There were grown-up adult Republicans when I was a kid. There were people like Jeremiah Denton and Howard Baker, Nancy Kassenbaum and Bob Dole, John Danforth and Richard Lugar – solid Midwestern types, occasionally patrician and occasionally small-town, and they were people you could work with and who, broadly speaking, seemed to have the same goals and values and commitment to good government in whatever form it happened to take.
Then Newt happened. And the GOP became the party of talk-radio, the party of Rush, the party of Fox, the party of a thousand conspiracy theories and a million nutters, and the patricians and good-government types who tried to raise a hand got sidelined. and ultimately turfed out, one after another. They went along, because it got results – it delivered the whole Congress to the GOP, it hamstrung the Clinton presidency, it kneecapped Al Gore with the help of a dying political media – but eventually it got to be too much. John McCain tried to repudiate the birther bullshit to one of his supporters and got booed for it, but then, nobody put a gun to his head to make Caribou Barbie his running mate. I don’t recall Mitt Romney ever disavowing birtherism or conspiracy theory – but then, I don’t remember Multiple Choice Mitt ever disavowing much except for his own platform and positions in his first general election debate, when it became apparent that “bald-faced lie about what you said” is now considered an acceptable GOP debate tactic.
I don’t know what was worst last night, the lies or the truth. Saying “I never said that” about things he’d put on Twitter with considerable fanfare less than two weeks ago? Or saying he’d put his opponent in jail? Who can tell anymore? The problem is, all the subtext of the last twenty-five years of Republican politics is now text, and that text is the nominee. All the people who are cheering for “BUILD THE WALL” and “LOCK HER UP” aren’t trading in metaphor or euphemism or analogy: they legitimately want to build a wall and imprison the Democratic nominee. This crazy shit, by and large, is what they actually believe and what they actually want.
Now the GOP’s more traditional establishment elements are in a pickle: they have build their fortress on a foundation of sand and the storm is here. You can either disavow Trump and abjure his works and his pomps and his clearly empty promises, but you’re also going to cast off about two-thirds of the GOP electorate if you do, and you’re not going to get any credit from Democrats for only realizing in October 2016 that Donald Jehosephat Trump might be completely and utterly unfit even to look at a picture of the White House. Or you can ride this shitbomb all the way to Earth and die in the splatter, possibly. If you’re down in the South, or in one of those one-cow-one-vote districts out West, maybe you can survive, albeit damaged. But on current form, you’re going to be a permanent minority in national politics, you’ll probably be in a minority in Congress, and you’re going to have Trump hung around your neck by opponents for the next generation.
Ultimately, that’s what this election has become about: it’s not even Democrats versus Republicans anymore, it’s about the American system of politics versus weaponized ignorance and breathtaking unfitness for civilized society. It’s not enough to win, at this point – it’s about purging the contagion, about stopping the bleeding, about making sure that as many people as possible know that being numbered in the votes for the GOP nominee on November 8 will be to add themselves to a list of people who have proven they are unfit to govern themselves, who willingly choose the worst in humanity as the preferred leadership of this nation. About telling the Republican Party “you need to sit in the corner for a while, because you fucked up. You don’t get to play anymore.”
It’s not 1996, or 2000, or 2004, or 2008, or 2012. It’s not about stopping a guy who’s going to hold the door open for the arsonists. This time, it’s about stopping the burning truck headed straight for the fuel tank.
What are you prepared to do?