Max Boot-- A Conservative Republican-- Explains Why He's Voting The Straight Party Line... For Democrats Up And Down The Ballot

 

Celebrated artist Nancy Ohanian portrays the worst president in history

From what I can recall from a high school course in European history, the terms "right" and "left" were first applied to politics in the early stages of the French Revolution when the representatives of the parties that represented the noble families and Church hierarchy (less than 5% of the population but a majority of the representatives) were seated on the right of the National Assembly (formerly the Estates-General), while the Third Estate, the representatives of about 95% of the population, sat on the left. Those on the left represented the legitimate interests of the working class. Those on the right... eventually got what was coming to them. Reactionary political parties never needed to be "saved," which has what conservative Republican Max Boot was advocating in his Washington Post column yesterday; they always needed and need to be destroyed. "We have to destroy the party in order to save it," he wrote. He admits his party had always had "long-standing problems-- conspiracy-mongering, racism, hostility toward science," but it apparently didn't really matter much to him until Trump was able to "exploit [and] exacerbate all of those maladies, just as he made the coronavirus outbreak much worse than it needed to be." He wrote that he "watched with incredulity the GOP’s descent into collective madness." The madness, though, just exposed what was almost motivation for Republicanism and its the heart of the nature of American conservatism.

Many Republicans I know began by holding their noses and voting for Trump because of judges and taxes and their hatred of Hillary Clinton. Now the whole Republican Party seems to inhabit the Fox News Cinematic Universe, an alternative reality where President Barack Obama spied on Trump and Joe Biden is a socialist who will let “anarchists” and “arsonists” run riot.





The party has even become infected by the lunatic QAnon cult, whose followers believe Trump’s opponents are blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In one recent poll, half of Trump supporters said top Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking. Georgia’s Senate primary offers a disturbing snapshot of the state of the party: Rep. Douglas A. Collins promotes his endorsement from two convicted felons (former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos) while Sen. Kelly Loeffler touts her support from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a soon-to-be House member who questioned whether the Pentagon was really attacked on 9/11.

The same trickle-down craziness is evident in Republican mishandling of the coronavirus. Trump has given up trying to control the pandemic, mocks masks and promotes conspiracy theories such as his claim that death counts are inflated because “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they say people died of covid-19. This specious allegation is faithfully echoed by Republicans such as Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. Red states are paying a devastating price for pandemic denialism: North Dakota has the lowest rate of mask-wearing in the country and the highest covid-19 death rate per capita in the world. [As of yesterday North Dakota had 52,367 cases per million residents, the worst rate of COVID in the entire world outside of Andorra, a tiny principality in the Pyrenees ruled by France and Spain and subsisiting entirely on tourism and smuggling.]

Trump has given permission for Republican bigots to come out into the open-- to replace dog whistles with wolf whistles. Sen. David Perdue (R.-GA) mocked Sen. Kamala Harris’s Indian first name. Madison Cawthorn, a House nominee in North Carolina, proudly visited Hitler’s lair and created a website attacking a journalist for having worked “for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” Laura Loomer, a Republican candidate for a House seat from Florida, calls herself “a proud Islamophobe” and cheered the deaths of 2,000 refugees crossing the Mediterranean (“Good. 👏 Here’s to 2,000 more”).

The longer Trump stays in office, the more damage he does-- and the more loyal Republicans become. “Axios on HBO” found that, among 178 congressional Republicans who have been in office since Trump began his run for president, 42 percent criticized him after the Access Hollywood tape was released in 2016. Only 12 percent criticized him for the attack on peaceful demonstrators and Bible photo-op this year.

Republicans flatter Trump the way Trump flatters Kim Jong Un. Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of homeland security, just tweeted that Trump is the “greatest SCOTUS [Supreme Court] President since the founding era (at least), and possibly of all time,” and that his “Nobel Peace Prize for Mideast peace” is a “sure thing.” Internet memes depict the portly president as a superhero.

Trump has no second-term agenda, and the party has no platform other than supporting him. Even the editor of National Review-- supposedly the intellectual leader of conservatism-- suggests that the primary reason to vote for Trump is to extend a middle finger to his critics. This is sheer nihilism-- and it will get worse if Trump wins reelection. By next year, fewer than 1 in 6 House Republicans will have been in office during George W. Bush’s presidency. Trumpism is their reality now.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden just released a study showing that in four years the GOP has been transformed into an autocratic party that has much in common with the Fidesz Party in Hungary, the Law and Justice party in Poland and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey.

America needs a sane center-right party. It doesn’t need an extremist party that undermines democracy, caters to White grievances, and rejects science and reason. The only way Republicans will come to their senses is if they see that the path they are on leads to electoral oblivion. That’s why, even though I’m not a Democrat, I’m voting straight-ticket Democratic on Nov. 3-- and for as long as necessary to make Republicans come to their senses. The GOP needs to be detoxified and de-Trumpified.