Time To Split?

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Professor Richardson provides the information that suggests, at least to me, that the GOP is in the final stages of fragmenting. This is motivated by the revelation that President Trump has attempted to interfere, quite possibly illegally, in the Georgia Presidential election, as revealed over the weekend.

Some prominent Republicans are waving flags indicating they will not cross the line. Here’s former Speaker Ryan (R-WI):

High ranking member of the GOP House caucus Rep Liz Cheney (R-WY), and, yes, incidentally daughter of former VP Dick Cheney (R-WY):

Trump ally Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), which I find surprising:

And then there will be the Trump supporters, who will be substantially those who’ve come to power due to Trump. Georgia GOP chair David Shafer appears to be in the President’s camp, judging from his reaction to the weekend’s revelations:

Incidentally, this was rejected by a Biden lawyer.

As has long been foreseen by many pundits, the Republican Party is ripping itself into pieces. In my view, the tenet of team politics, in which Republicans are expected to vote the ticket, no matter how repugnant, has led to leaders who, so long as they are willing to swear allegiance to a collection of positions, such as absolutist positions on gun control, abortion, taxes, private sector regulations, immigration, and smaller government, are then automatically considered to be qualified for elective office.

But Republicans were at a loss as to what to do when Senator Barack Obama defeated Senator McCain in 2008. Republican Party tenets had lead the country to wrack and ruin in the form of the 9/11 attack, two wars which revealed a Republican Administration willing to indulge in torture, and the Great Recession; worse yet, the lion of the old order, McCain, had lost to a Black Democratic, who then proved to be exceptionally competent and, at the end, if not during, quite popular.

But McCain had brought into national prominence his running mate, Sarah Palin (R-AK), a religious freak who happened to have some charisma, enough that her incompetence and incoherence was not a factor for those who were naturally aligned with her.

And that was the evangelical movement. Already socially conservative, Palin spoke an apocalyptic language familiar to those who detested social change such as gay marriage, and preferred their ideal of justice to be pre-ordained, rather than reasoned.

Minnesota contributed its own Evangelical rambling incoherent political leader, Rep Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), who became the subject of much excitement on both sides of the spectrum. (A conservative relative of mine from Illinois once asked me why Bachmann was being elected, using language that was less than complimentary towards her – not profane, something along the lines of “loon”, which here in Minnesota is not a compliment.)

But the dropping of the importance of the requirement that candidates demonstrate competency, or even sanity, has led to the elevation of the ill-defined term charisma as the differentiating factor in selecting candidates.

And many folks found Trump to be charismatic, much like Palin and Bachmann.

But this characteristic’s elevation does not encourage rational approaches to politics, whether it’s selection or performance evaluation. Charisma evaluation becomes a chute down which the voter falls, and it takes courage to climb back up the hill and admit to making a mistake. Thus, so many cries of Fake election and Stop the steal. They’re not willing, because their evaluation is based on an intuition of charisma, bolstered by a lack of accurate information, to change their allegiance. After all, a chronic liar like Trump doesn’t suffer charisma changes just because everything he does is a failure; he just lies some more. In concert with frantic cries of Fake news! from allies benefiting from his pliability in office, and several decades of determined creation of “alternative” realities, Trump finds a putrid bedrock for his popularity.

Combine this with Trump’s desperation to win, whether it’s a pathological feature of his personality, or a reality-based fear of future events if he is ejected from office in seventeen days, and it’s not surprising to see the Republican Party beginning to fragment. To a certain, small extent this has been happening in the form of Biden endorsements by modern Republicans, and the formation of The Lincoln Project.

Those who’ve achieved prominence by clinging to Trump’s gonads face two hard questions: Do the actions of Trump constitute a challenge to the very bedrock of the American Experiment, and, if they agree that it does and that Trump is either a criminal, or close to one, then are they willing to imperil their own political position in order to do right?

Most won’t. They are so far gone in irrationality or their hypocritical allegiance that there’s no backing out now. I look forward to the rational and irrational sides of the party throwing charges of RINO (Republican in Name Only) at each other, desperate to retain the stained name of a formerly great party.

But the truth of the matter is that the conservatives are fragmenting, and in first past the post electoral systems, which are in general use in the United States, that’s death. Ironically, we may see the Republicans taking up the call for ranked choice voting, as a last gasp chance at grasping and holding power.

But it won’t work. The bitterness will be too strong. The Trumpists, bitter that the more moderate Republicans didn’t cheat and destroy the Constitution so that their deeply incompetent leader could remain in power, will not vote for moderate Republicans while they are in the thrall of the Trump cult. And the moderate Republicans will not trust the Trumpists for betraying the Constitution.

The next few months should be deeply entertaining.

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About Hue White

Former BBS operator; software engineer; cat lackey.

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