A sad and rude awakening

Not (as yet) being a subscriber to the Washington Post, I'm unable to submit comments for publication. So I emailed columnist Michael Gerson directly after he wrote that "Democrats are on the verge of mistakes" such as claiming "that Trump is the culmination and embodiment of  Republicanism and conservatism." Gerson, who was head speechwriter for George W. Bush, seemed a bit defensive of his party.

I have nothing to say here about conservatism, but I emphatically do claim that Trump is a culmination of Republicanism. In 2016, a month before the election, I wrote: "In all things Trump amplifies the worst tendencies of the Republican party. He is a culmination, not an aberration. He is the bursting boil, hot, festering, putrid." Back then I said that Trump is "an unfit leader atop a dysfunctional party."

I maintain that Trump is the unique result of a Republican Party that over at least the past dozen years has become increasingly and perhaps terminally corrupt, cynical, and destructive of national norms and institutions. It's a minority party that exercises power ruthlessly and un-democratically in many dimensions. I decided to remind Gerson how we got here.

It's important to recognize that Michael Gerson has been strongly opposed all along to Trump and Trumpism, and has called Republicans to task for their complicity. In a previous column during the impeachment trial, he wrote of Republican senators that "understandable cowardice is still cowardice." And yet he still seemed to have not fully grasped why this is the party that gave us Trump—a result that was long in the making.

I opened my email to Gerson by noting that fellow conservative columnist Ross Douthat, reflecting on the decade just ended, remarked on the "rot" in the Republican Party as one of its features.

I reminded him that on the eve of the Obama presidency, prominent Republicans strategized about how to make it fail. How during the midst of an economic calamity not seen since the Great Depression, exactly three Republicans in the entire Congress voted for a useful but inadequate stimulus package. How Republicans in the Senate weaponized the filibuster in order to conduct an unprecedented campaign of scorched-earth obstruction.

How in their landmark 2012 book It's Even Worse Than It Looks, political scientists Norm Oreinstein and Thomas Mann analyzed the pervasive governing dysfunction then occurring and laid the blame entirely at the feet of the Republican Party. How the right-wing email mill, which was a prominent feature of that time, and which had no analogue on the left, was a symptom of an ignorant and inbred party. How more recently Rex Tillerson has warned of "alternative realities" implicitly coming from the right. How the Republican Party exists in its own information bubble curated by Fox News, whereas persons on the left rely to a significant extent on high quality mainstream sources, including Gerson's own paper.

How as if on a singular mission the Republican Party has engaged in every available form of anti-democratic voter suppression. How the right uniquely gives voice to unfounded conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

How other conspiracy theories too—most of them bizarre—abound on the right. How it was the Republican Party that gave us birtherism.

I reminded Mr. Gerson how the disinformation (in all its forms) promulgated by the two sides is profoundly asymmetrical. How it is the Republican Party that eschews all manner of expertise, including scientific. In 2016 I wrote: "It is no accident that a party that has elevated and embodied ignorance has chosen as its presidential nominee the most ignorant and unqualified candidate in modern history."

And so, I said, the Republican destruction of governing norms and institutions has occurred these past dozen years at a furious pace, on the way to the unprecedented and self-satisfied blocking of a Supreme Court nominee for almost a year. One prominent Republican senator said Democrats would have done the same. No, they wouldn't have.

I concluded my email by saying that only the Republican Party could have produced Donald Trump. That, ideological differences between the two parties aside, this Republican Party has led us in the here-and-now to an immensely dangerous place, and evinces neither remorse nor awareness of what it has wrought.

I ended with: "It is therefore quite proper to wonder if the only recourse is to wipe it all away and start over. I say that with sadness and despair."

I have no idea if Mr. Gerson read my email. I did not expect that he would. He must receive an immense amount of correspondence.

But he did end his most recent column with this:

"Every Republican who has lectured others on their insufficient respect for the Constitution now has the chance to defend the constitutional order from the despotic populism the founders most feared. But nearly all of them have failed. When the moment of testing came, they were absent without leave.

"It is, for me, a sad and rude awakening. I have known Republican members of the House and Senate over three decades and never, on the whole, doubted their commitment to America’s founding ideals. That commitment may remain. But there is precious little public evidence of its existence. A nation in need of Republican leaders has found flunkies instead."

Copyright (C) 2020 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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