Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:17 pm
*The following is an opinion column by R Muse*
It is interesting that, although not very often, a conservative regarded as a “Republican’s Republican” will express their dismay and veritable disgust at the direction the conservative movement has taken and actually tells the truth; no matter how painful. And the dismay shared by a man known as an “intellectual conservative” is over his Party’s embrace of Donald Trump due to the multi-decade Party adherence to white supremacy.
In this case, the Republican’s Republican, one Avik Roy, shared his remorse that his party, and the conservative movement in general, “is going to die” due to its being “conservative” and incapable of change.
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“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” Mr. Roy said. “There’s going to be a disruption.”
Avik Roy is an editor at Forbes and worked for three Republican candidates for president: Willard Romney, Marco Rubio and Rick Perry as part of his lifelong dedication to advancing conservative ideals.
As a Republican, Roy is not enthralled that with the Republican Party’s “disruption,” it will mean Democrats will have the upper hand in leading the nation, but he confesses the GOP is reaping precisely what it’s sown in Donald Trump. He is sad to report that the Republican Party “has lost its right to govern because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.”
According to a conversation with Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, Roy said,
“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that [commitment to equality] principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country. I think the conservative movement is fundamentally broken. Trump is not a random act. This election is not a random act. The gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”
Mr. Roy, like real historians and not Republican revisionists, traces the Party’s racist “gravitational center” back to the 1960s and Barry Goldwater, a harsh opponent of the civil rights movement. It was during the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Act movement and passage that then-Southern Democrats became the ‘white nationalist’ Republicans; because apparently representing the former Confederacy meant representing white supremacy and chasing African Americans from the Republican Party and portraying them and any non-whites as not “real Americans.”
Today, that white supremacy has isolated and chased anyone out of GOP who is not a white Christian male; women have never been accepted by the GOP as “real Americans” unless they are subservient and willing perpetual birth machines. As this column has reiterated ad nauseam, it is that several decades-long “whites only” agenda that gave rise to Donald Trump as the GOP standard bearer. It will also mean, according to Mr. Roy, that the “whites only” agenda is going to be the undoing of the Republican Party.
In 2012, two high-respected political scientists and longtime scholars of American politics, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, attempted to warn Republicans about their extremism in a damning Washington Post op-ed. Of course the two scholars, a liberal and a conservative, dealt with Republican extremism and dysfunction on everything and didn’t focus on white nationalism, but they fairly cited exactly what is wrong with this country and who is ultimately responsible. They wrote:
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
Obviously, as Mr. Roy noted, despite losing a presidential election and rejecting an official Party election post mortem citing stupidity and lack of inclusiveness of all citizens, Republicans were incapable of reforming. Instead of reining in the extremist rhetoric and demagoguery of anyone not white and not Christian, Republicans ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric, attacked the LGBT community mercilessly, portrayed African Americans as thugs, and declared that all non-Christians (Muslims) were monsters and an existential threat. It is that sentiment that Donald Trump seized upon and why he is the Party’s leader.
Whether, as Mr. Roy contends, the Republican and conservative movement suffers a near-fatal setback or not, and they retool the movement to purge the Party’s white nationalist branding, nothing will change. Republicans have spent the past 50-plus years inculcating white nationalism and Aryan entitlement into their racist base, and spent the past 8 years making it popular as the conservative movement’s raison d’être. It is not going to go away no matter how inclusive the Party becomes.
The GOP base will revolt against a humanistic reformation and that truly explains why no small number of Republican politicians are terrified of speaking out against hate, religious extremism, and particularly this idea that America was created by god for white Christians at the exclusion of all others. It is the story that elevated Donald Trump to lead the GOP and according to an acknowledged intellectual conservative, it will be the demise of the movement that avowed Republican Avik Roy asserted has “lost the moral authority to lead.”
Audio engineer and instructor for SAE. Writes op/ed commentary supporting Secular Humanist causes, and exposing suppression of women, the poor, and minorities. An advocate for freedom of religion and particularly, freedom of NO religion.
Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn’t look good.
Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.
