The new Whigs

I have shamelessly stolen this title from Hunter S. Thompson, one of my favorite political writers.  He used it to describe the Democratic Party in the days of Ronald Reagan, for their habit of putting up liberal darlings as national candidates who would then get beaten like gongs (another HST-ism).   The Whigs, you may recall from your high school history course, were a US political party in the early to mid-19^th century.   While several presidents at one time or another had some affiliation with the Whigs, the party took no strong stand on slavery, the central issue in national politics during the lead-up to the Civil War.   The Whigs dissolved into bickering, and disappeared completely by the late 1850s.

I often wonder what Hunter would have made of Trump, but he took his own life in 2005, so we will never know.  But HST used exaggeration and caricature to lampoon political figures, so he may well have just shrugged his shoulders, admitting that Gonzo journalism had finally met it’s match.

On January 7^th, 2021, I wrote the following comment in the Washington Post: 

“The ease with which Trump has manipulated the GOP base to his own ends should surprise nobody. It is the logical endpoint to the “Southern Strategy” the GOP has employed since Nixon, using white voter fears to get elected. Yesterday’s chaos, as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, many waving Confederate flags, was a grim exclamation point on an era that must be put to rest if the nation is to survive.
The Republican Party faces a stark choice. They can continue to gnaw on the rotting carcass of white supremacy, or begin the painful process of re-invention. First, they need to be honest with their constituents. There was no widespread conspiracy to “steal the election”. The ACA is in fact an important improvement in national health care, not a socialist plot. Taxes are the price we pay for being protected by a military, having scientific advances that result in coronavirus vaccines and cancer treatments, and countless other benefits that we take for granted. Capitalism works, but if left unregulated results in debacles such as the Great Recession.
It may be that such honesty will end some political careers, but it is time for the GOP to start treating their constituents as adults, not scared children. A dose of truth can help immunize the body politic against the next would-be autocrat.” 

Today, January 6^th, 2022, I thought I would look back at the year and see how the GOP is faring on that score.  Well, that was depressing.   And it didn’t take long, did it?  The Great Lie has become dogma with most Republican office holders, even if they don’t believe it themselves.  (They clearly don’t believe it, since the same election that elected Biden elected most of them, as well).   I hear that Ted Cruz actually called the insurrection “a violent terrorist attack”, and got promptly reamed by Putin apologist and all-around asshole Tucker Carlson.  Of the GOP, only Liz Cheney and her father (yes, Jon Stewart’s Darth Vader) showed up for the ceremony in the House to acknowledge the anniversary.   

When all you have to hold your party together is a lie, and telling the truth will get you unelected, your party is in serious trouble.  Trumpworld will eventually unravel (as Stephen King says in The Stand: “The effective half-life of evil is relatively short”) and at that point, the GOP will fall apart.   Maybe from the ashes a new center-right party will form.  There is a nucleus already:  Governors Hogan (Maryland), Baker (Massachusetts), Senator Romney, and those brave local GOP officials in multiple states who defied calls from Trump to invalidate election results at the state level.   Add to them the GOP representatives and senators who voted for impeachment and to convict, essentially destroying their chances for re-election within the party machinery.  Most have announced their retirement, citing death threats and Trump-backed primary challenges.   (Oh, yes, death threats, what a fine omen those are for the health of a political party.)   It will take money (a whole lot of money), but those donors that regularly support GOP causes might welcome the chance to support candidates that aren’t beholden to a lunatic.  There will have to be a house-cleaning, possibly along the lines of the South African Truth Commission formed after the end of apartheid.   But we need a separate center-right party.  Currently, the Democratic Party houses both the left (Elizabeth Warren) and the center right (Sinema and Manchin), and just as clearly, that doesn’t work. 

There will always be lies and twisting of truths in politics.   But if a lie is all you have, it won’t last.  In my introduction to this blog, I wrote about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the web of lies torn apart by the Chernobyl disaster as a proximate cause of that collapse.  I can only hope and pray that it doesn’t take a disaster of that magnitude to wake us up.