The Republican Party Has Developed New Rites of Initiation: You Must Push the Big Lie
We allow ourselves only two political parties and, if one of them is permanently delusional, the whole system goes out of balance.
_By Charles P. Pierce
May 3, 2021
representative liz cheney r wy waits for us president joe biden to deliver his first address to a joint session of congress at the us capitol in washington, dc, on april 28, 2021
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...nl23696788
It appears that the cult driving modern conservatism—and the Republican Party, which is its outward manifestation—has finally developed its infallible litmus test for its initiates.
The cult is still based on monomaniacal loyalty to a vulgar talking yam, but now it has an article of faith through which that loyalty can be demonstrated. The Washington Post has a helpful survey of how the rites of initiation are being celebrated all over the country.
Nearly six months after Trump lost to Biden, rejection of the 2020 election results — dubbed the “Big Lie” by many Democrats — has increasingly become an unofficial litmus test for acceptance in the Republican Party.
In January, 147 GOP lawmakers — eight senators and 139 House members — voted in support of objections to the election results , and since then, Republicans from Congress to statehouses to local party organizations have fervently embraced the falsehood…
…Local officials, too, are facing censure and threats — in states from Iowa to Michigan to Missouri — for publicly accepting the election results. And in Arizona’s largest county, a hand recount of 2.1 million votes cast in November is underway by Republicans who dispute the results, in yet another effort to overturn the results of the November contest…“There’s no Republican that I know of, that I’ve spoken with, who has come to me and said, ‘Biden won fair and square,’” said Salleigh Grubbs, the newly elected chair of the Cobb County Republican Party in Georgia. “I absolutely do believe that there were irregularities in the election. I absolutely believe that our voices were shut out.”
The alleged big news in this area over the past few days was that Mitt Romney got booed by his home state party and that Liz Cheney’s days in the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives may be numbered.
But that isn’t what worries me most deeply about the cult’s penetration of one of our two major political parties. The people who worry me most are the people who already have taken their baptismal vows, like the woman from Michigan who told the Post...
“I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified,” she said , referring to Trump’s baseless claims that widespread electoral fraud caused his loss to President Biden in November…the 2020 election is one of the reasons she’s working to censure and remove Jason Cabel Roe from his role as the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director — specifically that Roe accepted the 2020 results, telling Politico that “the election wasn’t stolen” and that “there is no one to blame but Trump.”
“He said the election was not rigged, as Donald Trump had said, so we didn’t agree with that, and then he didn’t blame the Democrats for any election fraud,” said Ell, explaining her frustration with Roe. “He said there was no fraud — again, that’s something that doesn’t line up with what we think really happened — and then he said it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.”
These are the people who become, say, school board members, who later become state legislators, who later get elected to Congress or, at the very least, they pick the people who do. And right now, in many places, accepting the verified results of the last presidential election means you don’t get invited to the county committee’s monthly bean supper—or to the next Inaugural Ball, for all that. Which means that the ultimate test of your partisan loyalty is the depth of your allegiance to a fantasy.
Several local Republicans have either stepped down or been forced out of their party positions for not supporting Trump’s baseless election claims or for criticizing the former president’s role in inciting the deadly Capitol riot.
In Iowa — after telling a local newspaper that Trump should be impeached for his “atrocious conduct” in egging on the Jan. 6 attacks — Dave Millage was called a “traitor” and forced to step down as chair of the Scott County Republican Party.
In Missouri, the state Republican Party’s executive director, Jean Evans, resigned from her term several weeks early amid angry and threatening calls from Trump supporters, who urged her to do more to help Trump hold on to the White House after his loss in November.
Now, nobody should be surprised that it came to this, not in a party that swore undying fealty decades ago to supply-side economics, which has no more bearing on reality than does the idea that the 2020 election was stolen.
This is the party that celebrated Ronald Reagan’s flights of fancy about poor people and the crisis of trees causing air pollution. And let’s not even get into the fact that the Republicans were willing to believe almost anything about Bill and Hillary Clinton—or at least pretended to for political purposes.
And then there was the Tea Party and all the stuff that was slung at Barack Obama. (What was the cry of, “I want my country back,” but the overture to the atonal nightmare of the past four years?) That the party now has attached itself to an even more malignant lie is simply an example of the iron laws of political evolution.
It’s really time for the elite political media to accept this as a given. (And, no, soft-focus profiles of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem are not an example of this in any way.)
There is no question worthy of being asked of Republican politicians except “Do you accept the results of the 2020 election?” It is the issue that touches all the others. We allow ourselves only two political parties and, if one of them is permanently delusional, the whole system goes out of balance.
I mean, there are a couple dozen reasons not to trust Mitt Romney, mostly having to do with his Silly Putty political principles, and there are just as many reasons to hope that Liz Cheney is kept far away from any political power beyond what she currently wields.
But their apostasy on the subject of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is not one of them, except for people who have tiny springs and gears popping out of their ears. And those are the people who matter now. They should just wear robes and meet at midnight in a clearing in the forest.
We allow ourselves only two political parties and, if one of them is permanently delusional, the whole system goes out of balance.
_By Charles P. Pierce
May 3, 2021
representative liz cheney r wy waits for us president joe biden to deliver his first address to a joint session of congress at the us capitol in washington, dc, on april 28, 2021
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...nl23696788
It appears that the cult driving modern conservatism—and the Republican Party, which is its outward manifestation—has finally developed its infallible litmus test for its initiates.
The cult is still based on monomaniacal loyalty to a vulgar talking yam, but now it has an article of faith through which that loyalty can be demonstrated. The Washington Post has a helpful survey of how the rites of initiation are being celebrated all over the country.
Nearly six months after Trump lost to Biden, rejection of the 2020 election results — dubbed the “Big Lie” by many Democrats — has increasingly become an unofficial litmus test for acceptance in the Republican Party.
In January, 147 GOP lawmakers — eight senators and 139 House members — voted in support of objections to the election results , and since then, Republicans from Congress to statehouses to local party organizations have fervently embraced the falsehood…
…Local officials, too, are facing censure and threats — in states from Iowa to Michigan to Missouri — for publicly accepting the election results. And in Arizona’s largest county, a hand recount of 2.1 million votes cast in November is underway by Republicans who dispute the results, in yet another effort to overturn the results of the November contest…“There’s no Republican that I know of, that I’ve spoken with, who has come to me and said, ‘Biden won fair and square,’” said Salleigh Grubbs, the newly elected chair of the Cobb County Republican Party in Georgia. “I absolutely do believe that there were irregularities in the election. I absolutely believe that our voices were shut out.”
The alleged big news in this area over the past few days was that Mitt Romney got booed by his home state party and that Liz Cheney’s days in the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives may be numbered.
But that isn’t what worries me most deeply about the cult’s penetration of one of our two major political parties. The people who worry me most are the people who already have taken their baptismal vows, like the woman from Michigan who told the Post...
“I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified,” she said , referring to Trump’s baseless claims that widespread electoral fraud caused his loss to President Biden in November…the 2020 election is one of the reasons she’s working to censure and remove Jason Cabel Roe from his role as the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director — specifically that Roe accepted the 2020 results, telling Politico that “the election wasn’t stolen” and that “there is no one to blame but Trump.”
“He said the election was not rigged, as Donald Trump had said, so we didn’t agree with that, and then he didn’t blame the Democrats for any election fraud,” said Ell, explaining her frustration with Roe. “He said there was no fraud — again, that’s something that doesn’t line up with what we think really happened — and then he said it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.”
These are the people who become, say, school board members, who later become state legislators, who later get elected to Congress or, at the very least, they pick the people who do. And right now, in many places, accepting the verified results of the last presidential election means you don’t get invited to the county committee’s monthly bean supper—or to the next Inaugural Ball, for all that. Which means that the ultimate test of your partisan loyalty is the depth of your allegiance to a fantasy.
Several local Republicans have either stepped down or been forced out of their party positions for not supporting Trump’s baseless election claims or for criticizing the former president’s role in inciting the deadly Capitol riot.
In Iowa — after telling a local newspaper that Trump should be impeached for his “atrocious conduct” in egging on the Jan. 6 attacks — Dave Millage was called a “traitor” and forced to step down as chair of the Scott County Republican Party.
In Missouri, the state Republican Party’s executive director, Jean Evans, resigned from her term several weeks early amid angry and threatening calls from Trump supporters, who urged her to do more to help Trump hold on to the White House after his loss in November.
Now, nobody should be surprised that it came to this, not in a party that swore undying fealty decades ago to supply-side economics, which has no more bearing on reality than does the idea that the 2020 election was stolen.
This is the party that celebrated Ronald Reagan’s flights of fancy about poor people and the crisis of trees causing air pollution. And let’s not even get into the fact that the Republicans were willing to believe almost anything about Bill and Hillary Clinton—or at least pretended to for political purposes.
And then there was the Tea Party and all the stuff that was slung at Barack Obama. (What was the cry of, “I want my country back,” but the overture to the atonal nightmare of the past four years?) That the party now has attached itself to an even more malignant lie is simply an example of the iron laws of political evolution.
It’s really time for the elite political media to accept this as a given. (And, no, soft-focus profiles of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem are not an example of this in any way.)
There is no question worthy of being asked of Republican politicians except “Do you accept the results of the 2020 election?” It is the issue that touches all the others. We allow ourselves only two political parties and, if one of them is permanently delusional, the whole system goes out of balance.
I mean, there are a couple dozen reasons not to trust Mitt Romney, mostly having to do with his Silly Putty political principles, and there are just as many reasons to hope that Liz Cheney is kept far away from any political power beyond what she currently wields.
But their apostasy on the subject of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is not one of them, except for people who have tiny springs and gears popping out of their ears. And those are the people who matter now. They should just wear robes and meet at midnight in a clearing in the forest.
