End the GOP
In order to save our democracy, we must not merely defeat the Republican Party.
newrepublic.com
There are two figures in the Republican Party who best represent the state of the GOP in the Trump era. The first, of course, is Donald Trump. The second is Roy Moore. By the time Moore defeated Jeff Sessions’s replacement, Luther Strange, in the Republican primary for Alabama’s special election in 2017, he had already been a minor celebrity on the right-wing fringe for nearly 20 years. He had been removed from the Alabama Supreme Court twice for refusing to comply with federal rulings. He regularly made statements disparaging Islam and homosexuality. He had been a proponent of the theory that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and had led an organization that celebrated pro-Confederate holidays. True to form, Moore would go on to make comments suggesting an ambivalence about American slavery during his campaign—America was last great, he had said in response to a question at a rally that September, “when families were united—even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.”
In the months leading up to the election, the Republican National Committee seemed entirely willing to swallow that record and more to keep Sessions’s seat in the party’s hands. But that November, The Washington Post went public with startling allegations. Moore, a fervent public tribune of conservative family values, was credibly accused of sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl and pursuing several other teenagers. This, obviously, was a bridge too far for the party. Quickly, the RNC pulled its money and field support from the campaign. “The allegations were obviously very concerning, and concerning to the degree that we pulled our resources,” committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel explained to conservative talk show host John Catsimatidis. “The Alabama voters are going to have to be the judge and jury on this.” Her uncle, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was among the voices urging the party to abandon Moore. “Roy Moore in the U.S. Senate would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation,” he tweeted. “No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity.” At a press conference earlier in the month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called on Moore to step aside. “He’s obviously not fit to be in the United States Senate,” McConnell told reporters, “and we’ve looked at all the options to try to prevent that from happening.” By early December, Moore had few open supporters within the party infrastructure beyond the Alabama Republican Party, which had secured Moore’s place on the election ballot.
But it had also become clear by then that Moore, who had dismissed all calls to drop out, retained plenty of supporters within Alabama’s Republican electorate—voters who defiantly disbelieved The Washington Post’s reporting and were loyal enough that polls continued to show Moore in a dead heat or even ahead of Democratic challenger Doug Jones. In an interview just over a week before the election, McConnell declined to condemn Moore again. “I’m going to let the people of Alabama make the call,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. President Trump, less reticent, officially endorsed Moore by tweet the next day. “Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts,” he wrote, “is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama.” In a statement afterward, the Moore campaign boasted that Trump had personally called to offer “enthusiastic support for Judge Moore’s candidacy.”
The inevitable followed. On December 4, 2017, the Republican National Committee endorsed a credibly accused child molester for U.S. Senate. Having decided his victory would be preferable to allowing a Democrat a partial and ultimately inconsequential term, the RNC resumed its financial support for the Moore campaign. In a column for USA Today, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg stated the obvious. “The RNC pulled its support when they thought Moore could be forced from the race,” he wrote. “They renewed it when it was clear he lacked the decency to drop out. In other words, their real problem was with a potential loser, not a possible child molester.” In defense of its decision, the RNC issued a brief statement to the press: “The RNC is the political arm of the president and we support the President.”
The Moore saga feels as though it was an eternity ago, but the episode has taken on a new resonance in the wake of Trump’s impeachment. Over the past several months, leading Democrats in Congress, the Democratic presidential candidates, and pundits across the mainstream press have denounced the Republican Party’s defenses of the president, attacks on the credibility of impeachment witnesses, and attempts to undermine the impeachment process. In a representative op-ed for USA Today in December, California Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, admonished Republicans and urged responsible figures in the party to “stand up and be counted.” “Are they OK with this president’s undebatable abuse of power?” he asked. “Are they prepared for what America becomes if we accept it? Is this the conduct we want to be commonplace in our children’s America?”
A similarly beseeching New York Times column from the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Peter Wehner in September was titled, simply, “What’s the Matter With Republicans?” “Mr. Trump’s most recent abuse of power—pressuring the Ukrainian president to do his dirty work—is the latest link in a long chain of corruption,” he wrote. “If Republicans don’t break with the president now, after all he has done and all he is likely to do, they will pay a fearsome price generationally, demographically and, above all, morally.” Vox’s Ezra Klein, one of the loudest voices condemning Republicans’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable, tweeted in November that the impeachment process had exposed much more than Trump’s willingness to abuse power. “I’m a broken record on this, but the impeachment process isn’t revealing what Trump did,” he wrote. “We already knew that. It’s revealing what the Republican Party will accept, and even defend.”
In truth, we knew that, too. As the RNC straightforwardly informed us during the Moore scandal, the Republican Party is the political arm of the president. Defending Trump’s effort to enlist a foreign power in the harassment of a political opponent has been an utterly trivial undertaking for a party not only willing to send an abuser of children to high office on Trump’s behalf, but also willing to sidestep and deny numerous allegations of abuse and rape against Trump himself.
The capacity of our political elites to be shocked anew by the Republican Party has been more shocking than anything Republicans have stooped to doing in the Trump era. It should be no surprise that a party willing to deny the reality of a climate crisis that imperils all civilization has given the presidency to a man who denied his black predecessor is an American. It is entirely logical that a party currently dismantling the right to vote has turned itself over to a man willing to undermine faith in the democratic process. Despite what the Democratic Party’s chosen rationale for impeachment has implied, the gravest offenses President Trump has committed against our country can be found not in the White House’s call logs but in the detention centers where the president has caged the children of migrant parents—children abused and traumatized in the service of a racist mythology Trump has crafted about the impact of immigration. The Republican Party has helped him promulgate it and stands ready to help him do worse, because Donald Trump, beyond holding office as a Republican president, embodies the very soul of the Republican Party.
Every single aspect of his administration has been foreshadowed not only by fringe figures within the GOP and voices in the conservative media, but also by the last Republican president—a man now embraced, sometimes literally, by liberal and moderate conservative figures decrying Trump’s conduct. Trump’s own rhetoric of division and exclusion was preceded by the 2004 reelection campaign for George W. Bush, which took advantage of homophobia to boost turnout from social conservatives. Before thousands of Puerto Ricans devastated by Hurricane Maria were forced by the Trump administration’s shoddy recovery effort to ask themselves whether they were really Americans after all, thousands of African Americans failed by the Bush administration’s relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina posed the same question to themselves. Trump’s intimations that the federal executive is above the law may well have been bolstered by the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance of the American people. Even Trump’s efforts to integrate his companies within the processes of the state were preceded by the Bush administration’s curious keenness for contracts with Halliburton, the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran before Bush took office.
The propaganda and misinformation campaigns that characterize what some have called a new post-truth era under Trump should, in fact, be quite familiar to those who remember the denialism that characterized defenses of the Iraq War and the hundreds of thousands of casualties it produced. The two Republicans who have occupied the White House in the first two decades of the new millennium have shared not only an address, but an enthusiasm for torture and war crimes, a zeal for using fear and the threat of terrorism to quash political dissent, and near-total support from the Republican political establishment.
In the years since the end of the Bush era, we have seen figures within the Republican Party denigrate African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and gender and sexual minorities. We have seen the Republican Party repeatedly back cuts to critical social programs under the pretense of fiscal discipline only to pass giveaways to major corporations, the wealthy, and an already gluttonous military. The character of the GOP is not an open question. Even those who suggest otherwise know it—the American political establishment meets each fresh stain the GOP leaves on the American conscience not with genuine surprise, but with performances of disbelief. Impotent in the face of a party that defied all political convention and wisdom with its victory in the last election, and unwilling to reshape a political order that offers them sinecures, political elites have only indignation and repetition as recourse. Their pearls, too often clutched, have been crushed into a fine powder. The straw has flattened the camel.
It’s left to the rest of us to face the truth squarely: Donald Trump is not a departure from the values defining the Republican Party, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power in this country. The question before us is not how much more the Republican Party might be willing to tolerate from the president but how much more we are willing to tolerate from the Republican Party. The GOP, founded by a generation of extraordinary men more committed to human freedom and the ideals expressed by our founding documents than the Founders themselves, has had a strange and improbable history. Built in opposition to the institution of slavery, the Republican Party is now a reliable opponent of equality and a malignant force in American life—a cancer within a patient in denial about the nature and severity of her condition. It should be not only defeated but destroyed—vanquished from the American political scene with a finality that can only be assured not by electoral politics or structural reforms alone, but by a moral crusade.
This might seem a startling supposition to liberal strategists and commentators convinced the Republican Party is digging its own grave. Despite Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, numerous pieces a year are written predicting that the GOP, dependent as it is on old and white voters, is headed for an inexorable decline, given the demographic changes set to reshape the country in the coming decades. “The numbers simply do not lie,” Axios’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote last summer. “America, as a whole, and swing states, in particular, are growing more diverse, more quickly. There is no way Republicans can change birth rates or curb this trend—and there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”
