The Republican Party in which I grew up and later served as an activist and City Committee member for Virginia Beach is dead and gone. Many of my former Republican colleagues - or at least those who have not fled the party like I have - remain in denial and sadly refuse to see the ugliness and, in my view, evil, that they are condoning through their acquiescence to Trump as the GOP standard bearer. Through the years I have found that "getting along" and "going with the flow" are easy cop outs. In contrast, speaking up for what is right and moral takes a spine and admittedly may not make one popular with one's circle of friends. Indeed, it made me persona non-grata in the Virginia Beach GOP. Nonetheless, I have always opted to speak out for what I perceive to be right. As Frank Rich lays out in a lengthy but wonderful column in
New York Magazine opposing Donald Trump and the ugly elements in the GOP party base that have rallied to him required courage and backbone. Most, as Rich notes, Have acted like the Vichy French who opted to get in bed with Hitler in occupied France during WWII. Morality and decency to them, and most of the leadership of today's GOP, is secondary to opportunism and self-advancement. I sincerely hope that history will be especially brutal to these individuals - Paul Ryan in particular - who put self-promotion ahead of morality and decency. Here are column highlights:
In
2016, springtime for Hitler has been held over by popular demand to summer and
fall. “It’s difficult to say when the Hitler analogies got out of control,” observed the writer Michael
Lind in Politico way back in March, after the somewhat unexpected
trilogy of Bill Maher, Louis C.K., and Glenn Beck found common ground in
likening Donald Trump to the Führer. But the avalanche of analogies never let
up. By June, the onetime Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman was
comparing Trump to both Hitler and Mussolini
when addressing fellow GOP fat cats at Mitt Romney’s annual closed-door
conclave in Park City. When a New York Times review of a new Hitler
biography in September highlighted some striking Trump
parallels, the book in question, a thousand pages long and
translated from the German, soared up the Amazon list as perplexed Americans
ransacked any source for clues to the provenance of the toxic lunatic who
threatened their country.
Trump,
I’ll argue not for the first time, is no Hitler. . . . . He has neither the
attention span, organizational discipline, nor ideological zeal it takes to be
a genocidal dictator. He doesn’t even have the skill set to avoid serial
bankruptcies.
Yet
if Trump is no Hitler, he’s proved himself a stalking horse for a movement with
Hitlerian ambitions, psychoses, and allies, the foremost of whom is a strongman
with credible Hitler potential, Vladimir Putin. Trump has made himself the
supreme leader of an enraged swath of Americans, perhaps some 40 percent of the
electorate, as eager to blow up our republic as the Nazis were Weimar. A subset
of that Trumpentariat adheres to neo-Nazi values (and in some cases neo-Nazi
organizations) defined by a hatred of immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and most other
racial and ethnic minorities.
[T]he Trumpist cause will outlive him. The Trumpists themselves,
nurtured within the GOP in embryo for a half-century before Trump’s candidacy
rallied them and rebranded them in his own image, will march on. Having already
been emboldened by their easy conquest of a major political party, they will be
more inflamed than ever by a crushing defeat in an election they are certain is
rigged. They may yet rally around a new demagogue who is a more effective
Hitler surrogate than Trump could ever be.
And
that’s why a second, intertwined analogy remains very much on the table: the
analogy between Trump’s collaborators and appeasers and their antecedents who
stood idly by or actively abetted Hitler as he consolidated power in the Nazi
era. The weak Republican elites who did little or nothing to bring Trump down
in 2016 — and who have pandered to his constituency ever since Sarah Palin’s
rallies boiled over into anti-Obama lynch-mob hysteria two presidential
elections ago — cannot slink away from history’s harsh verdict on the grounds
that Trump is no Hitler. After all, Hitler wasn’t fully Hitler either when too
many men in power gave him a free pass in the 1930s.
It
was not until 1942,
according to the Holocaust historian Peter Novick, that “the special fate that
Hitler had reserved for the Jews of Europe became known in the West.” But
history has not judged that timeline to be an exculpatory factor for
Chamberlain, the Vichy collaborators, and the startling number of prominent
Americans, most notoriously the aviator turned arch-isolationist Charles
Lindbergh, who earlier on eased Hitler’s glide path to his subsequent infamy.
Now historical judgment is lying in wait for their contemporary
counterparts. Those in power who said “Yes” or “Maybe” to Trump will remain on
the moral hook not only for him but for whatever form Trumpism takes after
November 8. They’re in a lose-lose bind: As posterity won’t be kind to them
over the long term, so voters, including those in their own party, will punish
them in the near term, too.
To
date, the blame game over accountability for Trump has focused mostly
on the press (which, of course, is also found guilty by Trump and his followers
of promoting Clinton). But the press didn’t create him and did not have the
power to stop him.
His voters didn’t give a hoot about the outright fraud of Trump
University, his other egregious businesses,
his nonpayment of taxes,
and his racial and sexual transgressions.
They ridiculed or ignored the high-minded editorials and op-eds skewering Trump
even when written by conservative pundits (George Will, Michael Gerson, and Bret Stephens most
ferociously and persistently) or published in traditionally conservative
outlets from National Review
to the Arizona Republic.
They didn’t even care that the Koch brothers —
one of whom, Charles, described Trump’s proposed Muslim registry as
“reminiscent of Nazi Germany” — refused to support him.
The
only people with the power to shut down Trump were those sitting at the top of
the Republican Party. . . . divided Republican elites into three categories:
“Vichy Republicans,” who went along with Trump and the party base enamored of
him; “Survival Republicans,” who tried to remain as neutral as Switzerland; and
“Resistance Republicans,” who actively battled his nomination.
In the GOP of 2016, a number of big-name figures fell into the
Resistance camp or close to it, including Romney, many of Bush 41 and 43’s
family members, former appointees and political strategists (like Murphy), and
the long lists of retired GOP officeholders who signed anti-Trump letters and
churned out an ocean of op-eds. But they had one fatal drawback when it came to
stopping Trump: None of them held any actual power within their party.
Unfortunately for America, those with real clout in the GOP were
without exception Vichy, not Resistance, Republicans: the current leadership of
both chambers of Congress (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell), the party chair (Reince
Priebus), and the incumbent senators with national followings (John McCain, Ted
Cruz). Not to mention their big donors. These collaborators, in contrast to the
conservative pundits and out-of-power Republicans of the Resistance, did have
the means to derail Trump. For them to do so would have required the guts to
defy a mob in their own party and to summon the sacrifice, strategy, and
cunning that constitute leadership.
No matter what slur Trump disgorged, they failed to act, even when
they were the specific targets of his insults. They failed to rally around any
plan, however risky or potentially divisive within the party, for challenging
Trump at the convention in Cleveland. Indeed, with the exception of three
incumbent senators not up for reelection (Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Jeff Flake of
Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina) and a handful of retro GOP moderates
and retiring members in the House, every Republican holding office in
Washington remained in the Vichy and Survival camps until long after Trump had
locked up the nomination. This hall of shame includes supposedly mainstream
northeastern Republicans . . .
It was bad enough that the top Republican leaders gritted their teeth
and continued to endorse Trump throughout his cavalcade of indignities over the
first 14 months of his campaign. But you’d think even the most cynical of them
would have acknowledged that a Rubicon had been reached in mid-August when
back-to-back developments left no doubt that Trump was not just a reckless
ignoramus and bigot but a clear-and-present danger both to national security
and to the Constitution.
First came the Times report of handwritten
ledgers indicating that his then–campaign chairman, the dictator-friendly
lobbyist Paul Manafort, had been paid $12.7 million
from Putin puppets for murky services rendered in Ukraine. Given
Trump’s repeated Putin accolades, vocal disdain for NATO, and open invitation
to the Kremlin to disrupt an American election, it was still further evidence,
if any were needed, that Trump was “an unwitting agent of the Russian
Federation,” in the words of the former CIA official Michael Morell. Then came
the supplanting of Manafort by Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon, a kingpin of an
alt-right movement well stocked with anti-Semites
and white supremacists. But even then the Vichy Republicans stayed
in line, either vacillating, hiding, or muttering faint critiques of their
party’s standard-bearer.
Much of the cross-referencing of Trump and Hitler
this year has invoked Lindbergh because of Trump’s slogan “America First,”
which is also the name of the fascist-friendly organization for which Lindbergh
became a leading spokesman prior to America’s entry into World War II. Trump
dismissed that link, saying that he saw America First as “a brand-new, modern
term.” He probably didn’t know he had stumbled into Hitlerspeak (“the Big Lie”)
to tar Obamacare either. On the issue of his ignorance, at least, I believe
him. Trump is nothing if not an idiot savant when it comes to fascism.
But America First all too soon became a magnet not just for
isolationists intent on avoiding another world war but for nativists and bigots
embracing Hitler’s pathologies: the populist radio priest Father Coughlin and
industrialists like the rabidly anti-Semitic Henry Ford and the textile
manufacturer William Regnery (whose son Henry would soon start the eponymous
conservative publishing house that nurtured the modern GOP’s radical right). It
devolved into what Time condemned as a hot mess of “Jew-haters,
Roosevelt-haters, England-haters, Coughlinites, politicians, and demagogues.”
[T]he Vichy Republicans supporting Trump use some of the same
arguments Lindbergh and his fellow appeasers trotted out to rationalize their
support of Hitler. Their argument of choice is that Trump, however imperfect,
is still the lesser of two evils. In the ’30s, the evil sometimes considered
greater than Hitler was Stalin, who was thought to be responsible for
butchering tens of millions of people, a crime not exactly comparable to
Clinton’s worst sins even if you believe she murdered Vince Foster. Some Hitler
appeasers also judged Hitler as a lesser evil to FDR. As Hitler’s bombs were
raining down on England in 1940, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio argued that “there
is a great deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the
New Deal circles in Washington than there will ever be” from the Nazis. This is
of a piece with the Vichy Republicans who claim that a Trump presidency is
preferable to letting Clinton nominate justices to the Supreme Court.
For much of the campaign, Ryan, McConnell, McCain & Co. were also
prone to claiming that the 70-year-old Trump would somehow change or grow over
time or be boxed in by the constitution. If elected, he would be contained by
“the constraints and accountability built into the U.S. system of government,”
in the words of The Wall Street Journal editorial
page, which, like Ryan and McConnell, rapped Trump on the wrist for
his excesses but still boosted him as the preferable alternative to “Barack
Obama’s third term led by Hillary Clinton.” This argument ignores the reality
of presidential power in the age of the Imperial Presidency — the very power
that conservatives complain Obama has abused — not to mention the realities of
human behavior. And again it echoes the naïveté of Hitler’s American appeasers,
including Lindbergh, who believed that “the Germans would eventually moderate
the excesses of [Hitler’s] Nazi regime.”
[T]oday’s Vichy Republicans, whose reasons for supporting the Putin-embracing
Trump were entirely selfish and partisan: clinging to power, holding on to
their congressional majority, and preserving a legislative agenda that would
reward the party’s biggest donors with further tax cuts. However misguided,
obtuse, or bigoted, Lindbergh and his fellow Hitler appeasers, including some
of those in Congress, were trying to put America, not their own careers or
party, first.
As Election Day approaches, some conservative
editorialists are already predicting that a Trump defeat will bring peace in
our time to the GOP — a restoration of the pre-Trump status quo. . . . . It
should be noted that these are some of the same conservative prognosticators
who predicted Republicans would walk away from Trump a year ago. It’s also the
same prediction that followed Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat by Lyndon
Johnson in 1964. The Republicans had rolled the dice on undiluted conservatism
and lost catastrophically.
The Trumpists are more radical than Goldwater’s or Reagan’s followers
were. They are building their own burgeoning Breitbart–Roger Ailes media empire
and are primed to disregard the results of a “stolen” election in which the
loser may not concede. The “Second Amendment people”
that Trump egged on are already talking openly about rebellion and
assassination after a Clinton victory. The damage they may inflict on the
country, let alone the Republican Party and the homegrown Nigel Farage–like
leaders they may rally around, is yet to be determined. As Steve Schmidt, the
former McCain campaign strategist and a #NeverTrumper, told the Washington Post,
the postelection GOP will “look like Berlin circa 1945.”
Whatever
happens on November 8, few expect a wipeout of Ryan’s 60-seat House majority.
But the Berlin analogy is nonetheless apt. There will be chaos and open warfare
regardless, and it’s hard to see a world where anything like the ancien régime
can be restored. . . . This is the same party that embraced Trump in the first
place. Most Republicans prefer his signature platform of sealed borders,
protectionism, and opposition to Social Security and Medicare cuts to Ryan’s
priorities of immigration reform, open trade, and “privatizing” entitlements. Whether
Trump wins or loses, Ryan and his fellow elites are certain to be rejected by
their own party’s base much as Bush, Rubio, and Kasich were during the
primaries — and much as John Boehner and Eric Cantor were before that. The
postelection purge may be particularly ugly, given how unhappy many Trump
voters are with what they regarded as the elites’ lukewarm support for their
standard-bearer.
With time and distance, the morally self-regarding Ryan, “the Hamlet of southern
Wisconsin,” in George Will’s withering dismissal, and some of the
other GOP elites who tried to be on both sides of the Trump question may
resemble no one so much as Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the
Seventh Marquess of Londonderry. The subject of a 2000 biography, Making
Friends With Hitler, by the great Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw — and
surely a model for the fictional appeaser in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The
Remains of the Day — Lord Londonderry was a member of the British Cabinet
from 1931 to 1935 who sought a friendly peace with the Nazis. Londonderry,
Kershaw writes, “had no truck with the fanatical Fascists, or the wide-eyed
cranks and mystics who fell for Hitler lock, stock and barrel”; he merely “saw
the need to come to a political arrangement with Hitler’s regime.” In the end,
however, his noble intentions and distance from the Brownshirts didn’t matter —
his “reputation was ruined.”
If history is just, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will in time be viewed as equivalent with moral bankruptcy and selfishness. Having been on our recent vacation and meeting many kind and wonderful non-white individuals, I am further convinced that those who would further their careers by sowing hatred of others need to become social and political outcasts. Indeed, if the Catholic Church had any moral credibility left, bishops would refuse to allow Ryan to receive communion. What he stands for and advocates for is diametrically opposed to the Catholic Church's supposed social gospel message.
