Biden says he's open to a Republican running mate
Biden stated in December 2019 he thinks we need to preserve the Republican Party to keep a balance in our political system. This is like Abraham Lincoln considering Robert E. Lee as a running mate, because Lee had spoken out against secession before the war started. I can’t help thinking Biden’s supporters would have considered Lee a reasonable “moderate.” I can see them yelling happily: “Grand strategy! Can’t you see?! Lee as Lincoln’s running mate would have avoided the Civil War!”
Yes, as Biden as repeatedly insisted, “there are some good Republicans still out there.” But this is elitist pining for the preservation of elitist rule and a refusal to face the dangerous changes in our political system that have accumulated from four decades of Republicans “feeding red meat to the base.”
Here’s the cover of the latest issue of The New Republic, dated March 2020. The front title is “With Malice Toward All: The Moral and Political Catastrophe of the American Right.” There are four related articles inside, but I will offer excerpts from only one: End the GOP: In order to save our democracy, we must not merely defeat the Republican Party.
Every single aspect of [Trump's] administration has been foreshadowed not only by fringe figures within the GOP and voices in the conservative media, but also by the last Republican president—a man now embraced, sometimes literally, by liberal and moderate conservative figures decrying Trump’s conduct. Trump’s own rhetoric of division and exclusion was preceded by the 2004 reelection campaign for George W. Bush, which took advantage of homophobia to boost turnout from social conservatives….
The propaganda and misinformation campaigns that characterize what some have called a new post-truth era under Trump should, in fact, be quite familiar to those who remember the denialism that characterized defenses of the Iraq War and the hundreds of thousands of casualties it produced. The two Republicans who have occupied the White House in the first two decades of the new millennium have shared not only an address, but an enthusiasm for torture and war crimes, a zeal for using fear and the threat of terrorism to quash political dissent, and near-total support from the Republican political establishment.
In the years since the end of the Bush era, we have seen figures within the Republican Party denigrate African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and gender and sexual minorities. We have seen the Republican Party repeatedly back cuts to critical social programs under the pretense of fiscal discipline only to pass giveaways to major corporations, the wealthy, and an already gluttonous military. The character of the GOP is not an open question….
Here’s the stark truth that Biden and his supporters are unwilling or unable to accept:
Donald Trump is not a departure from the values defining the Republican Party, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power in this country. The question before us is not how much more the Republican Party might be willing to tolerate from the president but how much more we are willing to tolerate from the Republican Party.… [emphasis mine]
This is from Salon, in July 2019: How far will Republicans go to destroy democracy? And can they still be stopped?
First, as is well understood, the GOP spent the past generation undermining the foundations of democracy — free and fair elections — so as to reinforce white rule. Thanks to the GOP’s commitment to voter suppression, paired with decades of phony rhetoric about voter fraud, millions of black and brown Americans have no access to the ballot box. Due to the Supreme Court’s evisceration of campaign finance law, unlimited and unaccountable dark money floods our politics….
Second, the GOP is structurally committed to lying. “Structurally committed” means that party leaders have little if any choice in the matter. They have to lie. And this has nothing to do with Donald Trump. One of the first things that Newt Gingrich's Republican House majority did upon assuming power in 1995 was to undermine evidence-based policy by killing the Office of Technology Assessment and slashing the funding of the Congressional Research Service and Government Accountability Office.
Why? Republicans must disavow factual evidence because neither wing of the party (the corporate wing or the resentment wing) can tell the truth about what it stands for. The corporate wing cannot admit that it cares exclusively about tax cuts for the rich and corporate deregulation, so it has to lie about what it does. That’s why the 2002 handout to oil, gas and coal companies was called the “Clear Skies Initiative.” That’s why the 2009-2010 health care debate was framed in terms of “death panels,”as if private insurance does not ration care. That’s why the 2017 tax cut for corporations and elites was sold as a middle-class tax cut.
Nor can the resentment wing of the GOP speak honestly about the paranoid basis of its preferences. (Interestingly, Donald Trump occasionally comes close, such as when he refers to Mexicans as “rapists.”) Gun enthusiasts cannot admit that they like firearms because they fear black people.
I don’t think Biden and his supporters understand that if we win in November, the work of repairing the republic will have not yet begun. In fact, the political situation will continue to deteriorate if a new Democratic President wastes time trying to establish bipartisan amity with Republicans.
….Long after Trump leaves the scene, Fox News will continue to manufacture paranoia to motivate resentment voters to vote for capitalists who will head to Washington to lower taxes, deregulate the economy and undermine democracy. The GOP’s capital wing cares about tax cuts and deregulation and, thanks to Fox News, has an unlimited capacity to manufacture paranoia. Its resentment wing cares about making scapegoats suffer, and has an unlimited capacity for consuming paranoia. Neither wing cares about anything else. Not fairness. Not national interest. Not democracy. Not the rule of law.
….the GOP cannot be de-radicalized at the ballot box. Democrats already thrashed the GOP in wave elections in 1992, 2006, 2008 and 2018, yet after each election, the Republican Party became even more radical. After its 2012 defeat, the GOP even concluded in a self-administered autopsy that it needed to de-radicalize — and then lined up behind Trump just a few years later.
A Biden administration would be an interregnum before something much worse than Trump. As an article in The Nation, May 2019, “Empty Calls for Bipartisanship Could Doom Us All” argues:
“As Biden and other centrist candidates share their fantasies of bipartisanship, the Democratic Party seems unable to recognize the seriousness of the moment. It is only luck that the right has not yet found a skilled autocrat. Palin was clueless, and Trump is his own worst enemy. He is a historically weak president who lacks even a passing understanding of how to use the power of the office effectively…. Democrats may get one more chance to govern before a competent authoritarian emerges from the right; that opportunity cannot be frittered away on four years of West Wing cosplay under the delusion that the GOP will have an “epiphany” and cooperate.”
When Biden argues that once Trump is defeated and out of the picture, Republicans will be reasonable again, and bipartisan governance will become possible, Biden is displaying a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding of what the Republican Party has become. The electoral power of the Republican Party now rests solely on a foundation that has been radicalized and misled by nearly a half century of “feeding red meat to the base,” stoking an ever more intense hatred of “the other.” It began with Reagans’s imaginary welfare queens driving Cadillacs, gained power and traction with the argument that “liberals want to kill babies,” and has now achieved political power and the ability to actually seperate children from their parents and put them in cages because they are “illegal immigrants.”
George Packer, wrote "The Corruption of the Republican Party" in The Atlantic, December 14, 2018:
It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means... There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.... The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.
Some of the founders clearly foresaw the danger of a demagogue rousing and exploiting the passions of the people. I think they would be horrified that we have allowed an entire political party to do it for four decades now. Perhaps Biden and his supporters are too terrified to face the reality we now confront of the neo-fascist menace that Republicans and conservatives have created and mobilized over the past four decades. Biden and his supporters are the wrong people with the wrong beliefs for these very dangerous times.