Press attention is so scattershot lately that a Democratic message for 2022 (if any) is nowhere to be found. There are the recurrent warnings that inflation will be their doom. There is the emerging counternarrative Democrats have yet to exploit that large corporations are banking record revenue while gouging consumers because they can. With understandable focus on Ukraine and Russia (some of it possibly U.S. propaganda) and amidst the daily trickle of bad legal news for former president Donald Trump, there is little evidence of Democrats selling themselves. Meanwhile, we wait for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine and for a U.S. prosecutor with enough guts to indict his poodle.
It is not that Republicans are getting good press. They have defined their deviancy down so far it is hardly news when these rebels without a cause beyond themselves go even lower.
On that, at least, The Week‘s Joel Mathis offers a few thoughts. How did seemingly normal(ish), educated Republicans go full Trumpist? What happened to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), J.D. Vance, Ohio U.S. Senate candidate, and his rival Josh Mandel?
It’s a reasonable question. Mandel leads the pack of Republicans seeking the party’s nomination for the open U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, and he’s achieved that rank with a series of ever-more-outrageous stances apparently designed to ensure no human being alive can flank him from the right. He’s suggested closing public schools and leaving public education to churches and synagogues. He’s declared that the “separation of church and state is a myth.” And, of course, he’s embraced the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. It’s not been so long since a politician with Mandel’s profile would’ve been consigned to the party’s fringes. Now he’s the man to beat.
Naturally, journalists are trying to figure the guy out. “Josh Mandel could be Ohio’s next senator. So what does he believe?” Politico asked last week in a profile. The New York Times offered a similar take: “The Senate candidate was a rising Republican when he abandoned his moderate roots. Now, those who have watched his transformation wonder if his rhetoric reflects who he really is.” Both stories echoed last November’s conclusions from The Atlantic, which examined the question and labeled Mandel a “genuine phony.”
That applies to the others listed above, especially Kennedy (who Mathis does not mention).
As for Mandel, Mathis agrees he is no mystery, “He’s an ambitious guy who has decided that becoming fully Trumpist is his best route to power. That’s it. End of story. Everything else is just commentary.”
But there is lots of it. Earned media, as campaign vets know. Buying name recognition is costly. Outragousness gets a candidate cost-free coverage.
The simplest answer to why such men of ambition debase themselves before Trump’s base is likely the correct one: they’ll do anything for power.
The Founders knew a little something about ambitious men. While they drafted the Constitution — and as they explained themselves in The Federalist Papers — they obsessed over how to contain those ambitions and make sure the new nation’s institutions could withstand demagoguery and corruption. Thus the whole checks-and-balances thing. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” they wrote. For more than 200 years it worked, more or less.
These days, not so much. American democracy is fragile at the moment, thanks largely to Trump, an ambitious man who cannot tolerate being counteracted — not by other ambitious people, and certainly not by a majority of voters. Now other Republicans are taking his cue. Ambition is amplifying ambition, not counteracting it. We’re all worse off as a result.
Over the weekend, reporting revealed that some forensic linguists had identified the men behind the mysterious “Q” of the conspiracy movement. Outing them, even an admission by them, is not likely to alter the minds already committed to the conspiracy. Someone noted that that horse has already left the barn. The same may be true of Trumpism. Whether Trump is convicted of crimes or dies in his sleep, his followers have drunk the blood of it and will be with us for some time. As Mathis writes, we’re all worse off as a result.
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