Eisenhower was president when I was born, and Trump is the most recent Republican president. Taking those two as bookends, it's tempting to conclude that the long, slow descent of the Republican party is the big political story of my lifetime. But of course Ike and Trump are just two data points. Joe McCarthy was contemporaneous with Ike, and his reputation has taken up permanent residence in the same shantytown for which Trump's is headed. Figures like Reagan, Bush the Elder, and John McCain don't land nicely on the downward sloping line, but, unless we tend to forget the buffoons of yesteryear, it does seem like the clown car has been picking up more and more passengers. Heck, McCain put Sarah Palin, the half-term and half-witted Alaskan governor, on the national ticket: she was below the sinking line back then, a herald as opposed to a lagging indicator.
On the other hand, maybe I see a pattern when, as ever, it's really just one thing after another and the orderly human mind placing accent marks, inventing a story out of the chaos.
Whatever the back story, though, a long slide or a lurch into the ditch, the Republican party is in a bad place. Its members can still win elections in much of the country, but I have in mind the merits of the case—the party's status as a governing entity and not just a loose affiliation of trollers eager to own the libz. It's perfect that in 2020 the Republicans declined to draft and adopt a party platform. On health care, for example, a matter of urgent importance to millions of people: what are their ideas? what do they want to do? what reforms would they pursue in order to cover more people at an acceptable cost? Trump campaigned on repealing Obamacare and replacing it with "something terrific." That's not my satire, it's literally what he said, over and over again. You might think that a candidate for the presidency would feel obliged to give a few details of the "something terrific" but no, wrong. Then he won. He was president for four years and he never divulged the details of "something terrific." (He also did not repeal Obamacare.) He had nothing. "Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated," he said, indulging himself in more unconscious self-satire. Maybe he hoped to adopt as his own a "Republican plan" that was presumably half formulated and out there, somewhere, maybe in the head of a noted "policy wonk" like the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. If so, that was a mistake! Nobody had anything except lurid, fanciful critiques of Obamacare. I don't count the small-ball stuff they sometimes talk about, Health Savings Accounts and the like. Save $25 per month, tax-advantaged, so there is no problem when one day you need surgery and chemotherapy! Even they understand they're beclowning themselves, which may explain why they insist climate change is a hoax: it's the needed excuse to have no plan, so that you're not tempted to vocalize your laughably deficient ones.
Well, don't bother them, it’s taking all their energy to figure out how to keep so many people from voting!
Comments