Seems to me that good-faith conservatives and “Never Trumpers” have two primary choices in the wake of one of the most dismaying fortnights in modern American political history. They can stand taller in opposition to Donald Trump and try to force from the Republican Party the anti-democratic, anti-science, conspiracy theorists who have spent the past five weeks trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Or they can abandon what’s left of the GOP to the delusionists and the ignorant and the ill-meaning and create a legitimate third party that gives earnest, honest Republicans another viable option at the ballot box in 2022 and beyond.
What anti-Trump Republicans can no longer do in the wake of the party’s chilling embrace of Trump’s attempted coup is to pretend that their party can exist, “half free and half slave”, with its future held captive by a vengeful, unhinged ex-president and his many enablers and propagandists. If the events of the past five weeks have shown the reality-based world anything, it is that the Republican Party itself has been corrupted by Trumpism to the point where it endangers American democracy itself. The postelection period also has made clear that the Trumpists will never peacefully coexist with who’s left of reality-based Republicans.
You can have intra-party disputes over immigration reform and the minimum wage, health care and criminal justice, foreign policy and the Second Amendment. The Democrats have those fights all the time (indeed, they are having one now over Biden nominees). But you cannot have an intra-party dispute over democracy itself, over whether the certified loser of a presidential election should foment civil unrest by promoting debunked conspiracy theories about nonexistent voter fraud. Whatever remains of the democratic wing of the Republican Party is in an existential fight with the ascendant authoritarian wing of the Republican Party.
In his smart piece earlier this month about the key role Never Trumpers and other Republicans played in helping to defeat Trump’s reelection bid, the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne also pondered the point about the future of the party but undersold the danger of its anti-democratic elements. “Some of the anti-Trump conservatives never lost their old faith and were simply repelled by Trump’s odiousness,” Dionne wrote. “For them, there is no temptation to join the other side. They are unlikely to give much support to Biden and will go off in search of a more conventional Republican to champion in 2024.”
No comments:
Post a Comment