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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