The least we can ask of a national political party is that it tries to be reasonable, tries to play fair and shows some minimal regard for the truth. That’s not a hell of a lot to ask. And yet anyone who argues that the current Republican Party gets a passing grade on any of these expectations is so deep in denial that his sanity’s in question. Ever since congressional Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama — and then brazenly reversed their own rationale to steal another one for Donald Trump — we knew that the word “hypocrisy” wasn’t part of their vocabulary. Ever since the party’s leaders endorsed Trump’s preposterous, petulant claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him — and claimed, in the words of one of those evil fools, that the violent sacking of the Capitol building on Jan. 6 was “normal tourist activity” — we knew that they lived in a floating fact-free world of their own.
When a current congressional poll for the midterm elections shows this party leading, nationally, by 1% (8% better than 2020), I grind my teeth in anguish. Has this brutal con game Republicans are playing, this faux populism funded by cynical plutocrats, conned nearly half the electorate? It doesn’t say much for America’s educational system — or even its gene pool. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, with whom I frequently disagree, hit the target when she wrote, “Republicans have exposed their willingness to accept anything to get power that they then abuse.”
She means “anything.” The outrage that set her off was the pitiful saga of Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker. Walker was promoted by the party as a hard-shell anti-abortion fighter until a former lover revealed that he had paid for her to get an abortion and tried to get her to abort another pregnancy, one that produced a now 10-year-old son he had never mentioned since he entered politics. It seems there were other girlfriends, other out-of-wedlock children fathered by the former football star, and they’re all coming forward. Then an acknowledged son chimed in with memories of neglect and domestic abuse. The party of “family values” held its breath. But even in the midst of this debacle, White mega-church evangelicals embraced poor Herschel in the spirit of Christian forgiveness and repentance, as a once-lost child who has now found his way to Jesus.
Spare me, dear Lord. And hypocrisy’s rank smell is multiplied by the fact that those Republican evangelicals supporting Walker, a Black man, are nearly all White. In the South where I live, that means most of them used to be Dixiecrat segregationists, a tribe that admires Donald Trump for his racism and still mourns for Jim Crow. These alleged Christians have totally exhausted my tolerance. Have they ever heard of the Pharisees? The Holy Bible, Old Testament and New, singles out hypocrites for its most passionate words of disparagement. Just Google “The Bible on Hypocrisy” and you’ll find at least an hour’s worth of scriptural indignation.
One typical polemic, Matthew 15: 7-9: “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.’ ” Another verse I recommend is Titus I: 16: “They profess to know God, but they deny Him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.”
What would St. Paul, or Jesus Christ, have made of these Christians in Georgia? If the Walker disaster was a play, staged with satirical intentions, we’d be in hysterics. Instead it’s front-page news with serious implications for the health of the Republic. But the amorous running back and his Bible Belt defenders are scarcely out of step with their Republican brethren when it comes to hypocrisy. I could argue that the heart, the spinal cord of the whole Trumpist heresy, the Trumpist insurgency, is shameless hypocrisy. You must have noted by now that every sin Donald Trump accuses his enemies of committing is one he’s committed or one — like “The Big Steal” — he’s currently attempting. His brain is so small and his imagination so feeble that he can’t conceive of anything that isn’t in his own bag of tricks.
Is Trump, still the party’s nominal leader as he fends off multiple investigations and criminal charges, even the worst thing the Republican Party has to offer? He’s a terrible man, stupid, vain, vindictive, and comically dishonest, who was in no way better qualified to be president than the inarticulate Herschel Walker is qualified to be a United States senator. No major party ever nominated a more ridiculous candidate. But now that his mind is failing him and a dementia clinic seems at least as likely as a federal prison, people his age — like me — are leavening our disgust with a measure of pity. When was there ever such a floundering, blithering jackass in the public arena? For years eyewitnesses have described him as “unhinged” and “deranged,” and now books are coming out with tales of a president throwing food at White House walls and envying Hitler for his loyal generals.
But his recent tirade in Nevada, accusing President George H.W. Bush of hiding classified state documents in a bowling alley and Chinese restaurant — this is known as raving, as in “stark raving” — seems to signal that involuntary commitment lies ahead.
The medical retirement of the dreadful Donald would certainly simplify the power struggle, in this most polarized of all possible Americas. Whether it would in any way sanitize or decontaminate the Republican Party is another question. Several years ago I wrote, “Obviously all Republicans are not bad people, but it seems obvious that all bad people are Republicans.” I’m sticking by it in 2022, with no end of subsequent evidence to strengthen my case.
The Jan. 6 insurrection introduced most of us to the MAGA party’s violent storm troopers, to neo-Nazi thugs like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. On the desk in front of me is a photograph, apparently taken Jan, 6, of a rioter from Maine named Kyle Fitzsimons, who was convicted of assaulting two Capitol police officers. In the photo, half of Fitzsimons’ forehead is smeared with his or someone else’s blood, his teeth are bared like a cornered wolverine and there’s an assassin’s light in his eyes that makes my blood run cold. If the Jan. 6 riots were “normal tourist activity,” so was Custer’s Last Stand.
These are the party soldiers, heavily armed of course and furious mainly because they believe every lie that’s been fed to them. Then there are the QAnon cultists, millions of them, who believe things that would, in the words of Philip Roth, “shame a gorilla.” Add the White supremacists who signal their racism with Confederate flags and the anti-Semites who signal to their brethren by demonizing George Soros. But the party’s media auxiliary scares me just as much. What fetid hole in hell’s sub-basement could have bred a creature like Alex Jones? The radio market is saturated with right-wing vampires howling for Joe Biden’s blood. And this whole radical project, bearing no resemblance to the pre-Reagan Republican Party, could never have sustained such momentum without Fox News, without the likes of Trump-fawners Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the unspeakable Tucker Carlson, Carlson who drives us crazy because we think he knows better and does this just for money.
And last but not less toxic, the party’s “leaders,” its legislative auxiliary. There’s Lindsey Graham, whose loathsome sycophancy would gag a hyena, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who should submit to a DNA test to prove she’s not Alex Jones’ illegitimate daughter. Take a whiff of Matt Gaetz, if your stomach is strong enough, or Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz. Are all bad people Republicans?
“If the Democrats are a coalition of interest groups,” economist Paul Krugman wrote in the Times, “the Republicans are now a coalition of crazies and cowards.” This strong language is not inappropriate, when polls show that the GOP could take back the Congress. I generally draw the line at Nazi comparisons, but a reference to a 1923 novel titled “The Oppermanns” struck me as timely. Written by Lion Feuchtwanger, a Jew forced to flee Germany before the Holocaust, the book calls special attention to two fatal false assumptions on the part of Hitler’s victims: That populist ignorance could not prevail in a sophisticated nation, and that technology would prevent the spread of gross disinformation.
Think about that. It’s also urgent to recognize that the Republicans’ most reactionary impulses — fighting gun control, denying climate change, resisting vaccines — will no doubt cause the death of someone you care about. Republicans aren’t a race of demons, as the QAnon crazies have depicted the Democrats. They’re just misguided human beings, grossly but often willfully misinformed, who have let their resentments and prejudices lead them down some dangerous paths. No doubt many of them are well-meaning — like “religious” women who vote to strip women of reproductive rights women struggled for centuries to win, But in aggregate they represent the worst of America, and threaten nearly everything we have reason to be proud of.
The Democrats, burdened like all of us with this antiquated, dysfunctional, cash-clogged two-party system, emerge as America’s sages and saviors only by extreme default. We need a better electoral model and more and better parties, left, right, and center. But with the Republican Party in total moral and intellectual bankruptcy, Democrats are literally the only game in town. Who is it that they represent? Simply, all of us who can see clearly what the GOP has become. Not voting for Democrats in the midterm election, or even sitting it out, is as reckless and ultimately self-destructive as refusing your COVID vaccinations. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2022
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