“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.”

Commentary

When it comes to the Republican party, that aid can’t come too soon! That is, if there are any good men…or women…left in the GOP.

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party” is a phase, originally designed as a touch-typing drill. I typically write it when I’m trying out a new fountain pen or new ink color. (You might have noticed that the writing in the image above is, appropriately for this story, red and blue.) Call me old-fashioned, but I still get pleasure writing with pen and ink – although with so little practice my penmanship has deteriorated significantly! But, as usual, I digress.

Given my familiarity with the phrase, I couldn’t help but link it with the current state of the Republican party, one of two political parties in our predominately two-party system, that is on the verge of imploding, bringing the country as we’ve known it, down with it.

How bad is it? How serious is the harm the GOP can do? How far has the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, the party of abolitionists, the party of the trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt, fallen? Let’s start off with the “Big Lie.” Perpetrated by it’s titular leader, Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted, morally corrupt former president, and amplified by spineless Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, third in line to the presidency, the most senior elected Republican office holder.

First, McCarthy:

And then, this: an incredible compendium of presidential candidate concession speeches from 1960 (Richard Nixon) to 2016 (Hillary Clinton). In this video, defeated candidates, Republican and Democratic both, give generous, heartfelt concession speeches linked by one overriding message: I lost, my opponent won, and we must go forward by congratulating the new president and supporting him for the good of the nation. That is, until 2020 and Donald Trump.

But don’t just take this from me. Read the incomparable Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College and author of the newsletter, Letters from an American.

August 11, 2023 – As I try to cover the news tonight, I am struck by how completely the Republican Party, which began in the 1850s as a noble endeavor to keep the United States government intact and to rebuild it to work for ordinary people, has devolved into a group of chaos agents feeding voters a fantasy world.

August 15, 2023 – This morning, Trump posted on Truth Social a promise that next Monday he will present “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia,” saying the report “is almost complete.” He went on: “Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others— There will be a complete EXONERATION!”

It appears that Trump Republicans have fully embraced what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.

…Trump, and now his supporters, rose to power on their construction of a virtual political reality—pushing the story that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had tried to “bleach” an email server until Americans believed it, for example (while Trump’s own recent attempt to delete security-camera footage after it had been subpoenaed by a grand jury has largely flown under the radar)—and Trump and his supporters continued to double down on that false world first to keep him in power and now to return him to it.

…Political theorists constructed political technology as a way to create a false world that would convince voters to elevate a strongman to power. It is not clear what happens when that false world is revealed to be illusory, as it increasingly has been with regard to Trump’s statements.

…At the very least, it seems unlikely that his announcement of “a major News Conference” to reveal why all the charges against him should be dropped will be met with the attention such an announcement would have attracted even a few years ago.*

*(In fact, as of this writing that “major News Conference has been cancelled. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be that there isn’t a “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia,”)

I haven’t even mentioned the sham investigations and hearings that vindictive House Republicans are conducting, or Ron DeSantis’ never ending indoctrination of children to his “faux” right-wing causes – At first it was school libraries — are Florida’s public libraries next? –Palm Beach Post, August 14, or the fact that, based on a recent New York Times analysis, Trump, despite the indictments, despite his obvious lies, despite his crudeness and, most importantly, despite personal threats to perceived enemies as he makes a a mockery of the First Amendment (and a judiciary that, to this point is allowing him to do so) is very much a GOP voter favorite. The Times, in the story, “The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters”:

“Mr. Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party is founded on an alliance between the Right Wing and Blue Collar Populists, two groups that combine to represent nearly 40 percent of Republicans — and about two-thirds of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base of seemingly unshakable support.”

• The Moderate Establishment (14%). Highly educated, affluent, socially moderate or even liberal and often outright Never Trump.
• The Traditional Conservatives (26%). Old-fashioned economic and social conservatives who oppose abortion and prefer corporate tax cuts to new tariffs. They don’t love Mr. Trump, but they do support him.
• The Right Wing (26%). They watch Fox News and Newsmax. They’re “very conservative.” They’re disproportionately evangelical. They believe America is on the brink of catastrophe. And they love Mr. Trump more than any other group.
• The Blue Collar Populists (12%). They’re mostly Northern, socially moderate, economic populists who hold deeply conservative views on race and immigration. Not only do they back Mr. Trump, but he himself probably counted as one a decade ago.
• The Libertarian Conservatives (14%). These disproportionately Western and Midwestern conservatives value freedom and small government. They’re relatively socially moderate and isolationist. Other than the establishment, it’s Mr. Trump’s worst group.
• The Newcomers (8%). They don’t look like Republicans. They’re young, diverse and moderate. But these disaffected voters like Democrats and the “woke” left even less.

With Biden and Trump in a virtual dead heat, with resentful, revengeful, malevolent crazies dominating the GOP House delegation, a delegation ostensibly led by the weak, spineless McCarthy, with former Trump opponents like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham now Trump’s most ardent sycophants, for the good of all of us, Democrats included, I must rephrase my original proposition:

“Now is the time for all good REPUBLICANS to come to the aid of their party.”

Anyone?

Anyone?