Truth Revealed: GOP leadership hates the base of their own party
Never has it been more apparent that the GOP leadership would prefer to be heading up a more liberal party, and they are working overtime to make that happen
Established Republican leadership ― Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel ― despite being hostile to the conservative values of their base, are nonetheless set to continue to lead the party to destruction or irrelevance. (Photo Illustration: We the People)
The leadership of one of the Republican Party utterly despises their party's own voting base. It is one of the most bitter and tragic ironies of our contemporary politics, and it does not bode well for the GOP as it is currently constituted.
The GOP elite's scorn for its own voters has, at this point, been a long time in the making. At least since the 16-year reign of FDR, there has been an undercurrent in the Republican Party of warring moderate and conservative factions. The trend accelerated during the 2009-2011 rise of the Tea Party, a grassroots movement fueled by both constitutionalism and populism.
The crustier elements of the Republican establishment ran as far away as possible from the Tea Party, and the 2012 presidential coronation of private equity plutocrat Mitt Romney effectively killed the movement, even though the then-retired Massachusetts governor went down in flames in his challenge to Barack Obama in his reelection effort.
When the 2016 presidential cycle launched, the Republican establishment fought tooth-and-nail against two specific presidential candidates: Construction and real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who stridently condemned the establishment's myriad shortcomings. An unsurprising corollary developed as Trump and Cruz fetched the most primary votes that cycle from actual rank-and-file Republican voters.
It was at that point the GOP should have realized the tide was changing and they should change with it. But that didn’t happen.
The Trump presidency saw the continuation of the same basic dynamic. Republican voters, by nominating an admittedly loudmouth non-politician in Trump, were clamoring for something new.
Those voters were sick of the same-old Republican pablum: Willful complicity in globalization, all the harms wrought by reckless immigration compromises accompanied by myopic supply chain outsourcing, and the ideologically driven pursuit of various right-liberal economic and foreign policy dogmas more generally,
The irony of such dogmas is that they come at the expense of the middle-class American's tangible self-interests. They are the base of the Republican Party and have been since Ronald Reagan. They are the ones who should be driving party strategy.
Nonetheless, with precious few exceptions, the neoconservative intelligentsia refused to treat Trump's deviations from previous decades' failed orthodoxies as anything other than a blip on the radar. The party decided to conveniently discard populist conservative policies at a time when the GOP's "dead consensus" might rise anew.
This was a total failure of the GOP to read the tea leaves accurately. Initiating a rapid shift back to the old way of doing things as soon as Trump left office, GOP leadership began driving a wedge between themselves and the party rank-and-file.
Most of the party leadership roundly condemned the January 6 demonstrations. They joined with the Democrats in referring to that day as an “insurrection,” an “attempted coup,” an “effort to subvert the Constitution.”
Those were total lies. Worse, everyone knew they were lies. But rather than abandon the tactic of trying to permanently destroy Trump and call out the Democrats for manufacturing isolated events they would then attempt to make the theme of the day, Republicans became willing partners in a giant fraud.
The result? Nearly 850 men and women who participated in nothing resembling a “riot” and certainly failing to mount an “insurrection” are still languishing in a filthy, germ-ridden Washington, D.C. jail without even having faced trial yet. Where is the GOP outcry over this gross miscarriage of justice? Why do they allow Democrats to control the narrative without challenge or question?
The answer is simple: That is how much they hate Donald Trump, his MAGA supporters and the conservative media that tells the truth about him and the movement. Carrying their animosity to extremes, the leadership did everything to undermine Trump-endorsed candidates in the recent November midterms — and succeeded.
By underfunding men and women such as retired Gen. Don Buldoc in New Hampshire, businessman Blake Masters in Arizona, entrepreneur Tiffany Smiley in Washington, and others, Sen. Minority Leader and Republican Senate Campaign Committee Chair Mitch McConnell (R-KY) proved he prefers a minority he can control rather than a majority he can’t.
Now, in the midst of a lame-duck Congress and in the aftermath of a severely disappointing midterm election, we have gleaned even more indicators about the level of scorn Republican elites reserve for their own voters.
Most notably, 12 Republican senators and a whopping 39 Republican representatives have rushed to add their sanctions of legitimacy to the so-called Respect for Marriage Act, which now heads to Joe Biden’s desk for signature. Not only does this terrible piece of legislation statutorily enshrine an erroneous definition of marriage in federal law but would also further weaponize the leftist lawfare apparatus to subjugate the conservative Christian base of the Party to the Western world's new same-sex marriage indulgence.
While it is true that Republicans nationally are now split on the issue of same-sex marriage, it is also true that religious Christians still comprise the very core of the GOP's base. Nonetheless, a sizable portion of Republicans in Congress voted for a bill that would open the floodgates of litigation for those Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who still adhere to the biblical (and historically noncontroversial) definition of marriage.
If you believe the Left has weaponized the courts against Christian cake bakers and website designers, you haven’t seen anything yet. There will be lawsuits against pastors who refuse to perform a same-sex ceremony in their churches.
The abrogation of the First Amendment guarantees against Congress making no law respecting the establishment or practice of religion must be recognized in the cases the U.S. Supreme Court will undoubtedly hear, but until then, this law will reek havoc on biblically-based churches, pastors and believers.
Then there is the always-thorny issue of immigration, where Republican elites have historically sold out their own base perhaps more than on any other issue. Republican leaders are using the disloyal backdrop of the lame-duck Congress to get the amnesty band back together again.
Specifically, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has teamed up with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) ― who just Thursday morning announced she is no longer a Democrat ― to push a prototypical "comprehensive immigration reform"-style so-called compromise: Amnesty for millions of young illegal aliens (subjectively called "Dreamers" by our propagandist press) in exchange for promised milquetoast "enforcement" measures that will do absolutely nothing to stem the tide of the foreign invasion.
Absent the most strenuous of border enforcement measures, such as the completion of a sprawling Texas-to-California physical border wall and a return of the highly successful Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" policy, there is an obvious, glaring problem with such a "deal.” Amnesty for illegal aliens will only exacerbate the border crisis by emboldening the very drug cartels, coyotes, and human trafficking rings that are the most ruthless thugs in the Western Hemisphere.
There may well be other lame-duck Congress betrayals, as well.
One week after the election last month, the Biden administration requested an additional $37 billion in "emergency" aid for Ukraine. One can only imagine how many Senate and House Republicans are all too eager to accommodate the administration's desire to bolster Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's quixotic crusade to recover Crimea and the Donbas.
It is not that Ukraine is being unsuccessful in driving back Russian forces in the East. But winter is hard on Ukraine and bitterly cold temperatures, deep snows and biting winds will bring that effort to a halt very shortly.
That will give time to Russia to beef up for what will likely be a devastating counteroffensive as well as a winter-long continuation of their missiles targeting utilities and infrastructure that is disheartening and destroying Ukraine one block at a time.
That is the backdrop of an all-around bad effort to further fund this futility. Such a deal ignores the plain fact that, of the billions already sent to Zelensky’s Ukraine, much of it has disappeared into the black hole of that country’s ubiquitous corrupt government agencies.
Fox news reported late last month that some $20 billion in Ukrainian aid, including weapons, cannot be accounted for by the Pentagon. There is much speculation, though no real proof, that Zelensky’s government is helping Joe Biden and the Democrat Party launder money for their war chest in 2024, as well as provide ready cash for Biden, Inc.
Meanwhile, despite last month's electoral disaster and grassroots Republicans crying out for change at the top, the entirety of what National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam has dubbed the GOP's “McLeadership” — Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Republican National Committee Chair (RNC) Ronna McDaniel — appears poised to remain in power, though McCarthy’s effort to be Speaker appears to be facing more and more of an uphill battle.
Despite that, refusing to recognize this leadership team is a failure, and quite likely duplicitous with the Democrats, the Party is essentially saying to the Republican rank-and-file, “Shut up and go away.”
It says nothing particularly good about the moral integrity of an individual who, for self-interested careerist purposes, seeks to lead an organization or movement while simultaneously harboring an intense disdain for the organization's very rank-and-file.
Organizations that feature such a yawning chasm between their leadership and their grassroots elements typically face two options: The leadership can ameliorate the chasm by listening to or better accommodating the rank-and-file, or the organization will cease to exist.
One of these must happen. For the GOP, the status quo is simply unsustainable.