Timothy Egan is clearly a decent person and usually a good op-ed columnist. I need to say this at the start because I’m going to suggest that his latest column could be even more hard-hitting than it already is. He’s not alone in pulling punches so I don’t mean to pick on him. Instead, I hope to point out that this is not a time to equivocate in our rhetoric or merely imply wrongdoing. We should be explicit and blunt, because it is the truth.
Egan organized his Times column today around a quote similar to the one pictured above:
We all grew up hearing an ageless warning about public morality: that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing…
The Trump presidency has shown just how many ostensibly good people will do nothing…
Here’s the two-step that all good people must take now: First, realize the level of depravity that has taken over the White House, and second, fight accordingly.
Agreed, but…
It’s notable that Egan can’t name-check a single elected Republican — not a Representative, not a Senator, not a Governor, no one — who both realizes “the level of depravity that has taken over the White House” and is prepared “to fight accordingly.”
As for Egan’s notion that Trump’s evil is contagious and has subverted otherwise decent Republicans: Who exactly are these “ostensibly good” Republicans that Trump has turned to evil? He doesn’t name them for the very obvious reason that “ostensibly good” elected Republicans do not exist.
The sad truth is that the diminishing cohort of Republicans that aren’t open criminals are just fine with those that are. That includes all elected Republicans including the apparently non-criminal Collins, Romney, Ernst, and so on.
To avoid making this point explict— that there are no decent Republicans left in elected offices — is a mistake. It is not an appropriate response to the current moment (the point of Sargent’s brilliant recent column on the normalizing by the media of Trump rallies). If we are to survive, op-ed columnists, among many others, have to describe the modern-day GOP without a hint of Mueller-like circumspection.
Because it’s not just Nunes, or McConnell/Chao, or Hunter, or Collins. It’s Romney looking the other way. It’s Flake refusing to take a stand against Kavanaugh and preferring to resign rather than speak up. It’s Collins’s Very Serious and Deep Concerned Inaction. It’s all the pathetic sheep on the backbenches avoiding questions or excusing their openly thuggish GOP cronies in the hope that, by not criticizing other party members, they will be able to tap into the lucrative wing nut welfare that awaits them once they are voted out.
When pointing out the obvious awfulness of modern Republicans, it’s a bit of a tradition also to insert a passage that begins, “No one’s claiming the Democrats are perfect.” But I’m not going to. Why?
Only one major political party — the modern Republican party — treats criminal, traitorous behavior as a moral good and highly desirable (because it advances GOP interests). The terrible reality of our time and place is that the GOP has openly embraced corruption, criminality, intolerance, racism, treason, and ostrich-like behavior as core party values. And if you won’t tolerate the criminality, even if you’re otherwise a complete rightwing nut job? Get out of the GOP. The ones that are left are just fine leveraging criminality and treason.
This era in American politics is not accurately described as a case of “we’re all human, therefore imperfect.” All responsible media figures should explicitly state and re-state the unvarnished truth: there are no truly decent and brave elected Republicans. They are not good people who have decided to say nothing. They are, in fact, all very bad people who are perfectly happy saying nothing. They are all complicit in Trump’s grift and betrayal of America.