gracchusdixit

Confronted with the plummeting poll numbers of its Presidential nominee, spurred in turn by a series of gaffs, insults, and threats outrageous even by Donald Trump’s elastic standards, the Republican Party has reached a point of no return.   It is now abundantly clear that, whether Trump wins or loses in November, the consequences for the party will be equally disastrous.

With Trump at the head of the ticket, the Republican Party is at war with itself.  A growing number of leading Republicans are denouncing their nominee loudly and publicly.  Senator Susan Collins of Maine has joined other Republican senators and representatives in declaring that she cannot vote for Trump.  Gordon Humphrey, a former two-term Senator from New Hampshire, has called on the Republican National Committee to remove Trump from the ticket and replace him with someone who isn’t (to use Humphrey’s word) a “sociopath.”  A group of major donors have put their money behind an independent candidate in a last-minute, desperate attempt to give Trump-hating Republicans an option other than voting for Hillary Clinton.  Lastly, fifty former foreign policy and security officials, Republicans one and all, penned an open letter to the New York Times in which they said the following:

From a foreign policy perspective, Donald Trump is not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief.  Indeed, we are convinced that he would be a dangerous President and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.

To call this situation unprecedented would a whopping understatement.  Never has there been such an cavernous rift between an American political party and its Presidential candidate.  A Trump victory will not heal this rift, because these defections cannot be undone and because Trump is a vengeful bully who will not easily forgive those who condemned him.  A Trump defeat will not heal the rift, either; it will merely lead to recrimination, finger-pointing, and further fracture.   If defeated, the candidate will claim that the election was rigged—indeed, he is already laying the groundwork for that claim, as if he sees his own defeat coming—and is just as likely to blame the Republican establishment as he is to blame his opponent.

In a purely official sense, of course, the Republican Party still backs its man, but the painful discomfort of its leaders is plain to see.  They may talk a good game, insisting that their party is unified, but one look at the faces of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or RNC chair Reince Priebus will tell you all you need to know about how they really feel.  They’re trapped, they’re scared to death, and it shows.

It is tempting to watch this pathetic spectacle unfold with grim, gleeful satisfaction.  After all, Republican political leaders brought this calamity on themselves.  For the better part of fifty years, they have been playing with fire, stoking the barely concealed racism, bigotry, and prejudices of their so-called “base.”  It was inevitable that a candidate like Trump, if not Trump himself, would someday emerge and turn the tables.  In the early 90s, Pat Buchanan, whose inflammatory rhetoric was different from Trump’s only insofar as it was more coherent, came uncomfortably close to toppling the first George Bush.  Republicans can’t say they weren’t warned.  They should have seen this coming.  They should have stopped Donald Trump before he even got started.

Although I disagree with virtually everything the Republican Party stands for, its nominal political philosophy—classic conservatism, combining skepticism of government, fiscal prudence, respect for traditional mores, and a belief in private enterprise—is both respectable and legitimate.  It is also a necessary counterweight to the other political ideas that fuel our democracy.  Just as the Constitution provides for checks and balances among the branches of government, democracy itself requires ideological checks and balances.  Left unchallenged, any ideology, no matter where it falls on the political spectrum, is capable of going astray, of becoming too extreme, of trampling on the rights of some to advance the rights of others.  We need conservative ideas, just as we need liberal ones, and we need healthy, functioning political parties to advance those ideas in the electoral arena.

The problem is that the Republican Party is no longer functioning or healthy.    It has been poisoned by its embrace of a self-absorbed demagogue, who doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction, who lies compulsively, whose first instinct is to demean and belittle anyone disagrees with him, who without compunction urges his followers to use their fists or their guns.

The leaders of the Republican Party still have a chance to end all this.  There is still time for them to wash their hands of this monster and, in the process, cleanse themselves, save their party, and just possibly save the country.  Denunciation must   become complete renunciation.  It must come now, before it is too late.