A DISAPPOINTING PARTY

I would so prefer to write something to make everyone laugh but the opportunities to do that with a straight face—as if there were not so many serious things that beg our attention—it makes me feel a little guilty when, in spite of those realities, I try to be funny. Given the horror that is and the horrors that continue to be the invasion of Ukraine, I’m having an equally hard time dealing with the horror that is and continues to be my own former republican party.  I left the party two years ago, when it became clear the things I cared about, the principles that made my family’s adults and then me rally round the party and the flag at every opportunity were falling left and right, as if thrown thoughtlessly out the window of a speeding car full of mindless adolescents drunk on obstructionism.

I’ve written before about the enormity of Mitch McConnell’s 2010 declaration that the republican party, in spite of a sustained and challenging national agenda, had nothing more important to do than to see that Obama didn’t get a second term.  That was a pivotal moment in my life, one that shook me, truly, to the core, but it didn’t shake the party to the core or at least didn’t shake it enough because republicans remained largely intact.  Only a handful cautioned that McConnell’s declaration was a signal that what was once part of a deliberative and participatory body was deteriorating quickly into what was more like a petulant group of juveniles and that its spokesman was simply and increasingly a cry-baby.

And then Trump was elected, and the ensuing and undeniably downward spiral left me nearly breathless in its wake until I came up for air in 2000 and left the party.  With nearly every passing day, certainly every week since, I have felt the relief of knowing I was not a party to one embarrassing performance after another culminating in last week’s shameful interrogation of Justice Jackson.  According to several reliable recent polls—this is true—fully 23% of republican Americans now really believe that our government and certain democrats are satan-worshipping pedophiles engaged in child sex-trafficking.  I can’t find words to sufficiently convey my astonishment and I know that although republican senators can’t find them either, simply knowing that such a segment of potential voters exists was enough for several of them, each of whom knows better, to shamelessly make the most of appealing to that segment during Justice Jackson’s interrogation.  

And then there was that supremely childish walk-out during the applause after a barely but nonetheless bi-partisan vote secured her appointment.   

How might the party have more plainly declared an end to the ideal that for centuries has been the world’s most effective deliberative body?  The United States congress has been that most effective institution because it worked, worked as intended by our founders, worked with ample opportunity for diverse views to be heard and then worked because whichever course the majority chose was the course followed.  What must have Mitt Romney been thinking as he stood there, alone, applauding appropriately, while his sulking fellow kindergarteners gathered up their petulance and walked out?  In so doing, they showed their utter contempt for the appointee, for congress and the sacrosanct deliberative process, for their fellow senators, for the American experiment and democracy and, certainly, for those of us who, while unable to fully comprehend the convictions of those 23%, do understand fully our own far more tangible and continuing disappointment in the republican party.