Roy Moore’s near victory in the Alabama Senate race epitomizes the GOP’s tolerance for repugnant candidates, so long as they align on ideology.
The soul of the Republican party, tattered from bigotry and auctioned off over and over again to naked self-interest and greed, was absolutely not restored by the defeat of Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race this week.
You could hear the sighs of relief across the nation in some GOP circles when Doug Jones bested Moore this week, a palpable relief that he didn’t drag yet another sexual abuse scandal into the Capitol.
But if anything, Moore’s near victory, the culmination of an extended internecine war over his candidacy, was a reminder of how badly the nation needs the GOP to get its act together. It’s a sign of just how soulless the party has become, how mired in self-confusion and licentious approbation the GOP has sunk.
The party is willing to indulge just about any repugnant point of view in a candidate or public official – racism, religious discrimination, disrespect for the Constitution – in order to achieve its political aims. And Roy Moore, an accused pedophile, only drew the ire of party officials once those claims against him came out. They’d been turning their heads to his offensive oddities for decades to that point.
Sen. Lamar Alexander said Wednesday that he was glad Moore lost because he didn’t represent “the future of the Republican Party.”
But think about it. Take away the penchant for sex with underage girls, and Moore represents the GOP’s past, its present, and the direction the party is unquestionably headed.
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His savage attacks on non-Christians, his romanticism of the eras of de jure discrimination, his insistence on blurring the lines between church and state – all of it was tolerable by the mainstream GOP, enough so that he was never really called out for it.
And that’s what the GOP has tolerated – and even celebrated at times – from any number of its politicians, including President Donald Trump .
It has been wildly discomforting to watch the GOP engage in stunning intellectual gymnastics to justify its support for officials of such low character.
Tax cuts. Low regulation. A smaller safety net.
As long as someone was in line with party positions on those issues, the GOP was willing to look the other way on racial and religious justice, or the decency that would suggest you don’t kick an economic cripple when they’re down, or stamp out opportunity for those who don’t have much.
There are Republicans for whom I have deep respect, despite our political differences. There are ideas within the GOP that I think are at least reasonable starting or along-the-way points for solutions to some of our deepest problems.
And I hear consistently from GOP friends about the party’s (ancient) history – about its founding in abolitionism, its long-time opposition to Jim Crow.
But the truth is that for the past 50 years, race has dramatically redefined both political parties’ outlooks, and the Republican Party has become reliant, first and foremost, on the support and votes of those who are either outright bigots or tolerant of inequality as an exigency to other issues.
It used to be couched in other messages. So Ronald Reagan announces his presidential candidacy with a states’ rights speech, delivered in the Mississippi county where civil rights workers had been famously killed. George H. W. Bush’s campaign preached law and order in the visage of black killer Willie Horton.
And it has become harder and harder to watch the dangerous duality grow – the rhetorical insistence on equality coupled with a slide of moral attrition, inching ever away from standards that even seem rational. It has only gotten worse, and now tolerates or even celebrates Trump and his overtly bigoted statements and actions.
Roy Moore should have been an easy “no,” years ago, based on the things he has said and done that contravene pretty basic tenets of equality. But just a few weeks ago, headed into the Senate race in Alabama, he wasn’t.
Not until several women accused him of creeping on them when they were underage did the party officially disengage at all from his campaign.
Why wasn’t racism enough? Ridiculous paeans to ethnic or religious purity?
Even worse, why did the Republican National Committee deal itself back into Moore’s column late in the race, even as the allegations against him hung in the air like a polluted cloud.
Trump should have been just an easy of a “no,” but he wasn’t either.
I can remember in late summer 2016, for instance, when Lt. Gov. Brian Calley finally announced he’d seen enough of the Trump campaign and said that he wouldn’t support Trump’s presidential campaign.
It was right after the tape was released of Trump bragging about assaulting women.
But I asked Calley why he hadn’t been moved by Trump’s promise to ban Muslim immigrants to the country, for instance – an issue that hits very close to home here in Michigan. I asked him about Trump’s history of housing discrimination, his racist accusations of the Central Park 5, even after they were exonerated.
Calley said those issues were a matter of “opinion,” and that reasonable minds could disagree.
Attorney General Bill Schuette has been worse about Trump, supporting him out of loyalty, saying he “rides for the brand.”
What does that even mean? Politics is not, in its best iteration, about mindless fealty.
This is what the GOP has become. A win-at-all-costs club that can’t consistently discern the path toward principle, rather than political payoff.
Moore was just the latest example, and it’s only by the slimmest margins that Alabama voters avoided making him an elected representative of the party in Washington.
The GOP needs to find its soul again – not just for its own sake, but for all of ours.
