Watching the country elect the dumbest, most unqualified and unprincipled president in its history might have been the high point of the Donald Trump years. (Actually, it was probably the 2017 women’s march.) From there the United States has been on an unbroken descent into dystopia. If life were like the movies, some Republican hitting bottom about now would find a mentor that turns his/her life around. Everyone loves a redemption story.
If only life were like the movies.
But no. Republican members of Congress want to carry sidearms around the recently ransacked Capitol. Videos of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia calling for the heads of her Democratic colleagues, blaming California wildfires on a “Jewish space laser,” and claiming Ruth Bader Ginsburg was replaced with a body double have driven militia-adjacent Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado’s possible involvement with the Capitol attack off the front pages.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy this week pilgrimaged to Florida to make ritual obeisance before Donald Trump, impeached for inciting the Capitol riot. If only the Orange Fairy will take back “my Kevin,” McCarthy might fulfill his dreams of becoming Speaker and a real boy.
This Republican Party “isn’t doomed; it’s dead,” writes Kathleen Parker:
The party’s end was inevitable, foreshadowed in 2008 when little-boy Republican males, dazzled by the pretty, born-again, pro-life Alaska governor, thought Sarah Palin should be a heartbeat away from the presidency. The dumbing down of conservatism, in other words, began its terminal-velocity plunge, with a wink and a pair of shiny red shoes. Palin cast a spell as potent as the poppy fields of Oz, but turned the United States into her own moose-poppin,’ gum-smackin’ reality show.
Forget Kansas. We’re not in America anymore.
It’s not the madness that’s enraging. It’s not the hypocrisy. It’s the pretension to having principles, to having faith in the American Idea. It’s the flag-waving, patriotic marketing for an essentially proto-fascist movement that is the antithesis of that Idea. Trump the flag-hugger makes a perfect front-man for such a movement. All show and no substance.
Before his death, Theodore H. White began drafting “The American Idea,” an essay for the 4th of July 1986:
THE IDEA WAS there at the very beginning, well before Thomas Jefferson put it into words – and the idea rang the call.
Jefferson himself could not have imagined the reach of his call across the world in time to come when he wrote:
”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But over the next two centuries the call would reach the potato patches of Ireland, the ghettoes of Europe, the paddyfields of China, stirring farmers to leave their lands and townsmen their trades and thus unsettling all traditional civilizations.
It is the call from Thomas Jefferson, embodied in the great statue that looks down the Narrows of New York Harbor, and in the immigrants who answered the call, that we now celebrate.
That American Idea is near-extinct in Trump Country. Forgotten, twisted and shriveled. Only its trappings remain, thinly disguising white-nationalist isolationism and the will to power.
USA (o͞o´-suh) is an idol whose name the Trump cult spells out in shouted chants: U – S – A! U – S – A! The Idea and its meaning are lost. What remains is weaponized ME-ning.
A memory I cannot shake this week defines the hollowness of the Republican project:
I attended what was decades ago a Baptist university. Drinking on campus was verboten. So, it was a shock one night to see cases of champagne and racks of champagne glasses staged in the dining hall kitchen for a scheduled trustees’ dinner. I removed one bottle from an open case. Dimpled bottom. Wired cork. Foiled top. The label read “Sparkling Catawba.” Nonalcoholic. A fake.
They planned a champagne toast without champagne. All the external form. All the ritual. Even the effervescence. But empty of substance.
So is the Party of Trump.