It may show up in the Abbreviated Pundits post (my favorite thing to start the day with), Charles Blow takes on the state of the GOP in the NY Times with Donald Trump: The Gateway Degenerate. Mr. Blow understands the GOP perfectly well, but is wrong in thinking the GOP needed Trump as some sort of match igniting the gas, the GOP had stepped over that line long ago (even before Senator McConnell vowed to block everything Obama tried to do). A few quotes:
This is all an outgrowth of Trump’s degradation of common decency. Trump was the gateway candidate. When Republicans allowed themselves to accept and support him in spite of his glaring flaws and his life lived in opposition to the values they once professed and insisted upon, they moved themselves into another moral realm in which literally nothing was beyond the pale.
It is a sort of by-any-means-necessary, no-sin-is-too-grave, all-facts-are-fungible space in the moral universe where the rules of basic human decency warp.
The column ends with:
Republicans, blinded by fear and rage, thirsty for power, desperate for a reclamation and reassertion of racial power, have cast their lot with the great deceiver and all their previous deal-breakers are now negotiable.
This first quote isn’t true (“This is all an outgrowth of Trump’s degradation of common decency”) but perhaps the last is accurate. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick offered another take in Vietnam’s Unhealed Wounds:
For more than a generation, instead of forging a path to reconciliation, we have allowed the wounds the war inflicted on our nation, our politics and our families to fester. The troubles that trouble us today — alienation, resentment and cynicism; mistrust of our government and one another; breakdown of civil discourse and civic institutions; conflicts over ethnicity and class; lack of accountability in powerful institutions — so many of these seeds were sewn during the Vietnam War.
The GOP began and this march to the institution of a fascist state a long time ago and probably hit a historical sweet spot with the ability to target communication so tightly. There may have elements as described by Burns and Novick that were exploited, but they were exploited and not the cause.
The truth simply is not hard to follow because we have watched it unfold in think tanks funded by the ultra wealthy, Fox news, and cesspool of Republican talk radio. Step-by-step a larger set of (largely) Republicans drank the kool-aid. Their voice is that chilling voice that can be heard in Gianforte’s post-election press conference that shouted out “We forgive you.” Of course Gianforte is forgiven, because in the GOP, world progressives and the press are not worthy of respect any longer so there was nothing to forgive in the first place.
If not Donald Trump, it would have been some other narcissistic proto-dictator that would have filled this hole. Probably someone a lot more competent than the pussy-grabber in chief.
We are in a constitutional crisis only because the GOP chose ignorance and hate over a belief in democracy, shared sacrifice, and the ideals the country was founded. We live it week-to-week in my state of North Carolina where the GOP, just like the nation, suffers a continuing degradation in public education, the rights of minorities, environmental protections, workers rights, and public infrastructure.
With their transcendence to power in the House and Senate, it is all to clear that Trump could go shoot somebody and not get impeached. It comforts us that Joe Scarborough, Nichole Wallace, and some other Republicans are horrified, but that is small comfort.
So, keep up the Resistance. Assuming we make it to 2020, this will not be over for a long time.
I end this by recognizing the sacrifices made this week by true American heroes who gave up their lives to fight hate: Ricky Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche. Two more victims of the forces that gave us Donald Trump.