The Witness Chronicles, January 19, 2024
Pragmatic views on US politics, global issues, and climate change
The Whining Victimhood of the Republican Party
Why are they acting like cranky babies?
Warning: optimism ahead.
Donald Trump is a privileged billionaire. Ron DeSantis is the Governor of a prosperous state. Nikki Haley has had success after success despite being a woman and person of color. The House far right Freedom Caucus are powerful DC politicians, arguably near the top of the elite.
So why are they all acting like the world has dealt them a losing hand over and over again? The simple answer is that it’s all an act, an act of monstrous cynicism. They pretend to care about their constituents as they seek greater and greater power, while not actually doing anything to deserve it.
Normally in US politics there is a kind of balance between the egotistical grandstanders and those who really feel they are there to serve, a balance that crosses party lines. That balance is not a minor thing, it is how we get things done, big things.
For every publicity blowhard there are usually leaders who work together to pass laws and improve the well being of the voters and the country. But now, when we measure the measurable actions of the two parties, one is missing.
The Republican Party is disintegrating into a divided, aimless mess, resorting to innuendo, lies, and excuses rather than participation in governing the country. Last year’s Republican-led House of Representatives passed 22 laws, an historic low, down from 78 under the Democratic leadership the previous year.
And that previous session’s number was unusually low, in part because of recovering from the pandemic, and having a thin Republican majority in the Senate. This low productivity, in both years, is directly attributable to an unwritten policy of stalling, not unlike Trump’s legal strategy in his court cases.
Put everything off until he returns to power.
There is a big problem with this. Despite the hand wringing by the punditry, Trump is unlikely to win in November and if he doesn’t, the Party will be lost, possibly even destroyed from within. The headwinds Trump faces include those court cases, his inability to control himself, his constant whining and victimhood, and the fact that he has nothing positive to offer the American public other than undefined fixes like his non-existent improvements on healthcare and other issues.
Empty promises, like his mythological promises of fixing infrastructure during his first term. It never happened, yet Joe Biden was able to do it with bipartisan support in his first few months in office. Why was Biden able to get things done in months which Trump could not do in four years?
The answer lies in one word, bipartisanship, the willingness to work with others even when you have basic disagreements over many things. Bipartisan has become a dirty word on the right along with compromise, but these two things are how humans work together.
Or not.
Right now we face the looming bankruptcy of the American government in a time of unprecedented prosperity in our country. Not because of structural failings or financial catastrophe, but because a few far right kooks think bipartisan action and compromise are the actions of weak men and women.
Leaders set the tone and direction of the country, and when we see this inability to govern on the right, we are seeing the failure of their leadership. It is telling that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a weak leader, has retained his job when any member can call for his head. No one in the Republican Party wants to lead.
Their actual leader, Donald Trump, lacks an essential element of leadership, compassion. Another word that his party views with derision as a sign of weakness. This reflects Trump’s obsession with self, with his need for constant attention even when it works against him.
His narcissism has spread into the weaker-minded members of his Party and infected our government and to some degree our country. It is so pervasive that some of Trump’s followers make absurd claims that he is divinely inspired or that a dictator would be good for the country.
They obviously have not lived under a dictator. Yet.
The rest of us, and I believe that is the majority of the voting public, do not share this devotion to a whining rich man born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth.
An interesting shift may be taking place in American politics. The Democratic Party, typically hampered by internal divides between liberals and moderates, is remarkably united right now. And the Republican Party is splitting into two parties, the Trump Party and the not-Trump Party.
We saw this in the Iowa Caucuses earlier this week. Yes, Trump won definitively with 51%, while his two main rivals each received less than half that. But was that definitive in an extremely conservative state dominated by the evangelical right? The reality is that nearly half of the Republicans voting in an all Republican caucus voted against Trump.
It should be noted that an incumbent, which Trump looks like to an electorate that believes the 2020 election was stolen (it was not), typically gets 80-90% of the votes in a primary.
The political news is dominated by the antics of Trump and his most bombastic supporters in the congress, but that does not paint the true picture of what the Republican Party is facing, a major split in an election year, a split where right leaning independents and moderate Republicans are left with only two options:
Swallow their pride and vote for a man who very well may be convicted of federal crimes, or make their vote a vote against him by voting Democrat while in the privacy of the voting booth. Or to not vote, essentially the same thing.
I am very aware that this thinking seems to contradict the prevailing story about the election right now. But a lot of that story is the media striving to be more than fair in their coverage, in the name of balance and fairness. The right knows this and uses it to stay in the headlines even when they are doing nothing.
But I’m certainly not alone in seeing this split in the Trump Party. There are other signs. State Republican committees in multiple states, including Arizona and Michigan, are broke financially and running deficits at a time when they should be raising money for candidates at all levels of government. These are so-called swing states where they should be able to easily raise money.
The quality of the Republican opposition to Trump has been unimpressive, in part because they share the Party’s inability to criticize the ex-president. We may see DeSantis try to change his message into an anti-Trump one, but he is such a terrible campaigner and generally unpleasant person that he won’t pull it off.
Haley shares the same problem with being unable to criticize Trump in fear of losing his block of rabid supporters. The reality is those MAGA cult members will never vote for another candidate while Trump is in the picture. That reality is at the core the Party’s weakness.
They live under a cloud of fear and cannot take responsibility for their own future, or ours.
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Thanks for what I see as a rational appraisal of the current situation, expressed clearly and succinctly.
Would that someone could devise a way to cut through the conditioned and simplistic views of the Trump supporters and/or put courage into enough Republican members of Congress and the Senate to see that party either split, disband or, at least, admit and cease its hypocrisy and start to do what they were elected to do, i.e. serve in such a way as to benefit the people and the nation - not sell it down the river.
Take care. Stay safe. ☮️