Enters the much-anticipated Democratic victory lap! The mighty stimulus has arrived thus slaying the austerity dragon. So let’s all do the libby jig, which, like dancing with the rest of the Riffraff, is just a Trump to the left. Covid slew Goliath, republicanism is in its death throes and ding dong the Mitch is finally dead, or at least dead-ish. We even have a new commander in chief calling his good friends across the aisle neanderthals. It’s a brand new day, a place where insight is once again valued and Trumpism has been relegated to the dustbin of Hannity. We can all breathe a sigh of relief at the now reopened pubs, right? Sadly, this is more wishful thinking from our intellgiencier, courtesy of those ivory towers of crapademia. Speaking of neanderthals, if someone could just drag Marjorie Taylor Greene back to her cave that would be great. Don’t judge me for that, after all, it’s common Pleistocene behavior. Fine, just tear up a Captain Caveman comic strip somewhere and get it out of your system. Fucking liberals. I know Trump is declaring war on all RINOS and he’s splitting the donations between the GOP and his legal GoFundMe page, but the bottom line is this: the republican party will climb back into its neococoon and will undergo a profound and radical transformation only to emerge once again as something …well, even more radical.
Oh, come on Zano. Can’t you just relax and enjoy the supermajority for a minute?
First off, it’s not a true supermajority and, two, who could be comfortable with the rise of this pack of right-leaning, anti-intellectual populists? Remember, these folks can flourish on only the scantiest of factoids. I’ve compared modern conservativism to political tardigrades, the only creatures that can survive virtually fact-free in the icy void of space. And they will regroup quickly—shapeshifting Terminator cop on crack, quickly—should anyone invoke the S word, or those other dogwhistles that they’re classically conditioned to froth out-of-the mouth over.
Meanwhile, our journalistic friends are all falling into the same trap: The Republican Party is in its End Stages, The End of The GOP? Can the Republican Party be Saved? The leftist delusion persists. I have read this tripe before, how one day soon republicans around the country would magically shed their worldview like so much Trump merch; that they’d shake off their collective stupor and return to some semblance of sanity.
Shortly into Trump’s presidency I too had such a moment of weakness, right here:
Somewhere in early 2018 I thought even they had to realize—regardless of whether or not they still felt grounded in some coherent principles—just how horrible their leadership choices had become. I also predicted they’d reached peak ignorance at that time, but even this assessment was simply a guess. This was no doubt followed by some Dr. Evil-esque laughter on my part that presumably gained me a perplexed stare or two from the nearby barstools. My warning, for decades, is how the rightwing types would keep doubling down on their own ignorance. My blogvesary, an otherwise critical-thinking/philosophy-grounded type, is following suit and has recently followed QAnon into oblivion. Radical as the new moderate.
Both sides have their radicals, Zano.
True, and yet it’s still another false equivalency. Let’s look at both sides of those “crazy” ends of the political spectrum, or at least those elected to positions of power: let’s go with AOC v MTG (Marjorie Taylor Greene). It’s always been intelligence v idiocy, and I know you don’t like where you reside in the distribution curve, but that doesn’t mean you can just flip the graph around. Whereas AOC is a bright young idealist, the republican equivalent is a bigoted misanthrope who has taken to heckling school-shooting survivors. One extrapolation further and in 2021 we find conservatism wholly devoid of any merit whatsoever, a trend that has steadily tracked southward since the attacks on 9/11. Despite their appalling track record, the GOP remains surprisingly intact and resilient. Worse still, it’s only going to take one more R president to end this glorious experiment in democracy.
Didn’t you already predict that we’d never recover from Trump?
Yes, and I’m afraid we are not out of the woods yet. They always manage to leave a mess, don’t they? Well, mess is not the right word, is it? Clinton was left a mess, Obama a catastrophe, and Biden a Trumpocalypse. Still, I’d love to be wrong on this one, but we’ll see, won’t we?
I have also given up on the prospects of the emergence of a better GOP, one grounded in reason. This is not in the cards, unless we’re playing Tarot with the village idiot. In my opinion, post-Dubya & Trump, the republican base is wholly impervious to even the most rudimentary precursors of self-reflection. Have you spoken to any of them lately? A family member of mine (R-AZ) recently confirmed this for me, at least anecdotally. When I made a comment about the historical standing of the last two Republican presidents, this person responded with, and I am not making this up, “Maybe next time we need to elect someone without any education whatsoever.”
Wow. Reminds me of this timeless quote:
“I want someone smarter than me in office, yet the typical Foxeteer is always searching for someone dumber than they are.”
Republicans remain on the hunt for some Mr. Smith-type who will march stoically off to Washington. It’s all magical thinking, pining for a place where all of their hate-filled delusions can be transmuted into golden Heartland policies. For them it evokes an image of Charton Heston somewhere on a ranch, toting a rifle, but for me it’s just more Randle McMurphisized romanticism for whitey.
Obama was right, you didn’t build that. And, even if you had, you would never have allotted the necessary taxes for the structural upkeep. The Heston ranch is closed kids. Your party has devolved into something more akin to that Clown Motel in Nevada, where only a few of the neon lights still burn brightly but the clowns are legion.
