The Grand Old Meltdown

What happens when a party gives up on ideas?

Earlier this month, while speaking via Zoom to a promising group of politically inclined high school students, I was met with an abrupt line of inquiry. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”

You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable. Identifying this intellectual vacuum is easy enough. Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.

Bumbling through a homily about the “culture wars,” a horribly overused cliché, I felt exposed. Despite spending more than a decade studying the Republican Party, embedding myself both with its generals and its foot soldiers, reporting on the right as closely as anyone, I did not have a good answer to the student’s question. Vexed, I began to wonder who might. Not an elected official; that would result in a rhetorical exercise devoid of introspection. Not a Never Trumper; they would have as much reason to answer disingenuously as the most fervent MAGA follower. Continue reading.

Conservative writer details how Trump’s ‘cult of personality’ is revealing its ‘grotesque selfishness’

AlterNet logoConservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has been consistently critical of President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis. This week in her column, the Never Trumper asserts that Trump and his loyalists in the Republican Party will gladly encourage others to put themselves at risk during the pandemic but won’t take such risks themselves.

“This is the natural consequence of a cult of personality in which the leader’s ego and survival are paramount,” she writes in her column titled: “The party of grotesque selfishness.”

“Both ‘Fox & Friends’ host Brian Kilmeade and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos say life is full of risks; so, send your kids back to school no matter what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say,” Rubin observes. “President Trump has been jetting around, greeting visitors and talking to his supporters — albeit fewer than planned — without wearing a mask in public until Saturday. His cult naturally adopted his contempt for this basic health measure. It was only when the pandemic socked red states that many Republican officials became terribly dismayed that ‘some people’ had politicized masks.” Continue reading.