president's campaign on similar charges would have provoked heightened GOP concern, rather than implausible and transparently partisan attempts to dismiss the entire investigation as a "witch hunt?"
Remember when they would have reserved the term "witch hunt" for investigations which hadn't already turned up so many witches?
Remember when despite the liberal bias across pretty much the entire range of the American media, Republicans would have been outraged at a president calling the media "the enemy of the people?" Remember when they would have recalled that authoritarian and totalitarian regimes always seek to discredit any source of information they don't control, and cringed at a pattern of threats and attempts at intimidating the free press going all the way back to the president's campaign?
Remember when if a president had accused the FBI and the CIA of conspiring against him, Republicans would have instinctively suspected, not the FBI or the CIA, but the president, at least of criminality if not of paranoia?
Remember when Republicans would have been aghast at a presidential candidate offering to pay the legal expenses of any volunteer stormtrooper at one of his rallies who would beat up a peaceful protestor, or had the outrageous lack of maturity, class, and basic decency to imitate and mock a disabled reporter in front of video cameras and then had the chutzpah to follow a long-established pattern in such situations and trying to lie his way out of it?
Remember when Republicans believed that an essential qualification for a president was that he or she be a grownup, and have strong enough filters on his mouth not to betray an intelligence asset of an ally just so that he could show off to the diplomats of an unfriendly power, as well as sufficient self-control not to throw a childish and very public tantrum any time someone criticized him?
I could go on and on. But it dismays me how the party of my father has mutated into something that he- or Ike, or Goldwater, or Ford, or Reagan, or Lincoln- would not only not recognize, but would be revolted by.
Interesting piece here by Edward Burmilla on how the man who was a pro-abortion liberal Democrat who claimed that the economy always did better under the Democrats and publicly adored Hillary Clinton only a few years ago and then reversed himself on all of that when it became personally advantageous for him to do so has mutated the Grand Old Party into a monstrosity which simply doesn't even resemble what it had always been before.
In 2016, 63% of Republicans said that tariffs were "a bad thing." Most congressional Republicans seem to still believe that. It's hard to think of very many things more traditionally Republican than the advocacy of free trade.
Today, that percentage of Republicans who take that position has fallen to 46%. Incredibly, a recent Pew poll shows that fully 73% of Republicans believe that the Trump tariffs will be "good for the U.S."
Trump's Republican party hasn't just lost its mind. It has lost its soul.
Those tariffs won't be good for America, of course. They are already so obviously going to be disasters for America's farmers that even the administration has had to put together an aid package to minimize the damage. Already American companies like Harley-Davidson are moving jobs out of the United States to Europe to escape from EU's retaliatory tariffs. Look for the major automotive companies and others to do the same.
The Trump tariffs have a very good chance of ruining the historically low unemployment figures which have resulted from a continuation of the steady trend which began under the Obama administration (it's slowed down under Trump, who certainly has had nothing whatsoever to do with the steady decrease in unemployment despite his attempt to take credit for it) and the equally steady, though slowed, growth in the economy which began under the last administration, and for which Mr. Trump has once again tried to take undeserved credit. Being put back into recession would most assuredly not be "good for the U.S.," though that would pretty much the result which traditional Republican economics would predict would be the result of the trade policy Mr. Trump has embraced. To a traditional Republican, that policy would be an abomination.
But not, it seems, to most of those who go by that label these days. It seems that the majority of Republicans have simply sold out everything their party has traditionally stood for to follow a demagogue with no principles other than self-aggrandizement.
According to Gallup, in 2015, only 13% of Republicans had a favorable impression of Vladimir Putin. Last year, it was 32%. Once, it would have been the Democrats who would have lauded an essentially fruitless summit at which a supine American president made obsequious nice-nice with a murderous Russian tyrant; today, it's the Republicans who mew inanely that it's a good thing, and not a bad one, that we're getting along better with our Russian enemies and wondering why the Democrats aren't in favor of making it less likely that our countries will fight a nuclear war.
Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave!
I understood, even back in 2016, why a sensible Republicans might vote for Donald Trump, even while warning that it would be a mistake. I join them in applauding the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh nominations- even though I continue to believe that the unstable and incompetent Trump is inevitably going to make such a hash of things that no other Republican will ever again sit in the White House to make another Supreme Court appointment. But what truly bothers me is that now that the mission has been accomplished, or as accomplished as it's going to get (make no mistake; the coming Democrat majority in the Senate will never confirm any Trump appointee to fill a hypothetical Ginsburg vacancy), Republicans as a group are continuing to follow the alt-right over the cliff and continue to support an immature, unstable, erratic, ignorant, and grossly immature president who is the enemy of everything the Republican party has ever stood for.
"What does it profit a party," I once wrote on Facebook, "to gain the Supreme Court, and lose its own soul?" It is a measure of the current state of debate that the response was not an attempt to argue that somehow the GOP was not losing its soul by turning its back on its own values, but a series of objections from concrete thinkers among the Trumpophiles who thought I was saying that people who supported Trump were going to hell when they died!
To remain a Republican and support Donald Trump is to buy into a fantasy world, a mass hallucination, a series of delusions which not only misrepresent reality but require either an utter sacrifice of intellect and principle or a truly prodigious capacity for self-deception.
Or else a very, very odd set of priorities. And that, I think, is the explanation of why many of the best of the people who walk that twisted road choose to do so.
Respected conservative columnists whom I find it hard to believe don't know better at some level continue to spew nonsense in the attempted defense of the indefensible. So what's going on? It's not just the Court. If that were it, there might yet be some hope that the GOP might eventually find itself again. No, it's something else.
Mark Hemingway, an eminently sensible man whom I am given to understand voted, as I did, for Evan McMullin, apparently thinks that we Never Trumpers need to clean up our acts because of the aid and comfort we're giving to the left. Let's pause there for a moment and consider that thought because I think that here we have the essence of the matter- and the reason why I no longer believe that there is any hope for the American conservative movement, much less for the Republican party.
There are only two ways to explain Hemingway's argument. I cannot help but reject the first one, not only as it regards Hemingway but also as it regards all those other respected conservative journalists who after careers of writing sensibly are now spouting Trumpist absurdity.
I cannot believe that all these intelligent and hitherto perceptive conservative journalists are actually saying that it is better to give aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un than to the Democrats and the American left; that defeating the liberals is more important than keeping America's relationships with our allies strong and protecting America from attempts by its enemies to covertly manipulate our elections and those of other democratic nations; that victory over the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer is more important than our national security and basic conservative and Republican principles.
That cannot be the case. I refuse to believe that explanation.
It's the other possibility I think accounts for Hemingway's statement, I think that he- like most of us- are so caught up in the polarization which has become the central, driving force in American politics- far more so than political principles or matters of policy- that we have lost our sense of perspective. I am less sure of that where the rank-and-file of the Republican party is concerned, but I'm fairly confident that such is the case with Hemingway with most other conservative columnists.
Maybe not Andrew Breitbart and the others on the truly nutty right. They have their own set of problems. But most of the rational ones.
I think that they have become so caught up in the necessity of defeating the "progressives" that they have lost sight of what defeating the "progressives" is for. I suspect that without their even realizing it, the side of the angels has become for them whatever side Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are not on. Their position- again, I think without their realizing it- has become a negative one, defined not so much by their own principles as by the people they want to defeat.
And I think most of us have become that way, to one extent or another, no matter what our politics. We've gathered in two hostile echo-chambers, by our own choice constantly bombarded by propaganda which reinforces our own viewpoints while caricaturing those of our opponents. That is why we cannot debate anymore but only scream at each other. Debate requires facts and evidence and above all clearly-delineated positions. It depends approaching one's opponents as at least somewhat rational human beings instead of slavering monsters, But instead, nearly all of us have the simple and apparently self-evident proposition that what the other side stands for is, by definition, evil and that therefore by definition to oppose it is to fight for what is good.
Hemingway's wife, Mollie- a senior editor of The Federalist (and, I regret to say, a frequent commentator on Fox News, Mr. Trump's personal propaganda organ) is another journalist I greatly respect and admire, personally as well as professionally. She recently pointed out on Twitter that we Never Trumpers are only a small percentage of the population.
I can only respond that whether or not that's true depends on how you define "Never Trumpers." If she means anti-Trump Republicans, of course, that's true. Nearly all of us who were once anti-Trump Republicans- myself included- have left the Republican party and become independents. I suspect that it's not a coincidence that there are now more registered independents than either Democrats or Republicans, and that of the three groups, registered Republicans are the smallest.
If, on the other hand, Never Trumpers are the sum total of Americans unalterably opposed to the current President of the United States, we are in fact, a majority of the American people, and were on the day when Donald Trump was elected, and have been ever since.
So yeah. Without much of a doubt, there are precious few Never Trump Republicans anymore. Doubtless, even if we who have left the Republican party were still in it, we would be a minority, and probably a small one. There has always been a shortage of people willing to stand on their principles when it would be so much easier to sell out and join the majority of Republicans, for whom Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are worse enemies than Kim Jong-Un or Vladimir Putin.
But that isn't an indictment of us. It's an indictment of those who are still Republicans, and of those who call themselves conservatives but nevertheless still support Donald Trump because it seems more important to defeat the left than to insist upon the principles they have always stood for in the past.
Why are even the most conservative of conservatives not planning at this very moment to take back the party and challenge Donald Trump for the 2020 nomination, perhaps offering, say, Ted Cruz as an alternative?
Well, for one thing, because they would lose, and they know it. Because the Republican party isn't the Republican party anymore. It's the Know-Nothings reborn. This is no longer the party of Reagan, you see. It's the party of Donald Trump. And because that would mean abandoning the best and most efficient way of fighting the left, even if it means accepting what ought to be unacceptable to do otherwise, Trump must be supported no matter what the intellectual or moral cost.
And there it is. A huge number of good people who consider themselves conservatives have made opposing the left rather than supporting free trade and national security and the founding values of the Republic and basic human decency their political guiding star.
The situation of the Democrats is somewhat different. What happened to the Republicans in 2016 happened to them back in 1972. There have been brief periods- moments in the Clinton presidency, perhaps, and the early Obama presidency- when they have seemed to drift, however slightly, toward the middle. The Democratic civil war, to the extent that there is one, is between the extreme left and the even more extreme left. Just as the GOP has left Reagan and Ford and the Bushes and Ike behind, the Democrats have left FDR and Adlai Stevenson and Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in the dust. It's hard to imagine any of those Democrats of days gone by being nearly as quick to assassinate the characters of their opponents as modern Democrats are or to dismiss those who disagree with them as hate-filled bigots without giving them a hearing and maybe even engaging them in a kind of dialog I have trouble even imagining Nancy Pelosi or Elizabeth Warren being equipped to become involved in. The Democrats of bygone times certainly wouldn't be nearly as quick to see opposing viewpoints as worthy of being intimidated into silence as modern Democrats are. And so it is that a nation founded upon open debate and free speech now finds itself with two parties dedicated to coercing those they differ with into silence.
One does so by flunking them out of college and firing them from their jobs and slandering them as bigots. The other calls a free press "the enemy of the people," threatens to change the law to bypass the First Amendment, and calls upon those loyal to it to beat up peaceful protestors.
And the fact that stuff like that has become even acceptable among Democrats and "progressives" only illustrates that they, too, have bought into the hallucination that integrity in defending one's own principles is less important than defeating the other side. The result is that American "liberalism" has become one of the most illiberal and intolerant movements in American political history. The ACLU, which once defended the Bill of Rights, a few years ago hired college students to circulate petitions in downtown Des Moines urging the defeat of legislation to defend the right of bakers and florists to refuse to violate their own religious beliefs by becoming, as they saw it, participants in a sinful activity by baking a cake for a wedding between two people of the same sex. Even today, the First Amendment's prohibition of laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion is a far less important priority for a movement once dedicated to the defense of the Bill of Rights than intimidating people into governing their own personal conduct in the way that the left feels that they ought to, regardless of what the Constitution might say.
The delusion that it can ever be healthy to define one's own political posture merely by opposition to someone else's has distorted the character of the Democratic party, too, into something that Roosevelt and Truman and Stevenson and Kennedy and Johnson and Humphrey would not recognize. I suppose we could accuse the Democrats of seeing pink donkeys; their perception of reality is just as distorted as that of Republicans by the habit of defining themselves in terms of those they oppose, rather than based on the principles they embrace- or once did. And it has been for a far longer time.
But this is about the Republicans, of whom I was until recently one. For them, the hallucination that one becomes a conservative by opposing liberals rather than by embracing conservative principles is a comparatively new symptom. It has meant intelligent people who ought to know better embracing utterly crazy notions such as the idea that a criminal investigation which has already borne fruit can reasonably be dismissed is as a "witch hunt," that Donald Trump's pathetic performances in his meetings with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin were anything other than diplomatic disasters and moral disgraces, and that the FBI and CIA's understandable and frankly dutiful concerns about a man who cannot keep his mouth shut about state secrets or avoid involving himself in compromising business and personal relationships is, in fact, evidence some kind of partisan plot or personal vendetta. It means playing along with the notion that Donald Trump is responsible for an economic recovery which predates his inauguration because the trends it set in motion have continued under his watch (at least so far) and that his profoundly un-Republican protectionist trade policy is likely to do anything other than disrupt that trend.
It means accepting the boorish, childish antics of a buffoon who is not fit to be a grammar school principal, much less President of the United States, as he humiliates our nation on almost a daily basis with his crazy claims and his obnoxious behavior and makes us the laughingstock of the world.
It means throwing aside the notion that it is better to be civil and kind to one another all the more because the other side refuses to be, and instead embracing our inner jerk. It means to voluntarily share the fantasies of a man whose only agenda is his own personal glory and whose acquaintance with the truth is more severely limited not only than any other president in our history but than any other national politician in recent memory. It means buying into the idea that a man who makes up his own personal reality as he goes along according to whatever may fit his own interests at the moment and seems unaware of it when he changes that subjective "reality" to fit his own changing interests is a fit custodian of our nation's security and interests.
It means betraying basic conservative economic principles even though the result will likely be a national economic disaster and becoming accomplices in protecting a president with an ethically shady past and a suspicious pattern of ongoing behavior when refuses even to make his own income taxes public as every president in recent memory has done.
It means making common cause with Nazis and Klansmen and the alt-right and supporting a president who defends them and even has on occasion has espoused their crazy beliefs; who for years after the notion was conclusively disproven continued, for example, to insist that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and who even now is likely to say almost anything at any given moment. It means refusing to recognize the pathetically obvious truth that Donald Trump's closest political friends and the heart and core of his supporters are far more enemies of our most cherished principles than the Democrats and most of the American left ever were.
It means granting credibility to every lie, every slander, every self-serving, crazy innuendo that the left has ever told the American people about the right. It means confusing opposition to one set of crazy, evil ideas with the support of another. In short, it means embracing a delusion, a moral and philosophical hallucination that is no less a profound betrayal of the principles for which conservatism and the Republican party and even America itself have always stood because those who are involved in the betrayal fail to see it.
It means buying into a political, moral, and economic disaster when one ought to be fighting to take the conservative movement and the Republican party back, or failing that, to found a new party to carry on the fight rather than making common cause with fools and scoundrels because they're our fools and scoundrels.
What does it profit a movement to defeat its opponents and lose its own soul? And make no mistake: that precisely the devil's deal those who remain within the Republican party and have become apologists for Donald Trump have made.
And no, that doesn't mean that they won't go to heaven. I just want to make that clear. But it does mean that in the interest of defeating what they oppose, to a considerable extent they seem to have forgotten why they oppose it.
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