The Republican Wall Already Up, a Republic Itself Falling Down

If you've been reading this blog since 2008, you might notice I've been yelling and screaming about the damage caused by the modern Republican Party.

But since I only get about seven people reading this blog, it's good to see when the national publications/websites get on the same wavelength I've been all these years. For example, a much-promoted essay from George Packer at The Alantic:

Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start...

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries. But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means...

I'd written earlier this year about the political minority status of the GOP, given how they've pandered to an ever-shrinking voter base and using that to ignore the majority's needs across every issue. Packer makes note of it too:

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact...

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative—from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself...

And it should be noted: Where Flake was a known public critic of Republican "viciousness" he DID NOT DO A DAMN THING TO STOP IT other than running away. Him and most other party leaders. They gave up on controlling the GOP and let the rioters from the wingnut media take the wheel.

We see these critiques among the punditry: David Frum with his "Waterloo" remarks regarding the Republicans' failure to compromise and accept Obama's health care reforms; Andrew Sullivan trying his hardest over the last decade to revive an intellectual conservatism that the Republicans will no longer tolerate; nearly every article by every pundit decrying the Republicans' descent into dogma and powerlust.

The problem is that every article is about trying to find some redemption in a shitpile of Far Right corruption. The pundits still think there is something worth saving in a Republican Party that has long since died.

The nation may need a two-party system to provide a choice for the voters when the time comes, but it is now a False Choice. Like John Cole said YEARS AGO, we're choosing between someone who'll suggest Italian for a dinner date and someone who'll insist on tire rims and anthrax. There's no viable choice there. This isn't a "Both Sides" worldview worth defending. One side - the Republicans - is simply power-mad and flat-out batshit crazy.

We are at the point where the media has to realize they have a First Amendment obligation not to allow "both sides" to present their arguments but a First Amendment obligation to inform their readers and viewers and listeners that one side is no longer interested in serving the public trust. We're at the point the media has to warn every American that the Republican side is wrong, just straight-up wrong.

The media has to report this. They have to report how the modern GOP has shut itself away from the realities of how things work, how the modern GOP refuses to play by the constitutional norms that have been in effect for decades if not centuries, how the modern GOP is closed off from open debate, differing life experiences, or the virtues of compromise.

The Beltway punditry has to admit - first to itself, and then to the nation - that the Republicans already have their Wall, built on ignorance and vanity, designed to keep THEIR kind in power and the rest of the nation out in the cold.

The national media, the local media, anywhere and everywhere across the information spectrum. THAT has to be the main story, this day and every day.

It has - by the way - the virtue of being the truth. Everything you see about the Republicans' cruelty, the Republicans' greed, the Republicans' ineptitude: It's really happening, and people are suffering.

That's how the truth should matter. That's WHY the truth should matter.

We as a nation need that truth. Or else the Republic truly falls and never gets up again.