Republican Lawmakers Are Cowards. Here's Why
The moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party is the gaping chest wound of America.
Democratic strategists and commentators have spent weeks diagnosing the party’s ills, for good reason: They just lost an election they expected to win.
But for the American body politic, that represents the equivalent of examining a sprained ankle while ignoring a gaping chest wound. The gaping chest wound is the moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party.
The GOP’s descent into nihilism has become so familiar as to almost escape notice. Indeed, the reason Democratic shortcomings attract more scrutiny is that serious-minded people now take for granted that only Democrats remain capable of running our government consistent with the rule of law.
The Republican president is an unhinged demagogue motivated by escaping prosecution for crimes, gratifying his ego, and separating supporters from their money. He’s not above maintaining a mutual assistance relationship with our Russian adversaries, who know that Donald Trump divides and weakens America. Trump babbles like a drunk at the end of the bar about taking control of the Panama Canal, Canada, Greenland, and the Gaza Strip. Because he has no principles beyond power itself, neither does his party.
Trump’s chief benefactor is a man-child with the fattest checkbook and largest social media megaphone in the world. Elon Musk’s frenetic posting on X shows him, like so many of his fans, in the grip of paranoid fantasies about the imagined evils of political opponents.
The Republican Congress is dominated by sycophants, extremists, performance artists, and opportunists. Those who know better bow down out of fear, not only for their careers but also for physical safety from attack by their own constituents.
That’s because the Republican voting base is shot through with anger.