Via ThinkProgress, we read that Episcopal Priest and former Republican Senator John
Danforth is not happy with the current Republican Presidential field:
What have been the big applause lines in these debates? Well, a statement that the governor of Texas is responsible for killing 234 people on death row. Or that we favor torture. Or that we’re creating a fence on the Mexican border that electrocutes people when they try to cross it. Or when people show up at the emergency room at hospitals and they’re not insured don’t treat them. And that, I mean these are the big applause lines, people just hoop and holler when they hear all that. [...]
It doesn’t have anything to do with the republican party that I was a part of. This is just totally different. And all of these people who are saying this, y’know, and claiming that, y’know, they’re for all this stuff, they also sort of ostentatiously say, “Oh, we’re very religious people. We really, we’re just very pious, Christian people.” They were for torture, and electrocution of the people on along the border and all of that. That doesn’t have anything to do with, is contrary to the Christianity that I understand.
One might be tempted to point out that this has been an aspect of the Republican Party for a very long time. Richard Nixon's cronies were engaging in "rat-fucking" in the 1960s, and Newt Gingrich has been the evil doppelganger of Ronald Reagan for as long as he's been in public life -- revealing the rot beneath the surface of Reagan's "friendly fascism" that Reagan himself worked so hard to obscure.
But of course, dirty politics and machiavellian policy approaches are one thing, and most certainly bi-partisan. What is different to Danforth it seems is the openness with which the Republican Party, both in terms of its candidates and in terms of it's most dedicated activists, has embraced the worst angels of its nature. It has become, as an institution, dedicated to the basest instincts of American electoral politics, and instead of seeking to rise above those instincts, the candidates have embraced them wholeheartedly.
How amazing is it that in many ways the most faithfully conservative (in a traditional sense) candidate in the election, John Huntsman, can't break 2% in Iowa? Why not? Because he refuses to pretend that the crazy base of the Republican electorate has anything legitimate to offer the party or the country as long as it applauds executions and boos gay soldiers.
Danforth may offer out a hope to the Republicans that they might stand for something more morally worthwhile than the values embraced by the goon squad that represents its base. But I suspect that, to the degree that values matter to someone like Danforth more than party labels do, he and those like him will continue to drift out of the Republican party, if not necessarily to join the Democrats, at least to stand as lonely witnesses to the death of a party that used to stand for the best of what we ought to be as a nation.
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