Republicans, You Have No One to Blame But Yourselves
For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created.
— Victor Frankenstein
We are witnessing the crumbling of an American political party at the hands of a egomaniacal, self-deluded carnival barker. Substance and thoughtfulness have relinquished all territory to bombastic sound bites lathered in infantile manifestos and fear mongering. Callowness is considered deft and incompetence is now virtue. This, frankly should surprise no one. Donald J. Trump didn’t get here all by himself. He was enabled by the very individuals and institutions now lamenting his success. They’ve been carefully and intentionally nurturing the essence of Don Trump for years — systematically building the ecosystem where he could fester and metastasize into the orangish monster who struts before you today.
And now he is going to raze their village and eat all their friends.
Years ago I would have celebrated this chain of events out of pure partisan delight. Years before that, I would have celebrated the potential for Trump’s rise to make way for a complete dismantling of the two-party system (highly unlikely). But now, I’m just bummed out at the state of American democracy.
Democrats and progressives everywhere should share in the anguish with me. And let’s not pretend like we haven’t tried to replicate the very same tactics that got the GOP into this mess. We just weren’t as good at it.
Before bowing out of the presidential contest, Senator Lindsey Graham could often be found bemoaning the damage Donald Trump was leveling on the Republican brand. Graham called Trump “crazy” and “a huckster billionaire whose political ideas are gibberish.” Graham is still at it. Just this week, prior to Trump’s crushing primary victory tonight in Lindsay Graham’s home state of South Carolina, he called Trump a “kooky” person.
Lindsay Graham is right. But Lindsey Graham, and everyone who shares his view, have many allies, and even themselves, that they can thank for the gaudy Trump tower that is now enshrined as the GOP standard-bearer. Senator Graham should first thank his best friend — the man who helped inspire legions within the American electorate to believe that the insipid mind of Sarah Palin should sit one heartbeat away from the presidency.
Lindsay Graham can thank John McCain for Donald Trump. He’s the king maker of reality show politics. The maverick of this mayhem.
Lindsay Graham can thank all party leaders, politicians, consultants, and strategists who wrapped their arms around, and bolstered, the de facto propaganda arm of the Republican party. Giving legitimacy to hyperbolic blowhards at Fox News and political pornographers like Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh.
Lindsay Graham can thank every conservative politician who capitulates to their inflated ego and treats election years as a zero-sum game — maximizing short-term gains at the cost of any long term influence over the direction of this country.
Lindsay Graham can thank the candidates before him who cowered in the face of the Donald and relegated themselves to kissing his ring rather than banishing him to Twitter rants and reality show melodrama. Conspiratorial birther theories be damned. There was an election to win…or not.
Lindsay Graham can thank the right-wing-propaganda-media-industrial complex and fellow candidates like Mike Huckabee, who blazed the trail on turning failed presidential campaigns rooted in absurd rhetorical cluster bombs into lucrative Fox News TV deals. It seems that the pews, vacant and bled dry, are easily replaced by a congregation strapped into their Lay-Z-Boy recliners with a TV remote holstered to their hips.
When you cultivate a rabid and vast voter base through divisiveness, anger, hatred, and fear, don’t act surprised when that base rallies around the candidate who exploits those crude emotions most effectively.
You belittled any definition of conservatism that didn’t jive with the faux machoism of saber-rattling or acknowledge any need for nuance. You planted your flag (and your head) in the false sands of ideological certitude, turning deeply complex notions of freedom and liberty into cheap beaded necklaces for tossing out to zealots in the crowd drunk on jingoism, pulling up their shirts and flashing American flags.
David Brooks ruminated on your repudiation of a conservatism that “stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible.” He goes on;
Politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions. It involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.
But this new Republican faction regards the messy business of politics as soiled and impure. Compromise is corruption. Inconvenient facts are ignored. Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens. Political identity became a sort of ethnic identity, and any compromise was regarded as a blood betrayal.
This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence.
The consequences have come full circle tonight. As Trump, and his Trump-lite lackey, Ted Cruz, continue to drown the Republican party under their ocean of rancor and slime, 140 characters at a time, you are left with one choice, conservatives: Put a pitchfork through the monster’s heart and begin to rebuild your village.
