If you’ve been
reading this blog for the past year, you are probably wondering if I’ve gone
off the deep end. But I’m serious. And let me explain why.
First, let me suggest
that even though I voted for Hillary Clinton, I think a Clinton presidency
would have been a disaster. Not because she would have been a bad president who
favored policies detrimental to the country. No, but because she would have
enabled the Republicans to continue on the same path they had become so
comfortable with, gaining power by spreading nonsense, obstructing good policy,
and blaming the Democrats for the dysfunction in Washington. It would have been
four more years of what we saw under Obama. And I believe Obama was an
excellent president. But his presence made possible what the Republicans do
best: obstructing and creating meaningless legislation (ACA repeals, for
instance) just to score political points.
But now, with the
GOP in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they are in a
position where they actually have to govern. They have to put their ideology
into practice in the form of policy. So now the American people are getting a full
view of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party as they
try to turn political sloganeering into governing. It’s not pretty. And it’s
not going to get any prettier.
Exhibits A and B
are the House’s AHCA (which I have dubbed the Abominable Health Care Act) and
the Senate’s BCRA (the Beneficial Care Reduction Act), two legislative Siamese
twins that are so horrendous that every medical association and retiree
organization and insurance provider is vehemently opposed to them. The AHCA was
polling at 12 percent approval when it was rammed through by the House
Republicans and then celebrated in the Rose Garden with the Tweeter in Chief.
These shameful pieces of legislation were concocted in an effort to repeal the
ACA, but they showed a devastating ignorance of the complexity of our health
care system, as well as a disturbing lack of compassion for the neediest in our
society. What these health-care bills did, however, was to reveal the real
priorities of the GOP. The Republicans were perfectly willing to take health insurance
from over 20 million Americans so that they could give massive tax cuts to the
wealthy. Of course they tried to spin this in a positive light, but almost
everyone saw through the charade.
In a perverse
way, I almost wish they had succeeded. Then we could have seen in even more
graphic detail the effects of their ideology, and it would have been thoroughly
rejected by the American people. Hopefully, though, getting that close to
disaster will wake a lot of people up. But in the meantime, I am grateful for
the belated negative vote of cancer-stricken Senator John McCain.
Health care, of
course, is just the tip of the iceberg. Republican efforts at tax reform will be
extremely revealing. They are certain to follow the same pattern: tax cuts for the
wealthy, paid for by reductions in aid to the poor and sick and elderly.
For a few decades
now, the Republicans have been in the business of paying lip-service to the
poor and the middle class, and then pursuing policies that favor wealthy
individuals and large corporations.
Nobel
Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman explores the roots of the intellectual and
moral degeneration of the Republican Party in an editorial this week titled
“Who Ate Republicans’ Brains?” Referring to their health-care misadventures, he
writes, “When they finally got their chance at repeal, the contrast between
what they had promised and their actual proposals produced widespread and
justified public revulsion. But the stark dishonesty of the Republican jihad
against Obamacare itself demands an explanation. For it went well beyond normal
political spin: for seven years a whole party kept insisting that black was
white and up was down.
“And that kind of
behavior doesn’t come out of nowhere. The Republican health care debacle was
the culmination of a process of intellectual and moral deterioration that began
four decades ago, at the very dawn of modern movement conservatism—that is,
during the very era anti-Trump conservatives now point to as the golden age of
conservative thought.”
Krugman
identifies a key moment in the 1970s, when “Irving Kristol, the godfather of
neoconservatism, embraced supply-side economics—the claim, refuted by all
available evidence and experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves by boosting
economic growth. Writing years later, he actually boasted about valuing
political expediency over intellectual integrity: ‘I was not certain of its
economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities.’ In another essay,
he cheerfully conceded to having had a ‘cavalier attitude toward the budget
deficit,’ because it was all about creating a Republican majority—so ‘political
effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.’”
In case you don’t
make the connection, Krugman explains it: “The problem is that once you accept
the principle that it’s O.K. to lie if it helps you win elections, it gets ever
harder to limit the extent of the lying—or even to remember what it’s like to
seek the truth. . . . Given this history, the Republican health care disaster
was entirely predictable. You can’t expect good or even coherent policy
proposals from a party that has spent decades embracing politically useful lies
and denigrating expertise.”
And this
philosophy runs the gamut from health care and tax reform to climate change and
environmental stewardship. There has been a terrible dearth on the Right of any
inclination to pay the intellectual price to understand the nuances and complexities
of the issues that plague modern society. They have been content to embrace simplistic,
politically expedient doctrines and empty, disingenuous slogans that appeal to
disgruntled but ignorant voters.
So, how do we
connect the dots to Donald Trump? It isn’t hard. Let’s start with Krugman’s
term “politically useful lies.” Has there ever been a public figure who is a
pathological liar on the level of Donald Trump? At one point during the
election, Politifact calculated that Trump was lying at a rate of about 78
percent. If I had to guess, I would say that this has increased since he took
over the presidency. If he says something, you can be quite sure that it is
false. He doesn’t just contradict his own staff and cabinet. He repeatedly
contradicts himself. And of course one lie leads to another. When you can’t
admit you’ve been dishonest, you just keep digging a deeper hole, hoping to
cover previous lies with more dirt.
Let’s again use
health care as an example. During the campaign, Trump promised, among other
things, that everyone would be covered. He said in February of 2016 that
coverage for everyone was “just human decency,” an odd statement from someone
who has no concept of human decency. In 2015, he stated: “I am going to take
care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not.” He added: “The
government’s gonna pay for it.” In October 2015, he tweeted, “I am going to
save Medicare and Medicaid.” In January of this year, Trump claimed that his
plan would include “lower numbers, much lower deductibles.” But of course he has
enthusiastically supported both the AHCA and the BCRA, which would strip health
care from over 20 million Americans, largely through gutting Medicaid, and
would increase deductibles and premiums. These are just a few examples of “politically
useful lies.”
Of course, Trump
didn’t fool any of the Republican establishment with his boasts and falsehoods.
Obviously, no Republicans in the House or Senate took any of these statements
at face value when they concocted their horrid health-care bills. They have
supported and enabled him primarily because they assumed he would rubber-stamp
any cockeyed bill they sent him, regardless of how awful it might be.
And this
symbiotic relationship shows just how morally vacuous the Republican Party has
become. They knew exactly who and what Trump was from the outset of the
campaign. If you want a sampling of what Republican leaders said about Trump on
his road to the presidency, click here.
These statements
are pretty brutal, but Trump’s presidency thus far has shown that all of them
are accurate assessments of the man. If anything, his presidency has revealed
that he is actually worse than advertised. We knew he was a sleazy businessman,
but I think the corruption and depravity we have seen in the White House thus
far exceeds even our worst expectations. He did indeed drain the swamp. But he
turned it into a cesspool.
And yet all of
these Republican leaders, with the possible exception of John Kasich, have
fallen in line to one degree or another and have been Trump’s apologists,
cheerleaders, and enablers. All because they think he might enable them in
return to enact legislation that will harm the needy, enrich the already
wealthy, and turn businesses loose to pollute and create other problems for
individuals and society. This is the result of what Krugman described above—a
party that determined some time ago that it would embrace politically useful
lies in order to win elections and gain power. And don’t fall for the myth that
this is simply the way things are in Washington. That is another Republican
lie. Yes, the Democrats are imperfect. But the disease afflicting the
Republican Party has not been contracted on the Left. For the most part, they
are focused on policy that can enable government to serve the needs of the
people.
Sometimes Democrats
have a difficult time explaining their policies and intentions in catchy
soundbites, but this is because they are so concerned with the details, which
happen to be extremely complex and nuanced. Because of this, they often do not
agree with each other, and so they do not have a conveniently simplistic
ideology that can be summed up in catchphrases, bumper stickers, and tweets. Disagree
with their positions, if you will, but don’t accuse them of the sort of moral
and intellectual vacuum that the Republicans have nurtured.
Whatever moral
superiority the Republican Party has claimed in the past, with its supposed
devotion to “family values” and its catering to the evangelical bloc of
Christian voters, any moral standing is now entirely lost with the party’s
embrace of Donald Trump. And what concerns me is how many of my fellow Mormons
have followed the Republican Party down this path of corruption and dishonesty
without blinking an eye. All because they belong to the Republican tribe.
LDS Senator Jeff
Flake (R-Ariz.) has just released a book that takes his own party (and himself)
to task for these very faults. Most political commentators shrug this off as a
last-ditch effort by a Never-Trumper who is about to get the heave-ho in
Arizona. And it is highly unlikely that the Republican establishment will pay
any attention to his warnings, but the highlights from his book that appeared
on CNN.com
sounded pretty accurate to me. I rarely agree with a Republican, but I’m on
board with Flake.
The Republican
Party has a dilemma. They have adopted and enabled Trump, who appears to be not
just a narcissist, a bully, and a pathological liar, but also mentally
unbalanced, vindictive, authoritarian, ignorant, bigoted, amoral, corrupt, incompetent, and
dangerous—all the things his challengers in the Republican primary accused him
of being. But the party elders have embraced him, slime and all, and now he is
the face of their party, ugly and pathetic and losing popularity fast (approval
rating down to 33 percent this week). They can do one of two things—get rid of
him through impeachment or ride his limousine to their own demise. Either way,
though, they will not come through this intact. The Republican Party is at a
crossroads. There will be one sort of drastic change or another, neither of
them what they hoped for, and neither of them capable of keeping the party in
power. They will either excise the malignancy of Trump and in the process lose
a large part of their base that still supports the madman. Or they can continue
to pretend he is acceptable and lose the more rational portion of their
supporters, including pretty much all independents, who by now are disgusted
with the chaos and corruption coming out of the White House.
Either way, the
GOP is going to have to finally rethink some of its favorite principles, which
simply do not work in the complex and increasingly unequal modern society we inhabit.
This is a good thing. And Trump has hastened it, perhaps the only good he
will accomplish in his presidency.
