Republican Party on the brink
Once-proud GOP, having fully embraced the fringe, may be on borrowed time
As former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is out here comparing the recent death of political prisoner and opposition leader Alexei Navalny to the plight of Trump — maligned and wrongly accused by the corrupt and hypocritical Democrats — I can’t help but marvel at the drain-circling downward spiral the Grand Old Party has taken the last couple decades and continues to take down the road to complete irrelevancy.
Tune into Fox News on any given day or read posts like this from Gingrich, and one can find endless examples of politicians and pundits intentionally conflating their own party’s behavior with that of the other side because just saying words in public is what counts for an argument these days. For instance, when Gingrich says that “the hypocrisy and corruption of the left is astonishing,” the reality is exactly the other way around.
In the party’s desperation to impeach President Joe Biden by connecting him to a bribery scheme between Ukrainian energy company Burisma and Biden’s son, Hunter, or to connect Joe Biden and administration officials to any wrongdoing anywhere at anytime, the GOP has showed its hand and has wasted public resources chasing ghosts. The Burisma case appears to be falling apart, not that it was very strong to begin with, and the list of other potential offenses Republicans have fashioned out of the thin air as justifications to hold impeachment hearings is comical. They include mishandling or malfeasance related to immigration at the Mexican-American border, classified documents, the president’s energy policy, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Burisma allegations and more.
All of this time-wasting and taxpayer money-wasting effort because our juvenile former president had sour grapes about losing the election. According to ABC News:
Before (emphasis mine) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy decided to move forward with an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump openly pushed Republicans to do more, claiming his political rival is a "crook," which the White House denies as baseless.
Later in this article, Trump essentially admits that the GOP was compelled to go after Biden because “they did it to me,” referencing his two impeachments:
… and had they not done it to me, I think, and nobody officially said this … perhaps you wouldn’t have it being done to them. It’s a shame … that’s human nature.”
Anthony Scaramucci, former Trump communications director, has called the Biden impeachment inquiry “specious” and said he thought it had “damaged our party,” while even Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), who actually voted to move forward with the inquiry, had seemingly grown weary of the whole thing, citing a lack of evidence:
The process has been abused. It’s meant to take out mentally deficient folks, somebody who’s lost their mind while they’re in office, or somebody who’s a (former Rep. George) Santos, like where they’ve committed in crimes while they’re in office.
The timeframe for the Burisma allegations were during the years when Biden was vice president, not president, so the main point of contention related to the inquiry was dead in the water from the start. At the core, this represents an abuse of power by House Republicans, who, in lieu of spending their time governing, have taken up this cause, apparently at the bidding of their corrupt ring leader, as some kind of revenge plot against the Democrats for his own impeachments, which actually did have supporting evidence.
As a brief review, in the first impeachment, as The New York Times reported, no one even contended the fact that Trump asked the Ukrainian president to “do us a favor” and dig up some dirt on Trump’s election rival, Biden. The Republican-controlled Senate later acquitted Trump. In the second impeachment related to the Capitol riot and vote tampering, America saw much of it play out on television and in social media.
That Trump would attempt to compel the Republican Party leadership to engage in an investigation against his political nemesis isn’t terribly surprising. The current version of Trump is just the culmination of what we’ve always known him to be, displaying classic traits of a sociopathic leader: charismatic, megalomaniacal, ethically and morally compromised, lacking compassion, ruthless. If anything, it’s pretty lazy on Trump’s part. Why come up with some cogent ideas to improve the nation when you can just have the party destroy Biden and do your work for you, not that Trump would have or could have come up with any good ideas on his own; the man is a hollowed out shell of a person, devoid of integrity and devoid of anything beyond that which might increase of his own power.
The truly astonishing thing in all this, to come back around to Gingrich’s statement — since he was so astonished by the hypocrisy and corruption of the left — is that the GOP went along with Trump’s scheme, that the party is filled with people, despite the individualistic, big-feeling, no-one-tells-us-what-to-do tenor behind much of their rhetoric, who just fall in line. They’re dogs on a leash. The astonishing thing is that the party isn’t utterly ashamed to put this diabolical figurehead at the top of its leadership as the best and brightest candidate it has to offer — twice impeached on solid grounds with an open contempt for decorum, the rule of law and order and democracy itself — and that, after one embarrassing thing after another, the party hasn’t run him off in disgrace, says more about people inside the party than Trump. They are as hollow as he is, but worse. He actually knows full well what he’s doing.
This party isn’t even recognizable from when Gingrich was speaker of the house. Even though he has been in politics long enough to have witnessed the complete downward spiral, he too seems to have lost his center, as has the party itself. (To be fair, Gingrich is his own test case, and may have as much to do as anyone with the corruption of American politics in general, but the symptoms outlined here that are killing the Republican Party go well beyond Gingrich being mean to the Democrats.)
For years in op-ed columns, I called for the Republican Party to return to a more moderate political ideology because I knew that was the only sustainable path forward for a once proud party. I had seen the rise of the Tea Party. I had witnessed the increasing fanaticism of the conservative body politic. The right-wing radio landscape went completely unhinged when Barack Obama became president, and the populace in the heartland turned increasingly radical, and so all of this has been brewing at least since the mid-2000s. People like Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz would have been laughed out of the Republican Party of the 1980s and 90s, but here they are, influential “leaders” made possible by their predecessors, Sarah Palin and cartoon characters Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher.
In addition to being largely taken over by a lot of fanatics, who, in tandem, just reflect an increasingly fanatical base of rural Republican voters, the party is also becoming — has already become — irrelevant socially. Even though evangelicals still represent a strong voting bloc in America, perhaps even a growing demographic, according to Pew, the party, unless it goes through some sweeping reforms, and soon, is on the way out. More Americans support LGBTQ rights. Two-thirds of those polled believe immigration is a positive. A majority support women’s rights to have an abortion and disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which the Republican Party worked tirelessly to make happen, with a sizable assist from Trump himself. And a majority support the Equal Rights Amendment to prohibit discrimination based on sex, even though the Republican-controlled Senate blocked it last year.
Lest readers think that I am just a hack for the left and will malign anything and everything having to do with the Republican Party, the GOP was once composed of intelligent people who understood that the way to move forward in politics and government was through cooperation and compromise. This version of the party is nearly dead. The party still contains a few noteworthy moderate people with brains and integrity among their ranks — Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and a handful of others — but their numbers have drastically dwindled over the years. A Washington-based group, Moderate Republicans, exists with the aim “to rebalance the Republican Party to better reflect the demographics of mainstream America,” and I would suggest that, for any Republicans reading this, to support causes such as this if you would like to see the party continue in any kind of valuable, recognizable form in the future.
Left to its own devices and left to the radicals, that future looks dim. Beginning with the Moral Majority, which infiltrated the party with more religious fervor than it had seen previously, and again with the fanatics of the Tea Party and again with the current band of no-nothing misfits, the GOP has become completely hollow and adrift. For now, as rural America continues to unquestionably and gullibly consume its outworn messages about tradition and its failed economic theories, it may indeed limp on in some form for decades to come, but without reform, remediation and a turn toward the center, the die is already cast for this party. The America it wants to create is a pipe dream; the America it pines for is lost to history.