A couple of days ago Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” announced that he was “leaving” the Republican Party. Why it was considered newsworthy for a television host who neither holds nor is running for public office (and has not done so in nearly two decades) to “leave” a political party was, and is still, lost on me.
This morning, for some reason, I had MSNBC on the car radio (xm), and heard the beginning of a panel discussion that included inter alia longtime conservative pundit George Will. Scarborough, helpfully, reminded the audience that Will had also “left” the Republican Party last year and declared himself an “independent,” and asked the bespectacled cognoscente, “How does it feel?”
Will fumbled for a bit, then gave what struck me as a very revealing answer:
”You don’t feel implicated.”
As the inimitable driftglass has been pointing out nearly every day for months and years now, not only have the Republican Party and American conservatism been slowly building and coalescing and metastasizing toward the precise form and function at which it exists at this precise moment in history for at least the past 25 years, but us dirty commie hippie libtards have for all that time been warning everyone who would listen that this was precisely where Republican/conservative politics and punditry have been inexorably and purposefully leading. And the only thing anyone who has actively supported, enabled, encouraged, and directed this descent into Orwellian madness has ever been willing to do about it is to “leave the Republican Party” and declare themselves “independents,” as if “independent” were a noun.
We saw it with the so-called “Tea Party”; millions of Republican voters, fans and enablers who couldn’t process their own culpability for the disaster that they and their erstwhile hero, George W. Bush, whom they’d spent eight years lionizing as a brilliant, strong, resolute, divinely-ordained, historically-great Mount-Rushmore-worthy leader, and their party, had wrought on the nation and the world, suddenly declaring themselves — and praising themselves for being — “independents” while carrying bucketloads of perfidious propaganda water for the sole benefit of the GOP. It was the most sickening, disingenuous, cynical political spectacle I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Why did they do it? So they would not “feel implicated.”
Joe Scarborough and George Will aren’t the first high-profile so-called “conservatives” to announce their departure from the party they’ve been supporting and enabling all of their adult lives. And why not? They’re not running for office. They’re not policymakers. They’re not out there whoring for campaign cash. They’re just pundits, who go on TV and talk about stuff.
So why do it? So they won’t “feel implicated.”
“Leaving the Republican Party” to become an “Independent” is no more risky or profound, and certainly no more praiseworthy, than “leaving” the Yankees to become a Cubs fan but still going on TV to talk about the 27 World Championships and how great Derek Jeter was. For people like Joe Scarborough and George Will, there’s really no reason to do it, let alone announce to the world that you’re doing it ... unless you “feel implicated.”
“You don’t feel implicated,” George? How about you, Joe; do you feel implicated? You should. Because you are. And you can’t let yourselves off the hook by making a meaningless declaration of “leaving” the Party that you’ve been enabling, and this is important, will continue to enable no matter how far down the rabbit hole the Drumpfenführer and his gilded gestapo take it. If you really cared about American conservatism and the Party that embodies it, you would feel implicated. And if you did feel implicated, you might then be able to help fix what’s wrong. Until you and other enablers start to feel implicated, nothing will change.