Who ever imagined a minority national party, beholden to voting patterns, would look for redemption by undermining enthusiasm for elections? Belittling the very notion of fair elections (past and future) exposes a politics of contempt. Since there’s no “surgical” way to do “voter suppression,”count on unintended, negative consequences, arguably demoralizing the Trump base. Partisan gerrymandering and manipulating judicial appointments are nasty enough; demolishing confidence that America can accurately tabulate votes quite another.
Thus, forget facile distortions that the right-wing cabal favors “party over patriotism.” That implies the GOP has gained power by ignoring its oath-based loyalty to the country. If so, where’s the offset, since the election, to grinding, Republican declines. Can a fragmented party, alight with displays of leadership animosity, be so deluded to think that restoration comes by only pillaging all things Democratic?
If anything, right-wing contradictions have amplified since the election – with the painful “choice” of not knowing whether they lose or gain more raw power by embracing Trump sedition. Yet, Trump aside, what real-world deliverables are Republicans even talking about? In the meantime, Republicans are stuck in their own political mud, hip to jowl with the two-time, ugly American vociferously questing against core Yankee principles and values.
How is it possible for the allegedly ultra-patriotic, law and order right, bristling with American exceptionalism, to forever tolerate unpatriotic criminal voter fraud (in GA), a trigger for riotous insurrection, tax fraud, and a sustained election-result denier? Consider this litany of anti-American violations:
1) maliciously, lawlessly rejecting a trouble-free national election with simple-minded lies because millions of voters favored the non-Trump.
2) refusing even a forced concession that a certified election is finale, objections out of order.
3) the outrage of Trump-driven insurrection against the Capitol, nothing less than a crime against the electorate and unimpeachable official mandates to accept certified elections.
4) a justified, double-impeachment whammy because that’s how the Constitution addresses a multiply-corrupt presidency.
5) demonizing the other party (before and after it won legitimately) as manipulative, nefarious, conspiracy-driven enemies of America.
6) slamming all critics, especially the media as “enemies of the people;”
7) punishing “disloyal” party dissenters by driving them from leadership, even office.
8) sabotaging the sovereignty of majority rule, pushing both election sabotage in GA “and voter suppression.
9) politicizing what had never before been so corrupted, from Supreme Court nominations to a global health pandemic, and essential foreign alliances all the while boosting a slew of unfriendly autocrats.
10) constantly leveraging overt racial bigotry as a divisive wedge; impugning minorities, immigrants and immigration as bad for American; promoting white supremacy, the Confederacy and egregious historic distortions.
If these are not blows against established, workable American values, what constitutes political treason? Name any other president, ex-president or national leader who ever so publicly torpedoed what the majority holds sacred. We’re not talking controversies, say, abortion, reparation for centuries of racism, preferential hiring, or how to exit bad wars. No president in memory promoted racism as a political agenda. No major party ever refused a peaceable transition after certified election results. No modern party tried to overthrow a legitimate election. America is not immune from hard-knock politics full of slander and intimidation, even direct Congressional fisticuffs. But what other president or party takes dead aim against democratic principles, open elections, and the sanctity of majority rule?
Sabotage is sabotage, whatever the con
Even before Trump, Republicans had degraded the “opposition party” role into blanket saboteurs against elected Democrats, as true with Biden as it was with Obama. Such treachery is not illegal but defies the American grain, with the dramatic, ongoing novelty of total election denial. That eliminates the all-important transition between nasty campaigning and a vestige of co-governance. If Trump succeeds in poisoning elections, he poisons voting itself, morphed into little more than a pause between endless, acerbic electioneering. Destroying the finale of outcomes corrupts politics into no-win, war-like battlegrounds. Nothing mocks majority rule more than willfully rejecting the only way democracies choose leaders and set agendas.
When has America ever backed a cult loser eager to devastate democratic stability for his long-shot fantasy of returning to glory? Never. The country can survive one crazed party that refuses to accept the role of opposition. But only chaos looms if one party, having failed to win, sustains the con by impugning the idea of elections. That defines anti-Americanism to a tee, in line with Russian interventions to devastate western democracies as failed systems – all to elevate foreign tyrannical brands.
Both the irony and tragedy is that widespread support of the wobbly Democratic Party matches high majority consensus of essential actions: to begin offsetting climate threats, upgrades to infrastructure, job training, and health care, plus much greater fairness in taxation and income equality. This national consensus looks to interconnected, systemic reforms, with secondary payoffs if immigration, gun gluts, and mass murders are addressed.
Is there any question that the right, to avoid a dead-end destiny, must abandon its mania for obstructionism and instead propose real-world improvements, if only for conservative and centrists? Lying bluster is simply not a sustainable political agenda. Loyalty to an ex-president who opposes American values and can’t win a national election will only confirm minority status for years.
Former GOP pollster Frank Luntz concludes that Trump’s maniacal obsession with losing the 2020 election “could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022.” Trump’s utterly debunked voter fraud fantasies will hurt the Republican Party by discouraging 2022 GOP turnout. “The reason why there is a Democratic Senate in Washington today is because of Donald Trump, not Mitch McConnell,” says Luntz.
Since a reboot of current Republican mindsets is hard to imagine, who can argue with the Washington Post’s ex-Republican Max Boot, convinced that “The Republican Party is beyond salvation — even without Trump”? If the GOP cannot rid itself of the fascist, anti-American Trump manias, then, like the ex-president, it invites doom. Parties do go out of business when they crash and burn – and haven’t a clue, nor the courage, how to face the hard work of change. Calling on Trump is inviting the same-old insurrectionists to your backyard garden party.
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