“The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to … vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).” — Rauch and Wittes.
It is said that desperate times call for desperate measures. In an article in The Atlantic, authors Johnathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes make a strong case that the current Republican Party is a threat to the rule of law and to the integrity of our democracy. Rauch and Wittes are not Democratic partisans. Both have spent their careers “strenuously avoiding partisanship.” Indeed, both have penned articles supporting people and positions that are decidedly conservative. Instead, they are concerned that the Republican Party has consistently done nothing to stop Trump’s attacks on the rule of law.
So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.
They point out that if the Press were indeed to be muzzled, the Justice Department weakened, and the Intelligence Community co-opted, our nation’s 242 year experiment in democracy will be over. As they say, the threat is “existential, not incidental.”
Rauch and Wittes focus on the Republican Party’s “failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins.” The first is Trump’s attack on the independence of the justice system. They give a detailed list of what he has done, but what concerns them is that many Republicans actually applaud the President’s actions — while other Republicans look away.
The second unforgivable sin is Trump’s “encouragement of a foreign adversary’s interference in U.S. electoral processes.” This began with his encouraging Russia, during the campaign, to steal Clinton’s emails and release them, but continues with his denials that Russian interference in the election even occurred. Again, the response of the Republican Party to this very real foreign threat to our democracy has been underwhelming. (Perhaps because they see Russian interference in our elections as helping them?)
When Trump tweeted about taking “NBC and the Networks” off the air (“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked”), congressional Republicans were quick to repudiate … left-wing media bias.
Nothing Trump has said or done has affected his popularity among his Republican base. The conservatives, traditionally suspicious of Russia, support him. The evangelicals, who used to insist that politicians behave morally, support him. Some Republican politicians who might have stood up to him are deciding not stand for re-election. Some who warned about him during the election have now put their arm around him. The Trumpists, who are often even more extreme than Trump, now control the party. And they are a “threat to democratic values and the rule of law.”
These writers have concluded that the only solution to this growing threat to our country is “to support the other party, in every race from president to dogcatcher. The goal is to make the Republican Party answerable at every level, exacting a political price so stinging as to force the party back into the democratic fold.”
The facts these authors lay out are not unknown. The problem is that few Americans seem to realize how critical the situation is. Our democracy is in serious jeopardy. Even before Trump came along, the Republican party was taking orders from big money, pandering to racists, destroying the social safety net, politicizing the courts, restricting voting rights, and perfecting the art of computerized gerrymandering. These behaviors are corrupt and anti-American and must be stopped!
I hope everyone will read this important article and share it with others. And I pray that my fellow Mormons will wake up to what is going on and stop voting for Republicans! (At least until the Party ceases this immoral, anti-democratic, and authoritarian behavior).
Source: Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes, “Boycott the Republican Party,” The Atlantic, March 2018
The system we grew up in is passing away before our very eyes.
I am a registered Republican and have not voted for an incumbent or major party candidate in years. I am way ahead of you on this one. In Fruit Heights where I live, we do not have traditional parties. We have the Pinecone and Sagebrush parties. You do not have to register, you just walk in and participate; you can attend another party the next election cycle. Each candidate runs on his or her own merits.