Cleaning Up a Mess

The Republican Party is a mess. It’s actually much worse than that, but let’s call it a mess and move on.

This mess is not the result of Donald J. Trump’s candidacy, although he has brought the party’s worst elements to the forefront. No, the Republican Party, since the 1960s, has been the party which has built its intermittent success on a shameful combination of mostly implied racism and sexism crudely and cleverly blended with financial policies that have divided the wealthy and the middle class to the detriment of the latter. It is an ugly record of discrimination against the least and the lowest among us.

It has become the party that refuses to govern and seemingly is no longer capable of governing. That began in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama, soon followed by a declaration from GOP leaders that they would defeat the President in 2012 by denying him any legislative accomplishments. To make that work, they surrendered the responsibility to govern in favor of preventing government altogether. (It was not the success they hoped for — ObamaCare is one evidence of their failures.)

They have now become a fringe party, controlled by and lacking the will to face up to an even smaller group of radical right-wing evangelical zealots. They are now the party that belittles and denounces not just women but almost every possible minority: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and Asians. Have we left anyone out?

Donald Trump is the face of this party. But if you look past the morass of Trump’s bigoted, bullying, careless lies you discover truly that the Republican Party has no clothes. The rest of its candidates have no solutions to the issue of no government, only varying shades of similarities to Trump. That’s why when confronted with a choice of saying they would support Trump or not, they unanimously agree they would endorse him regardless of how crazy they may believe him to be. So much for valid differences.

And so much for the Republican Party as a valid place for American voters. And I don’t know the right response. Maybe the party needs to die and be re-born. Perhaps if its most responsible leaders — and there are a few — had any backbone, they would denounce Trump as the most venal, vile, morally corrupt and unqualified person ever to seek the presidency and move on, whether or not that might mean creating a new party.

This country needs and deserves an ideologically honest, responsible two-party system. It no longer has that, and I deeply regret that and consider it a blot on our democracy. Blame Donald Trump if you will. But the real issues lie much deeper.