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The silver lining of the Trump prez is how much GOP hypocrisy & opportunism it has made blatantly, undeniably obvious going forward. No one will ever believe again that evangelicals care about character & public morality, that the Freedom Caucus cares about debt, that GOP tax /1
cuts aren’t anything but a pay-off to the party’s donor class, that free-trade is a core principle, that Senate rules are sacrosanct (most obviously McConnell effectively stealing a SCOTUS seat). It’s amazing how much ideological ground the GOP has just thrown away under Trump./2
The party is ideologically bankrupt now, with its core commitment revealed as white cultural anxiety (plus defense of the Trump family), and led by an infotainment class (Fox) that is laughably inexpert at just about everything. That’s awful - and is probably why Ryan got out /3
last year. The GOP needs to go into the wilderness for awhile and reconstruct itself as a modern center-right party. A reasonable, center-rightish place to start would be being pro-market (rather than pro-business and pro-rich as the patty is today); pro-free trade; a basic /4
reconciliation with the welfare state which most Americans want to keep; and supportive of American power & ideals overseas without neoconservative belligerence and the nationalist glorification of American force you see in so many movies and TV shows like M Bay or 24. You can /5
disagree with this stuff - certainly liberals will and that’s great - but at least it’s intellectually coherent, not grossly offensive (like Trump’s racial trolling), and disjoined from the corruption, spite, and know-nothingism of the Trumpers and Fox. I still think there is /6
room in the US for a normal center-right party.And a healthy opposition party is good for democracy. But the GOP today is not that. This Mulvaney quote is just the latest example of how Trump has effectively destroyed theGOP as any kind of principled intellectual policy voice.END
