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January 2 - January 11, 2021
How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.
“Family values” was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, “family values” was useful in attacking and defining Democrats.
Being against “out-of-control federal spending,” a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. It just makes the members of the Republican Church feel closer to their political God.
When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.
As it was in Mao’s China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today’s Republican Party to appear well educated.
Parties and elected officials don’t suddenly wake up one day and decide to betray avowed principles. It’s a gradual process of surrendering little bits of your soul and values while convincing yourself it is for a greater good.
The American political process with its deep dependence on the need to raise money is a system designed not for the best governance but for the selection of the person who can put up with being humiliated the longest.
What does a center-right party in America stand for? Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution. Now? Can anyone honestly define what the Republican Party stands for beyond “owning the libs”?