The Republican Party Had To Get Worse Before It Could Get Better.
In the age of Trump, Bill Kristol has become a voice of reason in the Republican party. In a recent interview I think he proves something I've been saying for a while: the Republican Party had to get worse before it could get better.
I'm not a Democrat, and I'm really not a partisan by nature. I hate teams and the feeling of being on one. So full disclosure, I don't really enjoy writing this. But I believe the fact that the problems with the GOP started years and years ago. Quite frankly I think the sharp denial of reality started with the Iraq war. Remember how mad Republicans were that reporters "weren't telling the good stories" out of Iraq? They wanted to blame the insurgency on biased reporting while journalists died over there.... sorry, I'm getting annoyed just remembering it, so I'll move on.
The next really bad sign in my telling of history is the Tea Party that wished for a completely unrealistic vision of small government that would actually do great harm the rural and struggling places that they claimed to be supporting. Then you had Sarah Palin, death panel hysteria, birthers, Obama as a secret socialist radical, Glenn Beck... It's been downhill for awhile from my point of view.
And yet smart conservatives over this time failed to notice how severe and widespread the problem had become. They wanted to focus on the problems with liberals, and either sweep their own problems under the rug as a fringe or stretch and strain to tease out some semblance of coherence or reasonable thoughts from them. Like trying to argue that, actually, if you stand on your head and close one eye and look through a pinhole camera, the Tea Party actually has some good ideas buried deep in there.
And even electing Trump wasn't enough to wake them up to the depths of the problem. Here is what I
wrote last year:
The farther the republican party falls the better in some ways. It is important for reasonable people on the right to have the scales fall from their eyes about their ideological allies. The worse it gets, the more will finally accept the magnitude of the rot... A team mentality is poisonous to clear thinking, and I think a willingness to see how bad some ideological allies are will help broadly improve the quality of conservative thought.
And now with Bill Kristol's recent
interview with Vox I think this has proven true. Here he is explaining how it's much worse than he thought, with my emphasis:
I am personally surprised by the amount of rationalizing and enabling of Trump. I think I underestimated the power of rationalization as a human psychological fact. They start with a very hardheaded look, [saying] he’s not good and the tweeting is horror, he’s a jerk, and the tweeting is distasteful, but you know, we’ll get this and this. He’ll be better than Hillary and we can live with it, but we’ll have to control him.
And then a month later it’s, “The media is being very unfair in their attacks. He’s getting more done than you realize.” And a month later it’s, “Some of the stuff you think is vulgar is probably necessary to really break though.” And then a month later it’s, “I kinda think he’s saying some things that other people haven’t said.”
Within six months, people I know personally, they started off with a very hardheaded, limited defense of Trump. And they’re now all in and saying that Robert Mueller is some partisan hack who wants to destroy Trump and no other Republican has ever fought for anything. It’s just kind of idiotic Trumpy talking points. That slippery slope is more slippery than I realized.
This is very good and healthy, and the degree of rationalizing is not surprising to someone with a more negative view of the GOP. But for Kristol, it really had to get this bad to make him realize how bad it was.
This realization is already improving his view of recent history. Elsewhere in the interview, here is Kristol also grappling with how things were worse than he realized in the recent past:
There was a kind of, in retrospect, excessive tolerance of things that should have been denounced more firmly. I mean, I thought we denounced them. I will say, you know, the Weekly Standard was pretty unapologetically anti-birther and anti-Buchanan and anti-Ron Paul, and anti- so many things that Trump exploited. Pretty liberal on immigration, but maybe in retrospect we didn’t take those things serious enough.
Again, this is good and healthy. I would like Kristol to write a whole book about the Republican party post 2000 with his blinders now off.
Hopefully in the age of Trump more smart conservatives will wake up not just to how bad things are, but how bad they were and why their focus on the problems with liberals were misplaced. The Republican party and conservatives broadly need broad and fierce internal debate, not kid gloves with ideological allies and vitriol and hysteria with liberals. There are allies across the aisles, and enemies on your side.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/modele...orse-before-it-could-get-better/#6cce061531c0
