Not long ago President Biden demanded to know, “What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”
Now we have the answer – officially so, because on Friday the Republican National Committee voted on it. Turns out the GOP is “for” a lot of things:
Beating cops to death.
Smearing poop on walls.
Breaking and entering and ransacking.
Threatening to hang public servants.
If only I were exaggerating. It’s right there in the RNC’s Friday resolution, decreeing that the congressional probe of the Jan. 6 in insurrection is merely “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
This is ironclad proof that we no longer have a legitimate two-party system. One party, however imperfect it may be, still believes in small-d democracy; the other party, in its devolution to a demagogic cult, officially embraces domestic terrorism with fascist intent. As former conservative talk show host Charle Sykes lamented this weekend, “The infection is already deep in the bone.” As former RNC staffer John Pitney tweeted, it is now “an organization that arguably supports the violent overthrow of the United States government.”
The RNC members who passed that resolution undoubtedly do not see themselves as abetters of domestic terrorism, because, after all, those were “real” American white folks who discoursed at the Capitol. In their purblind world, all terrorists by definition are swarthy people with long funny names who hail from countries that “real” Americans couldn’t find on a map even if their fingers were duct-taped to the correct continent.
But their resolution opens up all kinds of Orwellian possibilities. Perhaps schools should start referring to the years between 1861 and 1865 as The Civil Legitimate Discourse. Perhaps NFL players should be advised that although it’s still illegitimate to kneel in silent protest during the National Anthem, it’s totally legitimate to target a cop on the sidelines and administer a beatdown.
I’m aware that Orwell gets hat-tipped way too often. But there’s no escaping the fact that the RNC’s directive – telling us to ignore what we saw and heard on live TV with our own eyes and ears – eerily mirrors a key passage in 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
What’s fascinating – perversely so – is how the cult has continually tweaked its Jan. 6 spin. It used to say that, yes, there was violence, but it was all perpetrated by “antifa” and deep state FBI agents or whatever other imaginary bogeymen it could conjure. But now that there’s a cascade of evidence that the Trump regime, starting at the tippy top, was intimately involved in plotting a coup, and that the Jan. 6 violence was only one facet of the plot…well, their last-ditch delusion is to rebrand the entire episode and say, “OK, that was us, but it was all just legitimate political discourse.”
The conservative National Review, in an editorial, got it right yesterday when it denounced the RNC resolution as “morally repugnant and politically self-destructive.” Politically self-destructive , eh? Tell us more: “It will be used against hundreds of elected Republicans who were not consulted in its drafting and do not endorse its sentiment…Its wording is political malpractice of the highest order.”
In other words, this toxic endorsement of violence – what Charlie Sykes calls “a performative act of groveling” to you know who – has been teed up for Democrats and the free press. Every Republican on the midterm congressional ballot should be asked whether he or she believes that Jan. 6 was legitimate discourse. Every day, Democrats should be flooding the zone with messaging…OK, that’s probably too much to ask for, Democrats being congenitally incapable of doing what the GOP would already be doing if this situation were reversed. But if Democrats somehow fail to turn even this issue to their advantage, they belong in a museum with the Whigs.