No Country for Old Neocons

The Cleansing of the GOP

If you were to tell me ten years ago that the Republican Party would soon become the party of change and of embracing modernity I probably would have thought you'd spiked my drink and I was hallucinating. The lumbering Bush-era dinosaur of the post-Reagan GOP has been a long time in going extinct, but for those of us who feel a sort of visceral disdain when we hear names like "McCain" and "Cheney" it looks like the current political paradigm shift is just about culminated.

Sure, the Republican Party is still stocked with such relics as Mitt Romney (lest anyone forget, the author of what later got adapted into Obamacare) and Liz Cheney (the daughter of a man so despised that even Republicans largely seem to have disowned his existence) but it is now fairly clear that the Republicans- unlike the Democrats, at least at present- have decided to swap out their vintage calendars for those where the year doesn't start with "19."

Liz Cheney is presumably on her way out. Mitt Romney just narrowly avoided official censure and was booed by his own Utah party buddies for voting to impeach Trump. Even notable neoconservative Lindsey Graham has decided to save himself, even if just out of sheer opportunism, because he understands that Donald Trumps' brand of populism actually resonates with voters- something which cannot be said for making promises and not fulfilling them, as most Republicans since Ronald Reagan left office have done. Gone, it seems, are the days when Republicans bowed before legacy media pressure and claims of bigotry by people who ideologically hate them- most such figures have either gone silent or been kicked aside, again with the exception of Cheney and Romney. In this bizarre scenario, the terrified Democrats have resorted to unleashing their corporate media buddies to deem any Republican that publicly disavows Trump a "hero" regardless of their apparent ideological views. (Remember, Mitt Romney once famously quipped that he thought we should "double Guantanamo" and was deemed sexist for his "binders full of women" schtick.) Any sin can be forgiven so long as you kneel at the altar of disavowing the one modern Republican who walked the walk instead of simply talking the talk and then ducking aside to enjoy a lucrative lifestyle off the backs of gullible and long-suffering voters.

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and decided I could support neither him nor Romney in 2012, opting to write in a vote for Ron Paul. I voted for Trump twice; the first time partly because his opponent was insane, and the second time because he actually did what he said he wished to do despite obstruction. That's something few recent Republicans- hell recent political figures in the entire world- can brag about. For an independent voter, the choice between a Trump-style populist movement on one hand, and what is being offered by the Democrats still clinging to 2010s economic policies and Tipper Gores concept of free expression on the other, the choice is clear- and I hazard a guess that I am not the only person who sees it that way.

The pure and simple fact is that the Democrats are clinging stubbornly to two fatally flawed ideas: First, that those who vote for them, in the internet-of-everything era with all its content, will perpetually forgive them if they get elected and then do not do what they said they wished to do. Second, that the problems facing the world today can be solved by ideas that are woefully outdated.