12/11/20
One of my first memories as a child was riding to vacation Bible school in the back seat of my grandmother’s Dodge Dart and hearing the news on her AM radio that Bobby Kennedy had been shot. Millions of Americans responded to the riotous upheaval playing out nightly on network news by flocking to a conservative movement that would soon identify itself by what it was not, define itself by the enemies it kept and occupy itself with an endless search for a lost America that proved irretrievable — because it was a land that had never existed. The Republican Party projected itself as the bulwark against left-wing radicalism, the moral arbiter of all that was evil, and the righteous judge of what was constitutionally permissible and what was an abomination against God. The movement chained itself to rigid ideology and primal fear, despite Russell Kirk’s warning that “the conservative abhors all forms of ideology” and is guided instead by principles “arrived at by convention and compromise.” But a party that elevated Donald Trump from Manhattan’s class clown to the U.S. presidency no longer has any use for the likes of Kirk, Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley. For four years, Republicans averted their eyes as Trump broke the law, defied constitutional norms, trashed governing traditions, dehumanized political opponents and further radicalized a party that had long ago become unmoored from conservative tradition — and yet that proved to be but a preview of worse things to come.
Now, Republican leaders are either actively engaged in sedition against the United States or offering their silent support to a president furiously working to overturn an election. The leveling wind against liberalism has instead become a gale-force wind beating away at the foundations of American democracy. So what does one do when the cure becomes more toxic than the disease? When the fever proves more deadly than the infection it was meant to kill? Where do voters turn when those who promised to protect American institutions against political extremism pose a greater threat to democracy than the progressive elites they long demonized? Last weekend, I asked those questions while watching with horror as fellow Americans in Valdosta, Ga., cheered on a politician’s efforts to stage a coup against his democratically elected successor. What a devolution it has been for a party whose members proudly pack pocket-size Constitutions in their jackets while perversely claiming fealty to the Framers’ original intent. How ironic that the very people who convinced my parents they would be the cure for political extremism have metamorphized into a band of radicals who present the greatest risk to American democracy since the Civil War.
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