"But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing
And nothing at all keeps sending him...
Somewhere back in her long ago
Where he can still believe there's a place in her life
Someday, somewhere, she will return"
Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, "What a Fool Believes," 1978
The GOP doesn't want Pence. It wants Trump.
Pence is a straight-arrow conservative. He hasn't figured out yet that the GOP has changed.
I spoke words of consolation to Mike Pence last October in New Hampshire, when he was one of many Republican candidates challenging Trump. I congratulated him for rejecting Trump's demand that he discard Democratic votes under the pretense that fake electors were equally valid. It wasn't difficult to get up close to talk with him. Republican voters at the convention kept their distance from him.
Theoretically, Pence should have been the perfect post-Trump president. He did every single thing except openly, publicly, and defiantly commit an illegal, unconstitutional act to overthrow an election.
So, wasn't Pence a cleaned-up version of Trump? Trump without the tweets? Trump without Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, the Epstein vacations, and the "Access Hollywood" video? Trump without the former cabinet officials and White House aides who say Trump is dangerously unfit?
No. Pence thinks the GOP is a conservative party, a pro-immigration party, a party of international engagement, a party of fiscal responsibility, a party that is the heir to Reagan and the Bush presidents. It is not. Trump changed the GOP. Republicans who liked Reagan, Dole, the two Bush presidents, McCain, and Romney are without a party.Pence published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal describing the potential future for the GOP. Unlocked article. He describes a GOP that doesn't exist.
He wrote, "We embraced America’s role as the leader of the free world, and avoid "isolationism and the abandonment of American leadership." No. Trump says that alliances are unnecessary, unnatural, unappreciated, and expensive.
Pence wrote, "Republicans should pledge to deliver better trade deals that increase prosperity, not protectionist tariffs that make products more expensive." No. Trump says we need more and higher tariffs, which will mean that foreign manufacturers will pay our taxes.
Pence wrote, "Republicans should unashamedly recommit to the pro-life cause, which remains the great moral calling of our era." No.Republicans, led by Trump, are retreating from that long tradition. The position is political suicide.
Pence concludes with, "Republicans will win by embracing traditional conservative priorities."
No. The strategy that may well bring Trump to a general election victory is the one that has been overwhelmingly adopted by Republican voters. It is nativist, isolationist populism. Trump began with Obama birtherism, kicked off his campaign saying Mexican immigrants are criminals, added Muslims, added Chinese, added Central Americans, and now in the final weeks of this campaign is vilifying Haitians who are here legally. He has "otherized" non-White Americans and linked their presence to inflation, high housing costs, crime, and job loss. Trump has a consistent, coherent, story about what is wrong with America and how to fix it. Get rid of that criminal vermin and everything will be better. It may well be a winning story.
Pence imagines a Republican party as a party of principle and policy. That is gone. The party is a tribe. It is a mix of ethnicity, religion, tradition, manliness, and patriotism. We -- we normal good Americans -- are under siege, he says. Trump creates liberal tears because he fights Democrats who would poison our tribe with outsiders. Trump's crimes are irrelevant. What matters is that he leads the tribe.
Pence defended the Constitution. He was defending a law. He wasn't defending the important thing, the tribe. That makes him a traitor.
[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to Https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]
He sold his soul to the devil when he signed on in the first place. Pence knew what Trump was, but indicated you could be a moral Christian and still be for Trump. In my mind, that is not possible. He attempted to serve two lords and Trump didn’t think he did, so he was cast off, a predictable outcome.
ReplyDeleteExcellent synopsis. To be a Republican today requires one to support for president a rapist who tried to overthrow the government and has openly expressed his contempt for the Constitution and rule of law. It also requires the dismissal inconvenient facts, such as unfavorable election results. The party’s primary stock-in-trade is currently fear, anger and hatred.
ReplyDeleteLiz Cheney suggested last week that all the damage done by Trump and his supporters may have made the GOP irredeemable and real conservatives might need a new party. She’s right. There’s nothing conservative or patriotic about what the once-respectable Republican Party has become.
It's complicated. The modern history of Republican conservatism, anyway. Foreign policy produces divisions which don't connect obviously or consistently to social-issue divisions. I read an article in The Nation this summer positing today's GOP, especially J.D. Vance, as hewing towards Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservatism. Presumably that places Pence among neocons, then, alongside Dubya, Dick Cheney, and Bill Kristol, at least in terms of America's putative leadership role role abroad. But today's neocons are socially moderate, unlike Pence. And Reagan himself was reared on now-obsolete Cold War dynamics abroad, and was closer to Goldwater libertarian-conservativism on social issues than to religious conservatives like Pence. Economic policies fold in additional permutations.
ReplyDeleteTrump doesn't even belong in the foregoing, in my view, because he has no coherent worldview nor consistent principles. (That article in The Nation casts him as a "nationalist". Socially, he's a windsock). He "leads the tribe" in that for now he IS the tribe for most practical purposes. As vacuous and platitudinous as Harris is, or the self-portrayal she seeks, anyway, she is the only way the Trump boil can finally be lanced. Why oh why could it not have been DeSantis, or Haley? Anyone serious and steady.
I’ll concede that Haley presented a pretty convincing façade of rationality, at least until she endorsed Trump. But DeSantis – seriously? He won’t allow the words ‘climate change’ to be spoken even as it wreaks havoc in Florida. His state has the third highest number of homeless in the country, but he’s obsessed with his war on woke. He claimed in a campaign ad that God sent him to be our protecter and as proof, he took on Mickey Mouse. ‘Serious and steady’ indeed.
DeleteFirst off, “serious and steady”, as with Harris…..compared with whom? Trump is a low, low bar.
DeleteSecond, DeSantis has an objectively solid resume in nearly every qualification category. Unlike Trump.
“War on woke” means not acquiescing to progressive ideological orthodoxy. No, he is not a liberal.
LD, I was agreeing with most of what you said until you claimed Ronda DeSeptic as serious and steady. He was a meathead backbencher in Congress, his book banning, antiVaxing and war on Mickey Mouse in Floriduh not to mention his white GoGo boots remove him from any serious consideration for a National Leadership position.
DeleteTrue, he's not a liberal. As a representative in the house, he voted against providing federal disaster relief to New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, but as governor has requested it now and in 2022 for Florida. Maybe he's just an asshole.
DeleteI think we are in one of those rare periods in American history when the two party system dissolves and reconfigures itself. The Republican Party is becoming a party of populism; the Democratic Party is an unstable combination of college graduates and minorities that may not be viable in the long run.
ReplyDeleteThe old configuration is gone, and it will probably take a while until a new stable configuration emerges.
I don’t read anything in these comments about the potential that we are reaching the end of the era of politics as a form of governance. The world has never had so many people with such mobility and with shrinking clans and diminished religious identity and values, and such low education on basic civics. As long as we are speculating, why not consider that there are no longer agreed upon moral ideals? Even the “non-aggression” of anarcho-capitalist theorists had a moral framework about what is “good”. I see scant evidence of that in our current discourse.
ReplyDeleteI remember back in the 1990s reading books about us entering a post-modern, post-truth era. What seemed outrageous, confusing and improbable back then is now the air we all breathe. The paradigms are shifting quickly and I think old reference models about liberal or conservative are nearly irrelevant. They are meaningless labels that are useful for stirring arguments about deck chairs as the ship is listing. I hope I’m wrong and sanity will prevail.
This is plain wrong.
ReplyDeleteThe GOPee hasn't changed. It's still the party set out to destroy this country at the behest of corporations and churches.
There is little daylight, policy-wise , between what a President Pence (yuk) would do and what TFG would do. They are different flavors of the same product.
TFG's despicableness doesn't make GWB or Raygun any better for this country, nor does it make Cheney or Pence better. It just makes them different.
An interesting glimpse into what passes for the mind of a homunculus who was tagged by the late Doghouse O'Reilly of Indiana as Mike Dense, a most fitting name. His tongue bathing of Trump for 4 long years was the most disgusting display of sycophancy I've ever seen. He was the chief Toad among a gang of Toadies, and the Republic is better off without him.
ReplyDelete