What Would Republicans Have to Do to Redeem Themselves?

What Would Republicans Have to Do to Redeem Themselves?

One question that keeps coming up in these polarized times, mostly from the cocktail-party circuit evenhanded political punditry, is “What would it take for Republicans to redeem themselves? What would it take for you to consider voting Republican again?”

It’s worth recalling what got Republicans unredeemed in the first place. That might give us some perspective.

In my adult voting life, Republicans have consistently been the party of conservative religion and of big business. Since Reagan, they’ve been promising that prosperity is a tax cut away. These tax cuts have been paid for by running up the national debt, and sometimes by cutting social programs like school lunches, but God forbid you should cut military spending.

Republican presidents gave us Supreme Court justices like John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, William Rehnquist, and Antonin Scalia who have consistently pushed for giving religion (and specifically Christianity) a privileged place in American society.

Under Trump alone, though, we’ve seen a president trample all norms of conduct, unprecedented grift and corruption, a paramilitary organization seizing people from their homes or off the street and deporting them little or no due process. To say nothing of the Jan. 6 insurrection, spurred by a president who refused to accept the results of a democratic election.

“But Trump is an aberration”, a hypothetical Republican might argue. “We can work together to get rid of him, then get back to business as usual.” Except we can’t. If it were just Trump, he’d be a sad old loon publishing racist ads in the New York Times. But he’s not alone. He is enabled by Congressional Republicans who are too afraid of being primaried or being insulted on Truth Social to act like a coequal branch of government and go check the president. For at least a year, the only Republican members of Congress willing to speak out against him have been those who are retiring, and thus beyond the threat of a primary.

Before that, we had members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump, who spoke of how abhorrent January 6 was, but who later voted to acquit him in the Senate. And before that, of course, the Republican Party had no mechanism to prevent an obviously unqualified clown from becoming their nominee. And, of course, rank and file voters who voted for mass deportation and avenging perceived grievances over good governance.

So now “Republican” is synonymous with American fascism, with Trump, with the unitary executive (i.e., president as king), with Abu Ghraib, with wars of choice in the Middle East and elsewhere. With homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny. And it’s their own fault. Fuck ’em.