REFLECTIONS ON THE DEMISE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

     I had an uncle who I still honor a generation after his passing. Though our views began to diverge from my 16th year on, Uncle Clyde continued to argue respectfully with me at family reunions. Back in the time when womens place was in the kitchen, he invited me, at about 9 years-old, to join the men in their talks. He encouraged me to share my opinion. As our politics diverged, he may have regretted giving me that encouragement, but he never shut me out. 
     Clyde was a conservative Republican. Later, I would understand him to be a Libertarian-Republican. This was the post-McCarthy years, Sen. Joseph McCarthy; not Sen. Eugene McCarthy, and certainly not congressman Kevin McCarthy. It was that moment of Republican clarity that we know as the Eisenhower era. Until the Nixon era, there was a cautious avoidance of the hardline conservatives. Clyde had his foot in both groups. 
     The party has changed in the decades since. We have seen Republican's grow fat on eating their own. If an elected official of that party does not adequately follow the party line, they are first vilified during their primary, while a suitable  primary contender is selected.  So much for Reinhold Niebuhrs axiom that democracy is a proximate solution to an insoluble problem. In 2012, former Sen. Bob Dole was turned away by the Senate he once led, in control of Republicans led by Mitch McConnell, when he appealed to them to enhance Dole's signature law, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Not one Republican voted yea. They said there wasn't  the money. Five years later they passed a $2trillion TaxCut for billionaires. During the money-laundering trial of Donald Trump, the full scale of his "catch and kill" deal with David Pecker, editor of the national Enquirer and continuing delight to 9 yr. old boys, came into full view. One of the revelations was that a lie was planted that Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon and primary candidate for president in 2016, left a sponge in a patient after surgery. I would no more seek surgery from Ben Carson than I would ask Kristi Noehm to dog-sit, but doesn't that emphasize the full meaning of catch and kill? Can you be confident that Republicans of today's stripe would know that kill is a metaphore.
     Democracy demands bi-partisanship. This is not the way to keep that democracy, and every indication is that they, Republicans, do not intend to.

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