The Virginia Republican Party is finished. We finished ourselves. Trumpublican darling State Senator Amanda Chase is the Medusa QAnon of the Commonwealth with her fraudulent fraud claims. Trump won’t admit defeat. Even strong characters like Nick Freitas won’t concede. Leon Benjamin won’t concede even after losing in a landslide.
Good people have been corrupted by a Trump Strain epidemic, pandemic. What are rational people to do? The rotting corpse of the TEA Party needs to be covered in lye. No perfume. No eulogy. No vaseline.
Honestly – we’re not the only ones that ought to admit defeat. Left-of-center moderates should flee to the Democratic Party if they haven’t already. Moderates should form a Virginia Independent Party and draft someone like Denver Riggleman or Bill Bolling.
Progressive Democrats should accept that the Democratic Party will never accept them, embrace the Movement for a People’s Party and rescue Bernie’s dream from the corporate clutches of Kamala Harris.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden represent Virginia Democrats as well as John McCain and Donald Trump represent Virginia Republicans. The time for a duopoly is finished. The time to move forward is now. Let’s embrace the chaos and reject the corruption that surrounds us. Republicans need a cleanse to clear the Trumpism from its bloodstream and digestive system.
But that won’t happen.
It’s time for the hangers-on to stop hanging on. Let’s all do something else now. Trump broke the GOP easily because the GOP was already hollowed out by corporate corruption. Joe Biden would have lost if Bernie Sanders and AOC hadn’t rescued his lethargic campaign.
While Abigail Spanberger bites her thumb at the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, it’s the Progressives who are speaking the people’s language, not Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Remember policy? There was a time when policy was more important than politics and when character was more important than popularity. The Republican Party will never escape the shadow grip of Donald Trump. Sometimes when you sell out you sell out forever.
The Republican and Democratic Parties aren’t unified despite their being ubiquitous. Let’s blow them up and join the rest of the First World Republics and Democracies with a multi-party system of our own.
I agree that sometimes when you sell out, the decision can be irreversible, especially when character and basic morality no longer matter. Trump merely embodies the moral bankruptcy of the GOP which crept in when Christofascists were voted into the party committees. The second column better describes where the Virginia GOP is today. Here are excerpts:
Chris Saxman and Steven Brodie Tucker have each delivered withering critiques of the Republican Party of Virginia – and rightly so. Somehow, however, their zeal to look past the Virginia GOP combined with old tribal antipathy toward its rival to create a bizarrely shared viewpoint that the entire two-party system is somehow in trouble.
Both men rely largely on anecdotes (Saxman explicitly so) for their assertions about the Democrats’ travails. The data tell a different story.
Biden won more than 54 percent of the vote last week. Not only was that the largest share of the vote for a presidential candidate in Virginia since 1988, but it was also the best performance for a Democratic nominee in Virginia since FDR. Yet somehow, Tucker’s response to the party having it’s best presidential result since World War II was …”Let’s blow them up.”
The Congressional results were far more troubling for the Democrats nationally, but Virginia was another story. All three House seats taken from the GOP in 2018 were held. In fact, Congresswomen Luria, Spanberger, and Wexler won higher shares of the vote in 2020 than in 2018. This is hardly the sign of a party in trouble.
Tucker and Saxman are straight shooters. Their blistering diagnoses of the Republicans make that clear. However, their long histories in that party have shaded their views on the Democrats. As Saxman himself notes (albeit regarding the media): “It’s one thing to show bias, we all have some.” They may also have another motive – building a third-party movement. Tucker is explicit on this: “Moderates should form a Virginia Independent Party….”
… but then he nearly causes a miscarriage by recommending the V.I.P. “… draft someone like Denver Riggleman or Bill Bolling.”
Tucker would have us believe a movement led by an outgoing Congressman “who was on President Donald Trump’s re-election team in Virginia” (CBS19) and an ex-LG who openly supported Trump can appeal to the 54 percent of Virginians who supported Biden. I’m … not seeing it.
[T]he Democratic Party now has all three statewide offices, both U.S. Senators, a Congressional majority, and legislative majorities, all while delivering electoral votes for a victorious Democratic president. Nearly everyone acknowledges the Democrats are the favorites in Virginia’s 2021 races. Of course, favorites can lose, but it’s more difficult to see that if the opposition divides between pro-Trump Republicans and pro-Trump “Independents.”
For now, the simple fact remains that the Democratic Party of Virginia is stronger than it has been in decades. What ails the Virginia Republicans is limited solely to the Virginia Republicans.
Having driven away moderates and people actually tethered to reality, it is hard to see how the Virginia GOP can be restored to sanity.
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