The Definition of Insanity
Most Americans don’t like right-wing extremism. The Republican Party couldn’t care less.
The witticism, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” is often misattributed to Albert Einstein, even though the physicist never actually made the statement. Regardless of the maxim’s origin, it doesn't take a genius to recognize that the Republican elections strategy is about as close to political insanity as it gets.
After election losses in 2018, and 2020, missing the “red wave” in 2022, Republicans ran on the same unpopular set of so-called “wedge issues” going into this month’s elections. For some reason, they expected a different outcome.
In 2015, the then-presidential candidate Donald Trump promised we’d “have so much winning” if he were elected, so much so we might be bored by all the winning. And in the eight years since he made his bold prognostication, there has been plenty of winning. Fortunately for the state of democracy, Democrats are doing most of it. And less than a year until the November elections, we cannot afford to be bored.
Election aftermath
The GOP “agenda,” for lack of a better term, is a hodgepodge of radical positions: election denialism, governmental control of pregnancies, restrictions of parental decision-making, removal of books they deem offensive from public schools and libraries, and the free flow of military-grade weaponry. Ignoring their losses in every election cycle since 2016, Republicans refused to modulate their positions going into last Tuesday's elections.
Once again, the result was huge wins for Democrats, who racked up impressive victories in some of the country's reddest states. Democrats in Virginia not only held on to their Senate majority, but they also flipped the state's House of Delegates. And yet, the only takeaway for one of the state's Republican House members was the reason behind the losses was that their abortion policy wasn't extreme enough.
In the Kentucky gubernatorial race, Andy Beshear, a Democrat who won by only four-tenths of a point four years ago, handily defeated Republican Daniel Cameron, winning by five points—despite running in a state Trump previously won with more than 60% of the vote. Aside from his extreme position on abortion, Cameron’s handling of the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor by Louisville Metro Police during his time as attorney general was certainly a factor with Kentucky's Black electorate.
Ohio voters not only passed an initiative adding abortion protections to the state constitution, but they also legalized recreational marijuana use in a separate referendum. Once again, Republicans paid the price for the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade (emphasis added):
Overall, voters said 61-37% that abortion should be legal rather than illegal in all or most cases, and 89% of those who said it should be legal backed the referendum, establishing a right to abortion in the state's constitution, according to the exit polls.
Fifty-nine percent said they were dissatisfied or even angry about the Supreme Court's ruling eliminating the right to abortion access -- with a plurality, 38%, angry about it. Those voters again supported the abortion referendum by broad margins.
Leading up to election day, the media focused much of its attention on a New York Times poll that showed Trump leading Biden in several battleground states. As Democrats racked up significant victories, pundits seemed genuinely shocked by how many Americans chose political normalcy over radical extremism.
That said, there were, a few insightful assessments of Republican failure to read the proverbial room. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, Missouri senator Claire McCaskill distilled the tone-deafness of the GOP’s abortion strategy, in one the rare discussions uninterrupted by Joe Scarborough, the show’s host:
“The interesting thing is, I think Republicans thought that…well, I don't know what they thought because clearly, they weren't checking in with most Americans about losing the fundamental freedom in such a dramatic fashion. You would think at that moment then we [Republicans] go, okay, we need to be careful here and not go too far. But instead, in state after state like mine, total ban, life begins at conception, no exceptions for rape or incest. I mean, women who are raped in Missouri are mandated to have a child by the government. That is never going to be a winning position in America. So, government interference, whether it's in the bedroom or with parenting decisions. This is where Republicans have real vulnerability and anybody who thinks this issue is going away doesn't spend enough time with women.”
The night after being rebuffed by voters, the Republican presidential debate did little to address the problem. The acrimonious affair was so uninspiring that few people bothered to watch. Except for Chris Christie, none of the candidates laid a glove on the absent Donald Trump, the party's leading presidential candidate.
They said they were gonna
A month before the 2020 election, I wrote about how the GOP repeatedly tells us their plans to turn democracy inside out. I used this humorous stick man cartoon to illustrate my point.
A few days before my post, Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Utah, posted his infamous “We are not a Democracy” tweet. In the years since, the Republican Party’s disdain for democracy as we know it has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. The election of a theocrat who doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state as Speaker of the House is symbolic of the Party’s worldview.
In the meantime, Trump, who is likely to become the first presidential nominee to run as a convicted felon, is sounding more World War Two fascist with each passing day. In a speech intended to celebrate Veterans Day, he overtly echoed Nazi and fascist propaganda.
Should he win a second term in office, Trump has already telegraphed his plans to enact a laundry list of draconian policies straight from the authoritarian playbook, including mass deportations, the firing of thousands of civil servants, and the prosecution of political enemies.
Republican politicians are fully aware that most Americans don’t want what they are selling. They know minority rule is the only way they can win. If recently leaked videos from several of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election interference trial are to be believed, Trump did everything possible to avoid leaving office after the 2020 election. If he is elected to a second term as president, there's no reason to believe things will be different.
So next November’s election isn't a binary choice between a Republican and a Democrat. It is a choice between Republicans and democracy.
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