This Moment
/We would all do well – whatever your political affiliation – to ponder what became of the Republican Party over the past five years.
This is the moment to make careful note of what has happened. Not only the recordings of that gruesome day – January 6 – when our capitol building was invaded, but also of what our so-called authorities in their frightened partisanship failed to do about it, both during and after.
We will need to remember all of this. Especially what our nation has witnessed this past week ending on Saturday with the Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump.
Prominent in our visual record will be that brief video the House impeachment managers made: Damning scenes of mayhem, and audio of insurrectionists with murder on their lips.
If you weren’t moved from complacency by these sights and sounds, these actions of primitive savagery, you should seek help. At no point in the impeachment trial was that succinct video presentation challenged at all. It was ridiculed by some Republican senators, of course, but never once denied or even rebutted.
We must resolve to remember. In particular, these images …
The rioters themselves, that raging rabble with their barroom bravado and scummy emblems, hurling the word traitor at the wrong people. How brave they were, incited by their leader who exhorted them all to show no weakness, then watched from his bunker afar as they overwhelmed the outnumbered police.
Those congressmen and senators who after the siege were content to sit smugly in the silent seats, ever comfortable on the back bench, letting anyone else do the talking, hoping it would all just blow over. (Tennesseans should take particular note of how seven of the state’s nine House members and both our U.S. senators found their own comfort level in this craven category.)
Trump himself. Remember the pictures and the words of this manipulative man who hopes to be your President again someday. What happened on January 6 was, after all, the full flowering of all he ever wanted: Not policy-making but power to deal, not good government but the cult of his own needful personality – the same cult that has now consumed Republicanism.
They are all hoping we will forget. My wish is that they all - all of these bad actors, elected and otherwise - will return soon back into the dark holes of obscurity from whence they came. But we all must make certain to remember what some of them did – and what the rest of them failed to do for caving to their fears of Trump’s vestigial influence.
I don’t mourn this demise of the Republican Party, but I lament the sad passing of what its leaders once stood for.
It once was the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan and of lawmakers on the level of Taft, Dirksen, and Baker. All these genuine leaders stood for something – ever advocating, say, for smaller government, peace, and democracy, but never insurrection. Not so their pathetic political descendants. Not anymore.
Leaders of that party once helped make the system work, keep things in balance, maintain some perspective, isolate the bad actors, and achieve good ends. Apart from any individual leader, the success of government in the United States came about because of robust competition over centuries – the striving of strong candidates and their jousting over ideas and beliefs. Over time, this dynamic made for both sound policies and great statesmen. It’s neither Republicans nor Democrats alone but the honorable push-and-pull between them that produces good government.
Now that the old “Republican Party” has surrendered itself so fully into Trump’s hands and whims, now that it has gone so badly off the rails, what ought to replace it?
Today I hear rising talk of building a viable Third Party, whatever name it might adopt. The reasons that have long argued against that happening are well-known (among them, the great expense of modern campaigns, how the Electoral College works with winner-take-all presidential primaries, etc.) but in February 2021 these procedures are worth re-considering.
This moment may be ripe for a plan to build a New Party to replace this obvious wreckage of the old. If so, history will fairly blame such an outcome on the dishonor that today’s “Republicans” finally did to themselves.
© Keel Hunt, 2021
