Erick Erickson is appalled at the behavior of the Republican leadership:
There was a time in Western Civilization when if the party screwed up as badly as the GOP screwed up last Tuesday, the people in charge would resign out of shame.
They have no sense of shame anymore. The grift is too strong.
Tom Emmers, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, thinks he deserves a promotion to House Republican Whip. In what world does the man deserve that after the GOP took a red wave and turned it into a bloodbath by suicide?
Kevin McCarthy wants to be Speaker. The man thought the GOP would get up to sixty seats.
And on top of it all, Ronna McDaniel wants to be RNC Chair again. What the actual hell is up with that?
But Erickson, so far as I can make out, seems to think this was a matter of tactics. It’s not; it’s a matter of a toxic culture within the Republican Party, where certain tenets, such as 2nd Amendment Rights are absolute, regulation and taxes are an unremitting evil which are used to hold down the little guy, abortion is outright evil (baby-killing in Erickson’s terms), and experience and competency in the area of governance, if not deeply suspicious, is of secondary or tertiary importance.
Being capable of the gun-rights polka, the anti-taxation jig, the anti-abortion waltz are the primary requirements of a Republican candidate, and after that it becomes a matter of proving just how extreme you can be, as Governor Stitt (R-OK) demonstrated as he tried to drag Oklahoma into theocracy over the last few years. The lack of interest in experience leads to candidate with, well, no experience, and it’s that lack of experience which leads candidates to shoot their mouths off irresponsibly.
That toxic team culture means that it’s going to be hell to reform the GOP, and Erickson does recognize the difficulty:
In Georgia, the Governor of Georgia has decided to gut the state GOP. Kemp is setting up a leadership PAC that will siphon off most of the GOP donors from the Georgia GOP. The Chairman of that state’s party found primary opponents for Kemp and several other statewide officials. The Chairman won’t resign, so the state Republican elected leader will destroy the party, and deservedly so. It must be burned down to save it.
But if Governor Kemp (R-GA), himself a shady character, as we may deduce from his failure to recuse (or resign!) when he was Secretary of State and running for Governor, doesn’t understand that reformation includes returning experience to primacy, and enabling dissent and discussion around what are now religious tenets, his accomplishment will be fleeting.
And the only reason the Republicans will continue to be competitive is a Democratic Party that has equal trouble resolving its mistakes, primarily its autocratic streak.
