Throughout our modern history, we have always had a peaceful transition of power. The losers in both parties have conceded and vowed to support their opponents for the good of the country.Unfortunately, that did not happen after the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump has refused to concede, and has told repeated lies about fraudulent voting and a rigged election.
That would be bad enough, but the right-wing media and Republican officials in Washington have supported Trump and his lies. This has resulted in millions of Republicans refusing to accept the outcome of the election -- to the extent that hundreds breached the Capitol Building while Congress was trying to certify the Electoral College results.
This is insane. Truth and decency seems to mean nothing to many modern Republicans.
This is not just a liberal's view. Reasonable conservatives are also horrified at what is happening to the Republican Party. The following is part of an article by Kevin D. Williamson in the conservative magazine National Review. He writes:
I have on many occasions criticized the abuse of the word coup in our politics, but that is what this is: an attempted coup d’état under color of law. It would be entirely appropriate today to impeach Trump a second time and remove him from office before his term ends.
No one who has participated in this poisonous buffoonery should ever hold office again. There was a time when there was a plausible if sometimes self-serving rationale for working for the Trump administration — that the president is a clueless poseur surrounded by crackpots and frauds, and that he desperately needs good counsel from responsible adults. But the Trump administration is not currently under the guiding influence of any such responsible adults — and there simply is no defending what it is up to. This cannot be excused or explained away.
Trump’s media cheerleaders, who like to call themselves constitutionalists and patriots, are no such thing. They are, for the most part, profiteers who will justify anything if it helps them to hold on to one point of audience share as they peddle their various blends of snake oil. “Woe unto them that call evil good and justify the wicked for gain.”
There was never any reason to trust them in the first place, but the events that have transpired since Election Day provide superabundant reason to understand them as an impediment to the conservative movement they purport to champion and a danger to the country they purport to love. If history remembers them at all, it will be as grovelers and hustlers, holding out for one last payday, a ride on Air Force One, or, in some cases, a presidential pardon.
I suppose the conservative movement might have to build a future without too much input from Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity. The republic will survive that loss, I am confident. . . .
There are some Republicans who lament that the Trump movement has transformed the Republican Party into a profit-oriented conspiracy cult. Many Democrats insist that this is not the case and prefer to believe that the Trump movement simply revealed what the Republican Party already was and long had been. Whatever is at work here, it isn’t ideology: Many of the worst Trump sycophants haven’t been fire-eating conservatives but East Coast moderates such as Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie; unlike, say, Ted Cruz, Trump himself is not a product of conservative institutions, and such conservative ideas as he has were acquired the day before yesterday, when he jettisoned his prior enthusiasms (“I am very pro-choice,” etc.) in his bid for the presidency. For my own part, I believe that the Republican Party has been both mutilated and laid bare at the same time. It will be a very long time before it can with a straight face once again call itself the Party of Lincoln, though it may aspire to be that once again. Party of Lincoln? The Republican Party would have to undergo the political equivalent of one of those reality-television makeovers if it wanted to stand so tall as to be the Party of Gerald Ford.
The modern Republican Party, whatever it was, is gone, even if much of the staff and the incorporation papers remain.
The next question: What will be built on its ruins?
