The End of the Republicans’ Mythical Big Tent

For years the Republican Party claimed it was a "big tent" party where differing views and opinions were tolerated and there were some unifying principles.  Yes, in some ways the claim was a farce, but there nonetheless was not a single litmus test for inclusion within the Party.  Those days are gone, perhaps forever. Now, the single test to be a Republican is worship of and self-prostitution to Donald Trump, a man devoid of any priciples save self-promotion and lying incessantly. The "grand old party" is effectively dead and anyone refusing to prostrate themselves before Trump and parrot his lies in simply no longer welcome.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this reality and the continued growing maral bankruptcy that now defines the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

The best way to understand a controversial new resolution from the Republican National Committee censuring Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger is not, as some people have suggested, to legitimize the January 6 attack on the Capitol, but as something more primal: Trump service. . . . . designed to pacify the angry ochre god-king and his acolytes.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Republican Party prided itself on being a big-tent party. This didn’t mean that anything went—generally, members were expected to adhere to a philosophy of free markets and small government—but the party tolerated the left-leaning Nelson Rockefeller as well as the rock-ribbed Barry Goldwater, the conservative Ronald Reagan and the moderate Arlen Specter. The GOP no longer has many coherent policy goals, mixing free traders and tariff fanatics, entitlement-cutters with populists. The single unifying requirement is paying fealty to Donald Trump. Pretty much anyone willing to do that is welcome. This resolution is a demonstration of that fealty.

Cheney and Kinzinger’s purported sin is that they are serving on the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. . . . . This is a growing irritant to Trump allies, because the committee has been scoring repeated, though preliminary, successes. CNN reported just yesterday that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of McCarthy’s would-be appointees, spoke with Trump for 10 minutes on January 6. The committee has additionally collected damning evidence about Trump’s machinations before that day, and about communications with his aides during the riot.

The RNC’s resolution says that Cheney and Kinzinger “are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.” After initial coverage of the resolution portrayed it as referring to the January 6 violence as “legitimate political discourse,” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel released a statement saying the January 6 committee was persecuting “ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

Even if it stops short of declaring the violence “legitimate political discourse,” the resolution is nevertheless an attack on basic democratic principles. It is part of a push to legitimize the “paperwork coup,” the weeks-long effort by Trump and his cronies to cling to power by stealing an election that Joe Biden had won. Whether such behavior was illegal or simply immoral, dishonest, and dangerous to American democracy is a topic crying out for debate and investigation—by, say, the January 6 committee.

The RNC could have called for Cheney and Kinzinger to be expelled from the House Republican Caucus, but it didn’t do that, because the point is to satisfy Trump—a man who’s always been more concerned with appearances than actions.

Once you start looking for Trump service in today’s Republican Party, you can see it everywhere. The phenomenon of smart, ambitious politicians clumsily attempting to appeal to Trump and earn his endorsement, which I noted recently, is one example. Even politicians who are toying with challenging Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are engaged in Trump service.

The imperative of Trump service is why former Vice President Mike Pence’s presidential hopes are doomed. Yesterday, Pence once again said that he’d had no power to overturn the results of the 2020 election. . . . Pence simply cannot perform sufficient Trump service without saying that he could have overturned the election, which would, of course, be disqualifying in the eyes of Trump fans.

One might say that these contortions to pacify Trump are really just attempts to respond to the desires of Republican voters, but this defense is flawed. First, pandering to voters who wanted to overturn a legitimate election (and coddling their false claims that the election was stolen) is an abdication of citizenship and leadership.

Second, if Trump service is intended as voter service, it’s at least a second-order effect; the participants seem most concerned about what the former president will do. . . . Some recent polls have even found that fewer than half of Republican voters—including many Trump fans—want to see him run again in 2024.

In 2016, Republican primary voters drove Trump’s success, even as party leaders were horrified by him. Six years later, the voters have cooled a bit on Trump, but the party apparatus has turned itself over to placate him.