Biden reaches out. The GOP slaps him in the face.
Opinion by
Columnist
November 22, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. CST
President-elect
Joe Biden’s victory offered the cheerful prospect that we might begin to
detoxify our politics. Maybe we could forget Donald Trump for a while and argue
with at least a touch of civility about the actual problems our country faces.
Heck,
some of us dared to imagine that we might treat each other with respect. After
all, Biden said over and over that he wanted to be the president of all
Americans and honored the dignity of voters who had supported Trump in the past
by expressing an understanding of their discontents.
Moreover,
bypassing more polarizing alternatives, Biden’s own party chose the candidate most
likely to be acceptable to the other side, itself a form of outreach.
And the
GOP’s response to the outreach? With just a handful of exceptions, abject
refusal to stand up against the anti-democratic lunacy of Trump’s efforts to
nullify the results of a fair election.
It is also
a warning: Anyone advising Biden and members of his party to turn the other
cheek and reach out to Republican congressional leaders as though none of this
has happened is urging them down the path of political suicide.
Ronald
Reagan’s expression of hopeful skepticism, “trust but verify,”
is far too optimistic for what Biden faces. Republicans aren’t simply denying
him a honeymoon; they’re either acquiescing to or advancing Trump’s bid to cast
Biden’s presidency as illegitimate from the start.
Sen.
Mitt Romney (R-Utah) rightly received praise last week when he condemned Trump
for putting “overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of
the people and overturn the election,” adding: “It is difficult to imagine a
worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”
But
Romney’s statement is more a reason for distress than hope. It should not take
political courage — whether from him, former New Jersey
governor Chris Christie or GOP state officials in Michigan and
Georgia — to recognize the simple fact that Biden won. Nor do you have to be
liberal to recognize that a legal strategy based on throwing out ballots cast
in heavily Black Detroit or Philadelphia is racist.
And you
only need to honor the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower to be
horrified that the Republican National Committee made itself the
venue last week for an incendiary, untrue and insane statement by
Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Her screed was worthy of some marginal,
anti-democratic, far-right nationalist party in some other country.
“American
patriots are fed up with the corruption from the local level, to the highest
level of our government,” she said, making you wonder who is president. “We are
going to take this country back. We are not going to be intimidated. We are not
going to back down. We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won
by a landslide. We are going to prove it, and we are going to reclaim the
United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”
The
ballots of the majority that did not “vote for freedom” by Powell’s bizarre
definition — nearly 80 million so
far — can be tossed into the dustbin.
That’s
the party Biden has to deal with. And he can take no comfort if Republicans who
stayed mum during Trump’s attempted election theft turn around later and
pretend that they had nothing to do with this. Their silence is complicity.
This
presents a challenge to those of us on the progressive side who in the past
respected conservatism as a coherent and morally serious worldview. We saw it
as a set of ideas, advanced by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Robert Nisbet,
dedicated to preserving what is good in our institutions and traditions. Even
when we emphatically disagreed, we could understand why they might be skeptical
of the unintended costs of some of the reforms we might put forward.
But now
we confront a form of conservatism that openly disdains democracy, its rules
and its obligations. In his book “Democracy and Tradition,”
the philosopher and religion scholar Jeffrey Stout argues that “one thing a
democratic people had better have in common is a form of ethical discourse, a
way of exchanging reasons about ethical and political topics.”
Stout
is a realist who knows that democratic citizens can spend a lot of time “slapping one another in the
face.” But when politics is reduced to all slapping and no
reasoning, and when the words “take this country back” mean keeping the loser
of a free election in power by manipulating the truth and the law, we have
traveled a long way from the democratic tradition.
Those
who lack the conviction to sustain that tradition by defending rationality and
the democratic rules of engagement forfeit their standing to ask the rest of us
to believe that they are operating in good faith.
