Republican Failure Depends on Giving Up On Offering Ideas, Vision, and Hope

 In his June 10th letter, a certain letter writer has offered us an intriguing piece of political rhetoric, which, on a substantive level fails on several accounts, some of which I take up here.

 Since I have previously written on the Black Lives Matter movement in the Gazette, I will not waste ink in challenging his unsupported claim that this social movement is a “home-grown terrorist organization.” His critique of Antifa (I am anti-fascist, too) is also overblown. The following web resource provides a reasonably balanced perspective on Antifa, which is a loosely organized movement designed to confront the rabid right that in its US guise is rooted in a politics of white supremacy.  (https://luxediteur.com/antifa-history-and-politics-explained/) Here is a relevant passage:

 “Antifa grows out of a larger revolutionary politics that aspires toward creating a better world, but the primary motivation is to stop racists from organizing; doing that can take many forms…. The vast majority of what they do does not entail any physical confrontation.”

 The letter writer’s critique of AOC as allied to terrorists is another misguided right-wing trope. Her primary focus is advocating for what she calls the Green New Deal in linking economic development to mastering the environmental crisis over the global impact of climate warming. President Biden, in turn, connects his proposed infrastructure program to equipping the US to meet the environmental challenges the nation faces. This progressive enhancement process is built upon an economic and social platform that would enable more people to make a livable wage, while addressing long-standing racial and economic disparities, so that justice, concretely realized, may prevail as a substantial national value. These goals represent the defining vision of the Biden administration, which will require substantial political capital to implement.  Given the problems this nation will face in the upcoming decades, I view the Democratic vision for governance, symbolically embedded in Biden’s rhetoric and actions, as a thoroughly reasonable attempt to meet the challenges of our times in the domestic and international sphere.  On this, he is more tempered than AOC who, nonetheless has made an important contribution to political discourse within the Democratic party.  Disagree with this, if you like, but offer something at least resembling a forward-looking alternative. 

 In seeking a reasonable way forward in meeting important national goals, I stressed the importance of critical dialogue over the issues that matter between the Democratic party and the responsible (non-Trump) segment of the Republican party. For this group of Republicans, both within and outside of government, to take on such a task, they will need to radically transform the Trump obsessed wing of the GOP—no easy feat.  In the meantime, the Democratic party will need to establish a solid political base at both state and national levels to maintain the required political capital to sustain its vital power in the public square. However improbable such a transformation of this nation’s politics may seem, without some movement in this direction for both parties, this nation will find itself in a most precarious situation for the foreseeable future.

 His depiction of those Republicans who refused to kowtow to Trump’s bullying as RINOs is an ignorant misrepresentation of a significant portion of the GOP.  The writer's mischaracterization of them as simply, “good little Republicans…who dutifully knuckle under whenever their Democratic opponents raise their voices” is fundamentally flawed as both a historical point of reference and in terms of current political analysis in assessing how Republicans have responded in real time to any actual set of issues that have been before them. On this view, presidents Eisenhower, Ford, and G.H. Bush must all be RINO’s. The same goes for the current crop of Republican governors of MA, VT, Maryland, and points elsewhere, as well as Senators Collins, Romney, Murkowski and the four additional senators who voted to impeach Trump in February. It has been similarly so for those in congress, past and present, who have sought to find points of possible convergence with Democrats, at least on some issues. The list of Republicans outside of government who have repudiated Trump and are seeking bipartisan approaches to long term national problem solving is too long to catalogue here.

 I suggest that there is a RINO in the Republican party. His name is Donald Trump, a man with few values, other than aggrandizing his own narrow self. Recall his previous pro-choice stance, his support of both Clintons and various Democratic politicians within New York as well as throughout the nation. On the 2016 primary debate stage, he was the least of the 16 candidates who professed consistent Republican beliefs. The 2020 Republican platform did not include policy statements but averred that they were simply the party of Trump. If this is what the Republican party has degenerated into, Trump, the smiling Cheshire Cat, has pulled a fast one on the GOP—no values, no position, but support of Trump. How self-satisfied the former narcissist-in-chief must be.

 

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