The Republicans Seek Power Without Principle; The Democrats Seek Principle Without Power
Remember #NeverTrump? Of course you do. It was quite the springtime fling for the GOP. Faced with a candidate who had spent much of his life as a Democrat, who swore in public before children, who mocked and bullied members of the press, who was neither decent nor reliable, there were some in the GOP who thought that this, this man, was a bridge too far.
How quickly they quieted once he won the primary. His most implacable enemies — Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, the writers of National Review — all lined up to do their service for the party. Ted Cruz had a brief, pointless moment at the convention, calling on his party to “vote their conscience” — code of course for anyone but Trump — but when that failed, joined the party line and declared he’d cast his ballot for a man whose values he despised in September.
The moral compass of the GOP swung about madly, then split apart, and it didn’t really bother the party because they won. Oddly, irrationally, it turned out they never needed a moral compass at all to convince Americans that Hillary Clinton was the greater of the two evils.
And the GOP has basically gone silent ever since. Trump is their leader; they are doing as he asks, despite deeply unqualified cabinet picks like Betsy DeVos, or completely stupid executive orders like the Muslim travel ban (swiftly and righteously struck down by the courts).
Because years ago, somewhere around the election of 2004, the GOP concluded that power is better than principle. Winning elections at any cost — dog whistling racists, riling up homophobic bigots, using a great power rival to tar the opposition, distorting statistics and creating “alternative facts” — would one day establish the one party state America needed to enjoy permanent greatness. Wasn’t it Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, who once dreamed of a “permanent Republican majority?” That, dear friends, is a one-party state, the tinpot type of tyrants, riddled with corrupt flunkies, failing public services, and manufactured national crises that are both self-inflicted and inevitable. It is a golden era for the makers of riot gear and tear gas.
It helps that their opposition is a hapless one. As their enemies take their minority status to build a majority government, the Democrats flail their arms and concern themselves with how they’ll get into Heaven and forget that they’re still on Earth. Chuck Schumer’s tears may have been real, but they also backfired: when your foe has ditched their conscience, any softening is proof that your weakness cannot be tolerated in power. For those who voted Trump, Senator Schumer appeared contrite at best, a child at worst, and either way never to be supported.
Democrats had with President Obama a leader capable of soaring over and glossing past the moral turf wars between liberals, Leftists, socialists, social justice activists, and the many others who squabble beneath the party tent. But he is gone now, leaving behind a hole that no Democrat seems able to fill. All potential leaders are all sullied in the eyes of one faction or another.
At a rally in Battery Park last week, activists shouted “End Broken Windows!” at New York City mayor Bill de Blasio as he spoke. As if Broken Windows wasn’t already unconstitutional, but for the moral purists in the crowd, any policing of qualify of life crimes is broken windows in action. The laser-like focus on dogmatic morality by such activists undercuts the whole party, for when Fox News, or Breitbart, or even Twitter gets hold of the narrow-minded speeches of a few activists, it proves to the Trump tent that liberals care more about their pet moral projects than about greater American equality.
Kiss any Democratic candidate in the heartland goodbye: they are painted by the same brush.
Do we see any such squabbles in the GOP? Hardly, though pro-life folks by all rights should have beef with the pro-gun folks, whose hobby toys routinely murder many thousands of their citizens while rarely stopping crime. Libertarian Republicans ought to be horrified by the tough-on-crime talk of Trump, yet they never swing a primary their way. The contradictions of the GOP, in other word, are subsumed by a relentless pursuit of power.
For the Democrats, those contradictions are cracks so open and festered that they have doomed the party to minority status, capable of elevation only by an extraordinary personality.
The Democrats need not just a personality; they need a platform that convinces Americans that they will bring equality far beyond the coastal and inner cities. They also must let the Republicans fail. The GOP pursuit of power has created a policy bankruptcy the party cannot overcome. They have no plan for the Affordable Care Act. They have no plan to defeat the Islamic State. They have no plan to reduce crime or gun violence. They have only a political strategy that has finally worked.
The Democrats must let the Trumpian GOP burn itself out, and they must tame their factions who squabble too often with one another. If they cannot tame those factions, they must expel them: the Democrats don’t need anarchists anymore than the GOP needs the KKK.
Otherwise, the GOP dream of a one party state will come to the fore.
