President Biden's greater challenge lies not in repairing our wrecked relations with foreign allies — most are reasonable polities that, accordingly, will come around to acknowledging that a U.S. alliance beats the hell out of Chinese and Russian encroachments — but from within: an opposition party that over the years has turned dark, delinquent, pridefully ignorant and, it seems, most unlike our allies, incurably hostile.
Thus out rush the Republican Party's older-guardian strategists and makeup artists to make it all better — more palatable and less repulsive. In a false reconstructionist vein already all-too familiar, Karl Rove, for instance, writes in the Wall Street Journal that "GOP officeholders, candidates and party leaders should offer ideas that apply timeless conservative principles," meaning they should preach that "what they’re for is as important as what they’re against:... originalist judges, a pro-growth tax cut, regulatory relief, strong national defense, recognition of the global threat posed by China, secure borders, and respect for life and religious liberty."
They should also reaffirm, says Rove, that "the values underlying Republican initiatives are crucial, too" — their belief in "traditional values, family, faith, personal responsibility, patriotism and law and order."
Let us take a gander, however, at not only where the GOP stands, but where, after years of sliding decadence, it has metaphorically(?) overtaken Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. The party …
denies legitimate election results, countenances violent insurrections, tolerates lawless chief executives, encourages and thrives on racism, …
flip-flops with remarkable predictability on debt and deficits, undermines national security by focusing on little more than military hardware, cages and separates children from their parents, ...
treats women's bodies as government property, screams nonexistent threats to religious liberty, heaves "traditional values" such as plain human decency overboard, confirms not philosophically balanced but extremist judges, …
contributes to family breakdown by cold-shouldering basic needs, refuses to accept personal responsibility, and embraces broadcast demagogues such as Hannity, Carlson and Limbaugh, who exclaimed yesterday that Biden's election was "something that's been arranged, rather than legitimately sought and won…. They have not legitimately won it."
GOP officeholders, candidates and party leaders have conditioned the base to be dark, delinquent, ignorant and hostile — just as the base, simultaneously, has likewise conditioned its leaders. Earlier I placed a question mark after "metaphorically" since the GOP's Kevin McCarthys and Josh Hawleys have given real life to Wilde's fictional character.
Dorian Gray's condition was irreversible and so is the Republican Party's, now grayed — in places — into also flimflamming — as a change! — that it and almost exclusively it cherishes respect for life, national security, economic growth and lawfulness, as Karl Rove blindly promotes its future. Liberals don't give a damn about these things, implies Rove. "There are more conservatives in America who believe in traditional values, family, faith, personal responsibility, patriotism and law and order," he blathers, "than there are liberals who don’t."
Same old twaddle, repackaged and marketed as renewed and improved American conservatism. When one gets right down to it, their exclusive values, as hawked by them, have been an exercise in propagandistic fraudulence all along. The only genuine development is that they've become insufferably arrogant and unbearably nasty as well.
More than anything, if some Republicans really wish to tidy up their image, they'll hie to the nearest courthouse — and change their name.