I see that the conservatives – if that’s what they are – have mostly decided to shut their eyes and sing la-la-la loudly. CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) leads the way:
Top Republicans are split on President Trump’s first post-presidential appearance at a key meeting of conservatives in Florida this week.
“I don’t believe he should be playing a role in the future of the party,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney told reporters Wednesday.
Trump is slated to speak at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, also known as CPAC, which is meeting in Orlando between Thursday and Sunday.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican and Trump ally, did not hesitate when a reporter asked whether Trump should be speaking at CPAC.“Yes, he should,” McCarthy said. [Washington Examiner]
Cheney is well known to be a far-right Republican, so her dissent is at least refreshing. But between GOP Members of Congress signing on to the Stop The Steal campaign, as noted by their objecting to the the counting of the ballots in the Electoral College (that would be 147 of them) on January 6th, 2021, and the subsequent refusal of House Members to vote for impeachment of President Trump, and Senate Members to vote for conviction of President Trump, for the Insurrection which occurred on the same date, with only a few shining examples, such as Cheney, counting as exemptions to the general moral depravity of the Republican Party, it’s safe to say the Republicans refuse to take the public business of the Republic seriously.
Take, for example, Erick Erickson, a far-right pundit who has punctuated incidents of sanity, but today seems to have lost it in his eternal quest for moral equivalence:
The bulk of the American people are not politically engaged like you and me. What they see, are a bunch of jackasses on one side and a lot of conservatives who have concluded they too must behave like jackasses. I suggest conservatives not act like jackasses and not conclude nice guys lose. In fact, if you look at November and get past they [sic] mythology of the stolen election, it was the jackasses who lost. The voters rejected Donald Trump and wide range of Democrats who supported the insane policies of the left most Americans find contemptible.
Does Erickson mention the Insurrection even once?
No.
It doesn’t figure into his political calculations. It doesn’t figure into his moral calculations.
It’s a refusal to engage with the fundamental authoritarian tendencies of the right that have run out of control at the behest of the man-child and former President.
Erickson cannot admit that Trump is the product of the current toxic conservative movement, because his very presence, profoundly illegal and immoral conduct, condemns Erickson’s fantasy that the conservatives have some sort of moral supremacy over the Left.
And here’s the real problem for Erickson: the top down nature of the far-right makes it very difficult to get rid of the bad ideas or even the rot. This is self-evident.
The Left is rather less vulnerable to such inflexibility. Oh, sure, they can be stubborn about an idea – but they do seem to learn from failure. Erickson is complaining about this:
Seth Brenzel is a gay, white dad to a biracial child. A parental advisory council, or PAC, unanimously voted to add Brenzel, but the San Francisco School Board — the one that voted against Washington and Lincoln remaining on schools — rejected him for a lack of diversity. …
”He lives in San Francisco with his husband and their young daughter. If approved, Brenzel would have been the only man on the council. According to an online transcript, when prompted a representative of the PAC said, ‘The PAC can have up to 15 regular members and three alternates. Currently, we have 10 regular members and no alternates.’ Currently, the parent advisory council has two African American parents, one Asian American parent, three Latinx parents. One Pacific Islander parent and three White parents. Currently, all of those are women.”
For Erickson, this is a moment of condemnation.
For me, it’s a moment of experimentation. If the results are superior, then Erickson is proven wrong. It it doesn’t, then the Democrats, if not the far Left, will retreat and rethink. That flexibility is what marks the Democrats as probable winners over the next decade. The mid-terms in 2022 will be fascinating as the Democrats pound on all Republican incumbents who refused to vote for impeachment or conviction.
And this is what really made me laugh about Erickson, even as it marks his delusional approach to politics:
Loving your neighbor goes a long way, laughing at the left’s insanity gets us further, and not being a jackass gets us a few steps further with people who vote but are not committed partisans. I think the sooner the right realizes happy warriors win, the sooner we get out of the wilderness and back into power.
I’m sorry, but some dude not being selected for a school board position just doesn’t compete with images of an Insurrection. Erickson may be so buried in conservative dogma that he can’t see that, but I think a lot of independents will hesitate before ever voting for a Republican spouting extremist rhetoric again. Or even just a Republican. Especially in the absence of a sincere Republican Reformation. I have to wonder if Erickson would even agree that a bit of self-inspection is necessary for the Republicans – nevermind their tolerance for rampant lying and political cannibalism we’ve seen over the last five years.
Elections have consequences, and sometimes they are not what are expected.
