Another Lifelong Republican Leaves the Party
Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2018 9:26 am
Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College:
You'll notice from these excerpts that Nichols hasn't become a tree-hugging liberal overnight and is plenty critical of a number of Democrats. And I will save Flock the trouble of actually engaging his mind by providing his reply in advance: "What do I care what Tom Nichols thinks."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... source=twbSmall things sometimes matter, and [Susan] Collins is among the smallest of things in the political world. And yet, she helped me finally to accept what I had been denying. Her speech on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh convinced me that the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power, and not even for ends I would otherwise applaud or even support.
It was Collins, however, who made me realize that there would be no moderates to lead conservatives out of the rubble of the Trump era. Senator Jeff Flake is retiring and took a pass, and with all due respect to Senator Lisa Murkowski—who at least admitted that her “no” vote on cloture meant “no” rather than drag out the drama—she will not be the focus of a rejuvenated party.
As an aside, let me say that I have no love for the Democratic Party, which is torn between totalitarian instincts on one side and complete political malpractice on the other. As a newly minted independent, I will vote for Democrats and Republicans I think are decent and well-meaning people; if I move back home to Massachusetts, I could cast a ballot for Republican Governor Charlie Baker and Democratic Representative Joe Kennedy and not think twice about it.
But during the Kavanaugh dumpster fire, the performance of the Democratic Party—with some honorable exceptions like Senators Chris Coons, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Amy Klobuchar—was execrable. The Republicans, however, have now eclipsed the Democrats as a threat to the rule of law and to the constitutional norms of American society. They have become all about winning. Winning means not losing, and so instead of acting like a co-equal branch of government responsible for advice and consent, congressional Republicans now act like a parliamentary party facing the constant threat of a vote of no-confidence.
That it is necessary to place limitations, including self-limitations, on the exercise of power is—or was—a core belief among conservatives. No longer. Raw power, wielded so deftly by Senator Mitch McConnell, is exercised for its own sake, and by that I mean for the sake of fleecing gullible voters on hot-button social issues so that Republicans may stay in power. Politics is about the exercise of power. But the new Trumpist GOP is not exercising power in the pursuit of anything resembling principle, and certainly not for conservative or Republican principles.
A robust foreign policy? Not only have Republicans abandoned their claim to being the national-security party, they have managed to convince the party faithful that Russia—an avowed enemy that directly attacked our political institutions—is less of a threat than their neighbors who might be voting for Democrats. Respect for law enforcement? The GOP is backing Trump in attacks on the FBI and the entire intelligence community as Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the web of lies, financial arrangements, and Russian entanglements known collectively as the Trump campaign.
And most important, on the rule of law, congressional Republicans have utterly collapsed. They have sold their souls, purely at Trump’s behest, living in fear of the dreaded primary challenges that would take them away from the Forbidden City and send them back home to the provinces. Yes, an anti-constitutional senator like Hirono is unnerving, but she’s a piker next to her Republican colleagues, who have completely reversed themselves on everything from the limits of executive power to the independence of the judiciary, all to serve their leader in a way that would make the most devoted cult follower of Kim Jong Un blush.
But whatever my concerns about liberals, the true authoritarian muscle is now being flexed by the GOP, in a kind of buzzy, steroidal McCarthyism that lacks even anti-communism as a central organizing principle. The Republican Party, which controls all three branches of government and yet is addicted to whining about its own victimhood, is now the party of situational ethics and moral relativism in the name of winning at all costs. So, I’m out. The Trumpers and the hucksters and the consultants and the hangers-on, like a colony of bees who exist only to sting and die, have swarmed together in a dangerous but suicidal cloud, and when that mindless hive finally extinguishes itself in a blaze of venom, there will be nothing left.
I think Trump has turned the Republican project that was conceptualized during the Reagan era as positive. Now it's we no longer have things to achieve. Here are the people I'm going to punish and get even with. Republicans don't like to talk about this, I think, but some of that radicalization happened after eight years of Barack Obama. Some of this is racial resentment. It's the sense that the information age has produced a gap between people with education and people who can manage in this 21st century economy and people who can't.
I think it's a combination of things. There was always a latent racial tension. There was always a latent class tension and a difficulty of dealing with, again, the elites, the intellectuals and so on. Trump really took that and ran and said everybody is against you. This is one of the reasons -- one thing that I think made Republicans and conservatives different from liberals in the '70s and '80s, we were the party of optimism. We didn't think of ourselves as victims. Now we are the party of eternal victimhood. Trump supporters are constantly complaining about how they're looked down upon, and they're forgotten, and nobody loves them enough. And I find that just amazing from people who control all the branches of government.
You'll notice from these excerpts that Nichols hasn't become a tree-hugging liberal overnight and is plenty critical of a number of Democrats. And I will save Flock the trouble of actually engaging his mind by providing his reply in advance: "What do I care what Tom Nichols thinks."