But perhaps I am. For years I’ve been saying the RINO effect would eventually leave the Republican Party with three members – and two would be on probation. Well, the Party continues to shrink, as recent Gallup polling shows, but the ideological direction appears to be taking a turn – left, right, down, up, take your pick – as Daily Kos‘ Kerry Eleveld reports:
“What they’re going to open the door to is a situation where nobody’s Trumpy enough,” said former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, who lost her suburban Virginia seat in 2018 in the blue wave of anti-Trump sentiment that swept the nation. “It’s a problem for everybody.”
What I should have recognized is that there’s a limit to how far right one can go. It’s just an ideological certainty. But now it’s Trumpism that’s the goal, and that necessitates a change in ideological direction because there’s a fundamental difference between allegiance to principles and allegiance to personality.
Indeed, the latter is a lot like an absolute monarchy. The kind for which we held a Revolution, and it wasn’t a celebratory Revolution.
Trumpism is actually rather ill-defined, being characterized by a xenophobia – except when Trump likes your autocratic leader – and a provincialism, except when Trump thinks he can make money – and an allegiance to the latest in evangelical theology, such as an emphasis on prophecy – no apologies to those readers offended by the statement – and an even more important emphasis on Biblical verses involving Cyrus, a Persian king who accidentally delivered the Christians from Babylon, and functions as a Get Out Of Jail Free card for sanctifying evil.
So the new membership requirement of the GOP is a certain flexibility, and a concurrent willingness to accept that occasionally their beloved Leader will spit on them and prefer someone else, based on the treatment of former Rep Roby (R-AL). This will become a smaller and smaller segment of the electorate, as it’ll be emotionally taxing to live in that sort of atmosphere – and it leads to actions by the leaders that are absolutely at odds with reality, such as this dude, who has puzzled his own GOP colleague.
Right at the moment I’m foreseeing that in the next five years the Republican Party shrinking into irrelevance as people such as Amanda Chase (R-VA) destroy it from within. The noteworthy part will be the puzzlement of those involved. They’ll cry out that they had been Godly, that God had spoken to them, that they had done the right things.
And everyone else was evil.
And thus we’ll see the mistake of dragging dubious divinities into the project of wise governance.
The trick will be for the American electorate to see it for what it is, and to not permit single issue voters, the unsung weapon of the GOP – think gun control and abortion – to derail the country from selecting wise governance.
