I’ve been suggesting for years that the Republican Party, because of the use of the internal RINO! (Republican In Name Only, as in cries of) tactic to drive out members who are moderate or stand in the way of the ambitious, will eventually lose enough members that the party will become irrelevant, even extinct. It’s like a cancer, cancerous cells killing off healthy cells through deprivation of resources, all in their frantic race to survive forever. Thus, as the host dies, ends the cancer, and so, too, with the Republicans.
And, perhaps, some Republicans are beginning to realize it.
… some Republicans are privately fretting about their own lot, worried that the extremes of their party will drive them into extinction.
“I hope these trends reverse, but I don’t see them reversing without very principled and strong leadership emerging from those who have the responsibility to step forward and say enough is enough,” said former congressman Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-La.), who said his onetime colleagues appear to be “cowed into silence” instead of pushing back on the direction the party is going.
Admittedly, the provenance of the plural pronoun is somewhat ambiguous, but whether it points at the GOP composite entity, or the “moderate” Republicans, many of whom were the far-right radicals just a few short years ago, it’s much the same thing: a death sentence, not yet executed but direly threatening the inhabitants of the famed epistemic bubble, a bubble which cuts them off from communications and judgments from the outside world. That glass wall, so easily pierced, keeps them from realizing how perverse they’ve become – and how this appears to be ending for them over the next few years.
Republicans, however, aren’t technically moving right as much as they are becoming more Trump-like and embracing controversial positions. This summer, each primary appeared to be a race to convince voters who was closer to Trump, who supported him first or who loves him most.
Whether or not they had reasoned positions, first comes their allegiance to Trump and the bubble. Outside is chaos, inside is order. Trump and his incompetence, his barstool blowhard-ism, is the clarion call for those whose views on important issues are often incoherent, and cannot understand why they’ve not been accorded respect and power before now.
Well, reality has already slapped them across the face, once, but not as hard as I’d think 180,000+ dead would be. We’ve seen certain senior Republicans advance the view that the pandemic toll is really only 9,000, the number of death certificates that list Covid-19 as the sole cause of death. It’s trivial enough to refute: a “co-morbidity” such as diabetes does not consign them to a short lifetime. I have a friend who’s been diabetic for 40+ years. But if he caught Covid-19, he might be dead within a week.
Those Republicans should resign in embarrassment.
But that’s how they try to avoid the reality that they are unequal to the task of government: confusion, mendacity, distraction. Welcome to the bubble.
Vote Biden, and vote early.
