I’d love to forget Trump ever existed. But Republicans won’t; despite January 6, Trumpier than ever. Kind of circling the wagons around him.
Seventeen GOP lawmakers did break ranks to back impeachment. But state party organizations are voting to censure them! Something quite unprecedented in the annals of American politics. Trying to enforce a slavish conformity no party has ever attempted. It’s a great irony that they continue denouncing “cancel culture.” These censure votes are the GOP’s own cancel culture. Showing it’s no longer a political party so much as a religion, bent on casting out heretics.
Religions have their mythologies; now salient here is “the stolen election.” A trifecta of nonsensicality. It originated with the biggest liar ever. It’s been thoroughly debunked. And third, Trump lost not due to fraud but loathsomeness. Which Republicans also blind themselves to. A divorcement from reality characteristic of religious cults. The “election steal” fits right in with the QAnon fantasy, of some vast Satanic deep state conspiracy of cannibalistic pedophiles, rampant too among Republicans.
Such confabulation of nonsense stories — blaming Trump’s defeat on fraud, January 6 on leftist provocateurs, Texas power outages on the Green New Deal, and on and on — is now pervasively how Republicans engage with the world. Textbook insanity.
But they’re really RINOs — “Republicans in name only.” Everything the party used to represent thrown under the bus in their insane worship of the most destructive individual in U.S. history.
This is what we confront today in place of conventional political debate over ideas, issues, and policies. Not even abortion is to the fore any longer. In this religion, Trump is the messiah, the savior. Their Jerusalem, which they see him as promising, is the preservation of white supremacy, in the most literal sense. To, as they see it, remain culturally dominant, by any means necessary.
This is a fundamental rejection of democracy. A democratic culture means accepting the legitimacy of the role of people different from you, with different ideas. Today’s Republicans do not. I’m reminded of Turkey’s Erdogan saying democracy is like a train — you get off when you reach your chosen destination. To reach theirs, Republicans will stop at nothing. Not lies, not cruelty, not trashing civic decency. All grotesquely contravening the Christianity they supposedly sacralize. In fact, they’re not only RINOs, but CINOs — Christians in name only. Trump having superseded Christ.
They even justify overthrowing the Constitution. That’s what they tried to do on January 6. Many dupes fantasized “protecting democracy” from vote fraud; for others that was just a useful lie. But anyway, it was never actually election integrity that mattered, it was keeping their despicable messiah in office. At least President Biden has never tried to overthrow the government.*
Their failure on January 6 is not the end of it. While Republicans used to claim venerating the Constitution, about half, according to polls, now actually believe force and violence are justified to maintain the white Christian America of their imaginings and defeat their betes noires. No wonder this is now seen as our greatest national security threat. They consider January 6 another 1776. Though in 1776, we got rid of a king; on January 6 they tried to crown one.
This is the party Hawley, Haley, Cruz, Rubio, and others are jockeying to lead. Struggling to square the circle of kissing Trump cultist asses while somehow distancing from their loopiness. Their moral depravity will profit them nought, because the 2024 nominee will be Donald or else Donald Junior. If not a Trump-Trump ticket.
We’re told the party is split, undergoing a civil war, with some Republicans battling for sanity and the party’s soul. But GOP voters harbor great resentment against “elites.” Those still sane are the GOP’s own elite, similarly resented (now being censured), and too few to put up much of a fight. Many (like me) having simply left the party, as irredeemable.
I remember LBJ quoting, “Come, let us reason together.” America was always a place where, while disagreements were real and large, reason helped us work through them. That’s what politics was about. But no longer. There’s no reasoning with a religious cult.
So obviously is this a bad thing for America, one wants to believe it cannot possibly prevail. That we can’t go so far off the deep end. But the fools dancing dementedly around bonfires of reason are so numerous they don’t have to ensnare many additional voters. We’ve already had one bout of catastrophic misrule by their monster messiah, leaving half a million dead. Yet he actually came within 1% of re-election. Can the better angels of our nature keep these demons at bay?
*But Republicans will probably accuse him of it; weirdly inverting all indictnments of Trump. Now calling Biden “anti-science.” A right-wing radio commentator faulted his foreign policy for not sufficiently emphasizing human rights! And so forth.
