Thursday, September 08, 2022

This Again?

Some of us are old enough to remember Pat Buchanan and the speech Molly Ivins memorialized as sounding better in the original German. That was after the GOP had embraced the racist Jerry Falwell, and after Ronnie Reagan had announced his first run for the White House in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and after Ronnie ran pledging to spare us all from "Welfare Queens," by which he meant black women with a mythical horde of children borne simply to get a bigger welfare check, which they picked up in Cadillacs because welfare life was so easy. It was also after all the Dixiecrats had abandoned the Democrats for the GOP (as LBJ predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act). And there was the prominent House member whose name escapes me (and my Google-fu is too weak), who was shown to have close connections to the racist Conservative Citizens Council (that's the right name if memory serves), who was never denounced by the GOP for his racist associations. Yeah, Buchanan came in the middle of the GOP embrace of all things now denounced as "Trumpian."

As he put it, "Trump never found a way to escape the antisocial demons that haunt him. But here’s what turned a personal tragedy into a national calamity: He imprinted his moral pathologies, his will-to-power ethic, on the Republican Party."

Pointing out that the Republican Party he joined stood for law and order and moral values, the columnist claimed the current iteration has thrown it away because of their "... fealty to Trump despite his ceaseless lying and dehumanizing rhetoric, his misogyny and appeals to racism, his bullying and conspiracy theories."

I can't help but notice that the "Great Upset" here is that Trump's racism is now blatant in the party: 

And yet the "upset" is about what's being done to white people like Peter Wehner.

Trump didn't do anything except bring the GOP to its apotheosis.  What does Wehner think the Tea Party was, anyway?  A bunch of Bill Buckley patriots who wanted to lower the taxes on their trust funds?  Wehner complains Trump has led the GOP to commit "moral transgressions."  None of those apparently involve how we treat the poor, or how we (the whites with the power) treat non-whites will far less power. And his comments come as the GOP is about to face a reckoning, a nationwide, grass-roots rejection of the extremist party and politics the GOP has become and espoused.  So at bottom Wehner concern seems to be his loss of power, not really any concern with Trump's "pathologies" as they relate to women (abortion/healthcare), the poor (healthcare, housing, jobs), racism, or his totalitarian tendencies which, while they get great attention on Twitter (hint: the entire country is not on Twitter) and among the glitterati, really aren't getting any traction in the polling place or in the courtrooms (Judge Cannon is the exception that proves the rule, and even her ruling will not prompt the revolution every perfervid devotee of violence thinks their use of deadly force will spark.  Her little attempt to save Trump from prosecution will be snuffed out like a candle and forgotten in six months time.)

The GOP was the party of morality anyway?  What, because W. added an adjective to "conservatism," and then showed his compassion by flying over New Orleans after Katrina?  He was the most incompetent administrator we've had in that office since Herbert Hoover, until Trump came along.  Trump didn't bring anything new to the party; he just brought more of it, which is what the party now clamors for.

Do you forget so soon that Newt Gingrich proposed making kids in public schools work as janitors because they need to earn their education?
How far is that from this?  MTG can't be bothered to help, but she can rejoice at children laboring, while she looks on semi-benevolently.

Fortunately, the rest of the country doesn't clamor for this, or for Trump.  And that's what has Peter Wehner the most concerned; that the GOP goes the way of the Whigs.

It could happen.  The natural state of American politics, after all, is to have the Democratic party; and some party providing the loyal opposition.  It just may not be the GOP is that party for much longer.

So it goes.
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