A non-platform for an unreal Republican Party
"Platforms," we call them in America. The Brits call them "manifestos:" formal statements, adopted at the beginning of a political campaign, setting forth the party's proposals and policy decisions for the electorate, to be contrasted with those of the other party and thus to provide a basis for making an informed and intelligent choice between rival visions of the short-term future.
Granted, few voters ever actually read party platforms and manifestos. Nevertheless, they serve a useful purpose: they define that party in terms of the issues and give it something in terms of policy to stand on. That's why they're called "platforms."
Or perhaps I should say "gave." For the first time in memory, a major American political party will fight a presidential campaign without a formal, written platform. The Republicans, who quite rightly frown upon "living constitutions" (which tend by definition to be dead letters), are entering the fray this year with a living platform- one named Donald Trump.
Bizarre, eh? And a little frightening. When the cult of personality reaches the point at which nobody even pretends to care about policy anymore, a political movement may rightly be called a cult. And that is precisely what the once proud and substantial Republican Party has become.
The Republican National Convention has adopted a resolution which says, in part, the following:
RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;
RESOVLVED, [sic] That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;
RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration...
This is especially interesting because Trump loyalists (and especially that craven sub-species of the beast Charlie Sykes calls the "Anti-Anti-Trumpers) frequently make the bogus argument that we Never Trump types are willing to ignore questions of policy because we don't like Mr. Trump personally, as if alarm at his manifest incompetence, obvious emotional immaturity, clear psychological instability, global ignorance about every aspect of the job, utter contempt for the Constitution and for the law in general and a failure to comprehend the most basic elements of what are supposed to be our common civic values was trivial, petty nitpicking. This from folks who implausibly claim to cherish the Constitution and the rule of law, to say nothing of free markets, fiscal restraint, the open exchange of ideas, a vigorous defense of America's interests in the international arena, and a strong emphasis on national security, all of which are clearly policy matters and with none of which Mr. Trump's positions and behavior are remotely consistent.
But now all pretense has been dropped, and the Republican Party is officially committed to the position that the minds of good Republicans need to be turned off and blind, unquestioning obedience is due to an authoritarian leader who opposes virtually everything previous Republican platforms and presidents have stood for, as well as being an incompetent clown who has made America the laughingstock of the world and done incalculable harm to America in pretty much every way imaginable these past four years.
In a way, that may be a good thing. Donald Trump himself is, after all, the issue this year. All the evidence seems to indicate that his malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance concerning the coronavirus pandemic that has cost tens of thousands of American lives and ruined the hard-bought prosperity into which his predecessor brought the nation and for which Mr. Trump sought implausibly to claim credit, plunging us into the second historically dire financial crisis in as many decades has prepared the way for the GOP to take a historic drubbing at the polls in November. You'd almost think that Republican politicians would be led by their sense of self-preservation to be distancing themselves from Mr. Trump right now and trying to save what can be saved in the leadup to what seems certain to be an electoral disaster. In fact, you'd almost think that they'd go out of the way to adopt a platform that would break with Mr. Trump in some conspicuous ways if only to create as much of a distinction as possible in voters' minds between him and the rest of the party. But instead of grabbing for a floating plank or lifejacket to keep from going down with the ship, the convention has chosen to cling tightly to the ship's anchor.
Four years ago I used the Nuremberg Rally metaphor for the travesty the GOP staged in Cleveland. Ok, so the metaphor was a little overblown; as I've said many times, Trump may be Mussolini (or better, Oswald Mosley, an ineffectual individual lacking the courage and strength of character necessary to even be a Mussolini), but he is no Hitler. Inmates at Joe Arpaio's jail are the only people he seems to think actually belong in concentration camps, and though he may not place a particularly high value on the lives of the elderly and people with underlying health conditions for whom being exposed to COVID-19 would probably be a death sentence or the children of illegal immigrants he has proposed no program to actually euthanize them.
But the Cleveland convention, which ignored its own rules and silenced dissenting even to the point of refusing to record votes cast for any candidate but Trump, certainly was closer to the ethos of authoritarianism than to that of democracy. This year's semi-virtual convention promises to be an even more appalling show. The numbers paint an ugly picture for the President's re-election prospects, and since gaining the approval of those who aren't already fans seems a longshot at this point many commentators expect his people to play their one remaining card: trying to motivate the base to turn out in miraculous numbers by running a convention and a campaign so utterly, bat guano crazy in its appeal to the conspiracy theorists, extremists, racists, and general wackadoodles who form the Trump base as to abandon any chance of even being credible to more reasonable people.
A desperation tactic, sure- and unlikely to be any more effective than harping on Joe Biden's mental condition despite the polling data indicating that the voters are far more worried about Mr. Trump's own! Desperation and massive tone-deafness are not a combination that predicts electoral success, and the fact that the Trump people are so out of touch with their own candidate's weaknesses at this late date offers little prospect of the looming Biden landslide to be even minimized, much less stopped.
Mr. Trump's delivery of his acceptance speech from the White House will technically not be a violation of the Hatch Act, since the law exempts the President from its prohibition of using a Federal workspace for partisan political purposes. That's almost a shame, given the apparent contempt for the law Mr. Trump's followers seem to share with him, and given the unwillingness of the Senate to convict him on slam-dunk impeachment charges and Republican members of Congress generally to hold him accountable for anything. It would be a nice piece of symmetry, in a way, for the criminal enterprise known as the Trump Administration to open its bid for a second term with its customary disdain for the law. putting on display once more the decline in integrity and public-mindedness among Republicans in Congress since the days when Howard Baker, Hugh Scott, and other Republican members of the Senate and the House not only made sure that Richard Nixon was held accountable for his role in the Watergate coverup but personally demanded his resignation. But in this case, anyway, Mr. Nixon's infamous statement to David Frost, ironically, is actually true. When the President uses Federal premises for partisan political practices, it is not against the law even though it would be for anyone else.
In any case, it's pretty easy at this point to know what to expect this week from the
It should be a fascinating and entertaining piece of unintentional political comedy that perhaps a third of the country will swallow whole. My prediction, though, is that its only real impact on the campaign will be to allow the President and his lemming-like sycophants to dig the hole they're in even deeper. Once again, it will put on public display in terms too lurid for credible denial just what Donald Trump is, what the once-proud and noble Republican Party has become- and why Joe Biden, the only grownup in the room, is the only reasonable choice to lead our nation through the next four years.
As Charlie Sykes observes, the New Know-Nothings will fight this campaign based on one principle, and one principle only: complete and total submission to anything the Dear Orange Leader says or does. And given the kind of stuff the Dear Orange Leader says and does, what Mr. Trump's supporters probably should be hoping is that as few people as possible are watching this week.
It's gonna be nuts. And the comparison with the reasoned cogency of Joe Biden and the Democratic Convention, it's not going to help the party that pretends these days to be the Republicans very much at all.
Comments