The GOP is now a personality cult
The tragedy of today’s Republican Party lies partly in how far it has tumbled from its heights.
This is the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It is the party that built interstate highways, championed family planning, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, opened relations with China, confronted the Soviet Union and managed the collapse of Communism.
It is the party that under Ronald Reagan welcomed refugees. It is the party of men who exemplified decency like George H.W. Bush and adherence to a moral compass like John McCain.
At a rally in 2008, McCain corrected a questioner who called Barack Obama untrustworthy and an “Arab.” “No, ma’am,” McCain told the crowd. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”
Today that Grand Old Party has devolved into a personality cult surrounding a racist demagogue who incites a mob to chant about a Somali-American member of Congress: “Send her back!”
Elected Republican officials — with a very few brave exceptions, like Representative Will Hurd of Texas — protest the label “racist,” but not the racism. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell even says that President Trump is “on to something.”
Yes, Trump is on to something: He has seized on the ugly nativist streak that runs through the anti-Catholic riots of 1844, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942. Most men grow after becoming president; Trump has not only shrunk but has also miniaturized party elders with him.
The collapse of the Republican Party is not just about this month’s fecklessness, however, and as The Economist noted in a recent cover article, this is a “global crisis in conservatism”: From Australia to Britain, Italy to Brazil, “the new right is not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it.” [Continue reading…]