It looks like we’re finally
getting rid of #45 and replacing him with a Democrat who most people choose
because he’s not nearly as obnoxiously incompetent as Trump and not nearly as
arrogant and unlikable as Hillary Clinton.
Over the last 4 years, the Republican President cost his party the House
(2018 midterms) and the Senate (losing both Georgia seats). He’s compromised the integrity and
reputations of all the Republican congressmen who were induced to follow him,
not that we’re particularly sympathetic to their plight. What’s next for the GOP?
My suggestion, likely to
be immediately rejected by everyone, is for the party to break up. Any Republican with something close to ethics
and real values should defect to the Libertarian Party. I can understand most politicians’ reluctance
to do so piecemeal, in dribs and drabs, but a wholesale defection of sitting
Congressmen should be another story entirely.
Possibly, but not likely, some Democrats could also defect, though as I
write this I can’t identify any plausible candidates by name. The leading Republicans would be Mitt Romney,
Justin Amash, Rand Paul, and Thomas Massie, just to name a few.
I’ve been re-reading,
for the third time, Harry Turtledove’s alternate history series which begins
with How Few Remain and continues with three WWI stories, three interwar
stories, and four WWII stories. Herein,
the CSA won the Civil War (1861-62), also defeated the US in the so-called
Second Mexican War (1881-82), and allied itself with Britain, France and Russia
in WWI. For its part, the US found
itself allied with Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Now
imagine US and Confederate soldiers fighting in trenches, with biplanes,
machine guns, and poison gas, but in western Virginia, Kentucky, and other
locations. The CSA had purchased Sonora
and Chihuahua states from Mexico in 1881, so their territory extends westward
from Texas, along the New Mexico/Arizona border to the Pacific Ocean, giving the
CSA a Pacific Coast port city at Guaymas.
They also have Cuba.
In the aftermath of the Second
Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln – who was not assassinated in 1865 but survived to
become a Marxist – split up the Republican Party in 1882 into a Socialist Party,
with the Democrats taking the role of a conservative/reactionary party. The twin Presidents in 1914 are Theodore
Roosevelt (USA) and Woodrow Wilson (CSA).
By this time the Republicans are reduced to an insignificant third
party.
The LP candidate in 2020
was Jo Jorgenson, who had no experience as an elected official and her prime
political experience was being Harry Browne’s VP candidate back in the day. Gary Johnson, the 2016 candidate, was much
stronger: a successful two term state governor (New Mexico). His 2012 result, 1%, was somewhat disappointing,
but he was up against both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In 2016 he received 3%, and probably would have
gotten more had he known where Aleppo, Syria, was. If the LP has former state governors or US
senators as its candidates – the kind of candidates the major parties run –
they may well have a much stronger shot.
Returning to reality, I
do believe the heretofore marginal Libertarian Party may well be able to
accommodate a large influx of dissatisfied Republicans. Sadly, over the years the Republicans went from
Lincoln’s party abolishing slavery to a conservative party giving lip service
to capitalism but more accurately being a quasi-fascist party giving us a
corrupt form of capitalism mixed with religious right nonsense telling us how
to live our private lives. The Libertarians,
in many ways, are a more pure and principled form of what the Republican Party
would be if it actually adhered to many of the ideals which it claims to stand
for but which fall by the wayside either due to true indifference or political reality. Trump’s
debacle here in 2020 can serve as the impetus for the more principled Republicans
to abandon the party altogether and turn the Libertarian Party from a marginal third
party to a real competitor with the Democrats.
Quoting Picard: MAKE IT SO.
