The
GOP reckoning never came
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 14, 2020 at 6:11 p.m. CST
Over the years,
Republican politicians seemed many times to be on the cusp of a reckoning — a
realization that a lunatic fringe had seized control of the party’s more
pragmatic center and that conspiracy-theorizing, race-baiting,
science-denigrating demagogues had transformed the GOP base into ungovernable
paranoiacs. The situation seemed untenable; the fever had to
break eventually.
Yet the party’s
radicalization continued, and the reckoning never came. Today, U.S. democracy
is paying the price as millions of Americans refuse to acknowledge the results
of a legitimate election, and their leaders appear too cowardly or too
powerless to disrupt the collective delusion.
Republican
politicians have had ample motives to decide that enough was enough, that they
had lost control of a once-useful strain of the paranoid style in American politics and
that the golem must be decommissioned. Public association with tinfoil-hatters
is usually bad PR, after all. Or, as William F. Buckley Jr. put it in his quest
to purge the Birchers from conservatism 60 years
ago, linkage with extremists might allow the media “to anathematize the entire American
right wing.”
More recently,
Republican fellowship with unstable bigots has alienated segments of the
population their party wishes to woo — women, minorities, immigrants and others
who might be otherwise open to right-of-center ideas.
Plus, should a party
that houses such rabble manage to capture power, governing is difficult if the
base believes bonkers things. Such as the premise that the greatest threat to
public safety today isn’t a deadly pandemic but a fictional, Democrat-run child-sex
ring.
Still, Republican
leadership refused to eject the nutters from their party when, say, birtherism swept
through the base. They may have privately winced at the racist conspiracy
theory, but they nonetheless found it too useful to delegitimize the first
Black president.
The reckoning also
didn’t come after Mitt Romney, endorsed by one of the leading birthers,
lost in 2012. The GOP dissected Romney’s defeat in an infamous “autopsy” report that concluded the party
needed to develop more “non-inflammatory and inclusive” messaging — a
recommendation it promptly ignored.
The reckoning didn’t
come after then-candidate Donald Trump cleared the 2016 primary field, barking
inflammatory and non-inclusive messaging that other Republicans had merely
whispered or winked at. Perhaps afraid to out themselves as the “establishment”
Trump railed against, Republican officials shrugged as Trump promulgated ever
more cynical conspiracy theories about fake unemployment numbers, a climate change “hoax” and homicidal immigrant hordes. At the time,
I predicted that Trump’s electoral loss
would force the GOP to acknowledge it needed another Buckley-esque purge,
draining the right-wing fever swamps, at least if it wished to survive.
I was wrong, of
course. The reckoning didn’t come then, either, because Trump won.
Nor did it arrive
after Trump crossed multiple lines Republicans once considered uncrossable, including: a Muslim ban; government-sanctioned child abuse; command-and-control-style economic
policies; prioritizing his own political interests ahead of national security; or a bungled federal
response to a global pandemic, in which Trump and his associates fed the public
disinformation about a Democratic “hoax” and various snake-oil cures, rather than
emphasizing the “personal responsibility” that was once a GOP tenet.
These were all
opportunities for Republican politicians to divorce themselves from Trumpism —
which was both a conclusion and extension of the earlier right-wing-paranoid
movement, though its members now wore MAGA caps instead of tinfoil ones. Yet
with rare exceptions, party elders stood by Trump.
They feared Trump’s itchy Twitter finger and the populist base that he now
fully controlled.
And so the fever never broke, the frog never leapt
from the now-boiling water, the reckoning never came.
Then, last month,
something happened that seemed grounds for hope: Trump lost. Surely this, I
thought, must force his party to finally excise its necrotic political tissue,
once leaders recognized it had cost them not just their principles and 300,000 American lives but also the
White House.
Instead of learning
from their loss, however, GOP officials simply deny it happened. They indulge
Trumpers’ conspiracy theories that he won reelection. They turn a blind eye as
the president provokes threats of violence against state officials (including fellow
Republicans) responsible for ballot counts. Nearly two-thirds of House Republicans signed
onto a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, even as they surely knew the
case would get laughed out of court. When the party’s unofficial mouthpiece,
Fox News, interrupted the mass delusion by recognizing Joe Biden’s win, that
somehow just created business opportunities for news
organizations even more extreme than Fox News.
Now that the electors
have voted, certifying Biden as
president-elect, maybe Republican leaders will finally acknowledge
the defeat — and the existential threat they face if the party
doesn’t confront what it has become. Instead, I fear, they’ll stick with Trump,
dog-whistling past the graveyard.
