Professor Richardson’s daily post last night is well worth a full read. But for me, the important part wasn’t so much the sordid details of Republican members’ malfeasance, alleged or admitted, as the sociological backlash of the Gingrichian focus on win, win, win that came to the fore.
Look: The effects that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) had, and perhaps still has, on the culture of the GOP is undisputed, constituting an inflection point, if not a change in direction, of the GOP from a party that tried to exercise responsible governance, to a party that bent every effort to winning elections – and if that meant scanting on good governance or abandoning allegiances to democracy, that was a valid approach, too, for them.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s worth remembering two points:
- Good government policy is often an obscure business. For example, if high government debt is a concern, doesn’t it make sense for the government to print itself out of trouble? At one time, this was common sense, here and abroad, but now we know that this can and often does result in ruinous inflation. The human organism’s desire for quick fixes is often at odds with what turns out to be wise government policy. Additionally, even though this is the age of Turbo-Charged Communications, the fact of the matter is that information concerning what’s really going on in the major political parties is occulted, and often deliberately.
- Government policy, at its most effective, is tuned to reality. The electorate, in most nations including the United States, often has its perception of reality refracted through the prism of religion. There’s enough religions out there to know that most, or, if my reader is an atheist, all religions are false. This deduction, in fact, is the basis for many bloody conflicts. This electorate’s prism, or prisms, means that expectations of the proxies of good government will diverge from reality and each other, and sometimes this divergence is quite marked. Playing to these divergences, or biases, is not good governance, but it will please that portion of the electorate to which they’re tuned, and thus attracting their votes.
There is a sense of what are the rules of politics among most Americans, often listed piecemeal and in reaction to perceived breaches of those rules. For example, depriving voters of the chance to vote through supposedly innocuous rule changes breaches those rules. Thus the attempts to divert attention from such changes when legislatures bring such rules to the fore.
The Democrats allege that many breaches of this sort have occurred since the days of Gingrich. Some have become the subject of lawsuits, such as gerrymandering cases (and one case sponsored by Republicans involving Maryland has accused Democrats of the same malfeasance), while others are the focus of intense legislative battles.
But the real point here is that those Republicans who’ve retained a sense of ethics, of morality, when it comes to politics, have been leaving the Republican Party over the years in reaction to these tactics, when they’re not being forcibly ejected via the RINO mechanism. In point of fact, the Republican Party has been approaching a pure form of what is best described as corruption. The missive from Professor Richardson reads like a condemnation sheet: Gaetz endangered by the confessions of Greenberg; hints from Cheney that McCarthy may have things to hide; a random claim from the mendacious Trump that a Maricopa elections database has been deleted, immediately refuted by Republicans in Maricopa; McConnell reprising the lessons of Gingrich, putting Party before Country; and then there’s the national embarrassment of Rep Greene, Rep Clyde, dah di dah di dah.
The beat goes on, and it’s all bad.
With Cheney removed from the House leadership, the last of the Republicans with a shred of ethics may be gone, and so now we can wait to see if the Republican Party explodes from sheer built-up bile and mendacity as they raise their hands once more to grasp the levers of power, or if they actually manage to achieve their goal and inflict upon America a veritable tidal wave of frenzied ideological & theological office holders, who’ll prove their unsuitability for office through incompetence, mendacity, criminality, and ephemerality (think: half-term Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK)).
It’ll be like those 100 year floods meteorologists like to use as adjectives.
That’s how Professor Richardson, in conjunction with 25+ years of watching politics, leaves me feeling today. The Republicans have only their ideological & theological positions to offer, and they are repugnant. They offer no reason for me to trust them, to think they are competent, to consider them worthy of elective office.
This is a dangerous situation for a big country like the United States.
