Jeff Flake: 'My Party Might Not Deserve to Lead'
It's incumbent on us to mention that one quality shared by nearly all Republicans who have taken on President Trump is that they're leaving their jobs. John McCain, Bob Corker, and Jeff Flake all have limited time left in the game, and they're lamenting Trumpism on their way out so they won't find themselves on the wrong page of the history books. Yet they still didn't have to speak out, and they deserve some measure of respect for doing so. Flake, for instance, took to the podium at a National Press Club event Thursday evening and did not mince words about the state of the Republican Party under its current leadership.
We must be able to at least describe honestly what we are seeing with our own eyes. That is the least that we owe the people we represent. Not to describe that which we wish to be, or to enable further confusion with the oh-so-familiar “What the president meant to say…” No, the presidency is far too powerful an institution for a president to be so enabled.
But then, never has a party abandoned – fled! - its principles and deeply-held beliefs as quickly as my party fled its principles in the face of a nativist juggernaut...
If my party is going to try to pass off the degradation of the United States and her values from the White House as normal … if we are going to cloister ourselves in the alternative truth of an erratic leader … if we are going to refuse to live in the world that everyone else lives in … and reckon with the daily reality that they face – including their very real and understandable anxiety they feel … then my party might not deserve to lead.
The "degradation of the United States and her values" is no loose talk. But the real takeaway here concerns the conservative bubble world, where millions of Americans-including the president-have cloistered themselves, watching Fox News and listening to talk radio that assures them, over and over, that Everything Is Going Great, Except For Those Godless Liberal Snowflakes. There is now an entire political entertainment ecosystem designed not just to reinforce a particular worldview, but to wave away the mad ramblings and disastrous decisions of the world's most powerful man. Republican leaders are wholly complicit in this, as are conservative leaders outside the party proper. If you need evidence of that, you need only look at the Stormy Daniels fiasco-which Evangelical bigwigs initially greeted by granting the president "a mulligan."
Jeff Flake in New Hampshire: "We have instead succumbed to what can only be described as a propaganda-fueled dystopian view of conservatism." (via ABC) pic.twitter.com/VwdJHh7R5k
- Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 16, 2018
What remains to be seen is to what extent people like Flake understand that Trump did not usher in this era by himself, like some Vanguard of the Stupid. Flake continued:
We could all stand to be chastened for our part in this.
It has been a long, tortured process that has gotten us here, and it will take will and work to get us out of here – to once again put the interests of the people who elect us ahead of the prerogatives of power. It shouldn’t be hard because it is basic; but it will be hard.
To restore leadership that is aware of and cherishes our constitutional framework, which by design is meant to force compromise. It shouldn’t be hard because it is basic; but it will be hard.
To once again have a leader that assumes that Democrats and Republicans are not intractable enemies but competing friends. Leadership that recognizes the once-seminal American notion of the common good. It shouldn’t be hard because it is basic; but it will be hard.
The Arizona senator acknowledges a "long, tortured process," but does he really see that process as it is? While Trump has driven an almighty wedge between the two Americas, the divide was there already. He merely adapted himself to an environment where his predecessor was already being characterized as a Muslim Marxist fascist Kenyan by the Tea Party crowd, a group that told the world-and themselves-that they were primarily concerned with the national debt.
This kind of self-delusion is rampant, and it fuels whatever psychological justifications are necessary for the Republican Party to make an unabashed pivot to pure power politics. That effort has culminated in a shameless war on certain citizens' right to vote. Any national reconciliation will require the leaders of the conservative movement to tell their flock the hard truth: that the movement has lost its mind, or at least any attachment to principle. Flake moved in that direction last night, but he's also moving for the exit door. A real solution will require the brave voices of dissent to stay in the room and fight.
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