Yes, there is a Republican ideology. That is the problem . . .

R.I.P., G.O.P.

NY Times – editorial – October 24

Of all the things President Trump has destroyed, the Republican Party is among the most dismaying.

“Destroyed” is perhaps too simplistic, though. It would be more precise to say that Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals.

Tomato, tomahto. However you characterize it, the Republican Party’s dissolution under Mr. Trump is bad for American democracy.

A healthy political system needs robust, competing parties to give citizens a choice of ideological, governing and policy visions. More specifically, center-right parties have long been crucial to the health of modern liberal democracies, according to the Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe. Among other benefits, a strong center right can co-opt more palatable aspects of the far right, isolating and draining energy from the more radical elements that threaten to destabilize the system.

Today’s G.O.P. does not come close to serving this function. It has instead allowed itself to be co-opted and radicalized by Trumpism. Its ideology has been reduced to a slurry of paranoia, white grievance and authoritarian populism. Its governing vision is reactionary, a cross between obstructionism and owning the libs. Its policy agenda, as defined by the party platform, is whatever President Trump wants — which might not be so pathetic if Mr. Trump’s interests went beyond “Build a wall!”

“There is no philosophical underpinning for the Republican Party anymore,” the veteran strategist Reed Galen recently lamented to this board. A co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a political action committee run by current and former Republicans dedicated to defeating Mr. Trump and his enablers, Mr. Galen characterized the party as a self-serving, power-hungry gang.

With his dark gospel, the president has enthralled the Republican base, rendering other party leaders too afraid to stand up to him. But to stand with Mr. Trump requires a constant betrayal of one’s own integrity and values. This goes beyond the usual policy flip-flops — what happened to fiscal hawks anyway? — and political hypocrisy, though there have been plenty of both. Witness the scramble to fill a Supreme Court seat just weeks before Election Day by many of the same Senate Republicans who denied President Barack Obama his high court pick in 2016, claiming it would be wrong to fill a vacancy eight months out from that election.

Mr. Trump demands that his interests be placed above those of the nation. His presidency has been an extended exercise in defining deviancy down — and dragging the rest of his party down with him.

Having long preached “character” and “family values,” Republicans have given a pass to Mr. Trump’s personal degeneracy. The affairs, the hush money, the multiple accusations of assault and harassment, the gross boasts of grabbing unsuspecting women — none of it matters. White evangelicals remain especially faithful adherents, in large part because Mr. Trump has appointed around 200 judges to the federal bench.

For all their talk about revering the Constitution, Republicans have stood by, slack-jawed, in the face of the president’s assault on checks and balances. Mr. Trump has spurned the concept of congressional oversight of his office. After losing a budget fight and shutting down the government in 2018-19, he declared a phony national emergency at the southern border so he could siphon money from the Pentagon for his border wall. He put a hold on nearly $400 million in Senate-approved aid to Ukraine — a move that played a central role in his impeachment.

So much for Republicans’ Obama-era nattering about “executive overreach.”

Despite fetishizing “law and order,” Republicans have shrugged as Mr. Trump has maligned and politicized federal law enforcement, occasionally lending a hand. Impeachment offered the most searing example. Parroting the White House line that the entire process was illegitimate, the president’s enablers made clear they had his back no matter what. As Pete Wehner, who served as a speechwriter to the three previous Republican presidents, observed in The Atlantic: “Republicans, from beginning to end, sought not to ensure that justice be done or truth be revealed. Instead, they sought to ensure that Trump not be removed from office under any circumstances, defending him at all costs.”

The debasement goes beyond passive indulgence. Congressional bootlickers, channeling Mr. Trump’s rantings about the Deep State, have used their power to target those who dared to investigate him. Committee chairmen like Representative Devin Nunes and Senator Ron Johnson have conducted hearings aimed at smearing Mr. Trump’s political opponents and delegitimizing the special counsel’s Russia inquiry.

As head of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Mr. Johnson pushed a corruption investigation of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter that he bragged would expose the former vice president’s “unfitness for office.” Instead, he wasted taxpayer money producing an 87-page rehash of unsubstantiated claims reeking of a Russian disinformation campaign. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, another Republican on the committee, criticized the inquiry as “a political exercise,” noting, “It’s not the legitimate role of government or Congress, or for taxpayer expense to be used in an effort to damage political opponents.”

Undeterred, last Sunday Mr. Johnson popped up on Fox News, engaging with the host over baseless rumors that the F.B.I. was investigating child pornography on a computer that allegedly had belonged to Hunter Biden. These vile claims are being peddled online by right-wing conspiracymongers, including QAnon.

Not that congressional toadies are the only offenders. A parade of administration officials — some of whom were well respected before their Trumpian tour — have stood by, or pitched in, as the president has denigrated the F.B.I., federal prosecutors, intelligence agencies and the courts. They have failed to prioritize election security because the topic makes Mr. Trump insecure about his win in 2016. They have pushed the limits of the law and human decency to advance Mr. Trump’s draconian immigration agenda.

Most horrifically, Republican leaders have stood by as the president has lied to the public about a pandemic that has already killed more than 220,000 Americans. They have watched him politicize masks, testing, the distribution of emergency equipment and pretty much everything else. Some echo his incendiary talk, fueling violence in their own communities. In the campaign’s closing weeks, as case numbers and hospitalizations climb and health officials warn of a rough winter, Mr. Trump is stepping up the attacks on his scientific advisers, deriding them as “idiots” and declaring Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top expert in infectious diseases, a “disaster.” Only a smattering of Republican officials has managed even a tepid defense of Dr. Fauci. Whether out of fear, fealty or willful ignorance, these so-called leaders are complicit in this national tragedy.

As Republican lawmakers grow increasingly panicked that Mr. Trump will lose re-election — possibly damaging their fortunes as well — some are scrambling to salvage their reputations by pretending they haven’t spent the past four years letting him run amok. In an Oct. 14 call with constituents, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska gave a blistering assessment of the president’s failures and “deficient” values, from his misogyny to his calamitous handling of the pandemic to “the way he kisses dictators’ butts.” Mr. Sasse was less clear about why, the occasional targeted criticism notwithstanding, he has enabled these deficiencies for so long.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, locked in his own tight re-election race, recently told the local media that he, too, has disagreed with Mr. Trump on numerous issues, including deficit spending, trade policy and his raiding of the defense budget. Mr. Cornyn said he opted to keep his opposition private rather than get into a public tiff with Mr. Trump “because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”

Profiles in courage these are not.

Mr. Trump’s corrosive influence on his party would fill a book. It has, in fact, filled several, as well as a slew of articles, social media posts and op-eds, written by conservatives both heartbroken and incensed over what has become of their party.

But many of these disillusioned Republicans also acknowledge that their team has been descending into white grievance, revanchism and know-nothing populism for decades. Mr. Trump just greased the slide. “He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party has become in the last 50 or so years,” the longtime party strategist Stuart Stevens asserts in his new book, “It Was All a Lie.”

The scars of Mr. Trump’s presidency will linger long after he leaves office. Some Republicans believe that, if those scars run only four years deep, rather than eight, their party can be nursed back to health. Others question whether there is anything left worth saving. Mr. Stevens’s prescription: “Burn it to the ground, and start over.”

But the claim that the Republican party has no ideology or policy agenda is completely wrong.

The policy agenda of the GOP is to cut taxes on the rich and to dismantle regulation and social insurance programs.

NYT is out of depth. That’s a typical neoliberal platform and both parties, not only one, adopted the same neoliberal ideology (that was the essence of Clinton wing selloff to Wall Street).

So, yes, the Republican Party has ideology but this ideology is the same as the ideology on “Clitonized” Dems with some minor differences (“soft neoliberalism”: of Clintonized Dems vs “hard neoliberalism” by Repugs)

Both are now extremely corrupt Imperial Parties ready to sacrifices the interests of common Americans for the interests of global neoliberal empire (read multinationals) and personal profits. Kind of occupying force, much like Bolsheviks were int he USSR.

Both are War parties, jingoistic and militaristic to the extreme. and ready to feed Pentagon to the tilt at the expense of common people. And they are jingoistic to such an extent that is is not unclear to which party neocons should belong (Max Boot changed parties recently.)

Both are ready to blame the gradual collapse of neoliberalism in the USA on a convenient foreign scapegoat and use neo-McCarthyism as a smoke screen to hide neoliberalism failures including Hillary fiasco — the rejection by common people of a neoliberal, jingoistic candidate pushed by neoliberal elite. The fact that the second candidate was probably even worse domestically with his extreme “national neoliiberalism” program does not change the situation. That’s was a real protest.

Both are now extremely friendly to intelligence agencies. with neoliberal globalist wing of Dems using them for political purposes via Russiagate hoax, The situation that probably will be mirrored by Repugs with “Chinagate” if Biden wins.

Likbez,

“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

People who claim Trump is undermine the republic are wrong. The last nail in the coffin of the republic was put by George Bush, We are
now living in the empire.

The replacement of the republic with the "national security state" started with Truman, reached local max in 1963 when a faction
within CIA killed JFK and irrevocably became an empire in 1991 with the disappearance of the USSR. And the global neoliberal empire
ruled from Washington that the USA tries to maintain as a world hegemon is a death sentence to republic and democracy. So it is fair
to say that formally republic (and democracy) in the USA seized to exist after dissolution of the USSR, when the USA ruling elite became
drunk with the feeling of the only world superpower and neocons start to determine the USA foreign policy. People just became hostages,
forced to support and die in imperial wars, while standard of living of lower 80% of population start gradually sliding, like always
happens with empires, and manufacturing (and jobs) stared to move oversees, mainly in China. The decline started actually under Carter.

Truman initiated the transition of the republic into national security state by creating CIA, NSA and FBI. Herbert Hoover
was probably the first who noted that now "tail is wagging the dog ": intelligence agencies were able to the control of Congress and executive branch via dirt of politicians and other standard for the "deep state" tricks. To say nothing about Allan Dulles, CIA and JFK assassination.

And later Obama managed to paraphrase Mr. Orwell 1984, “We always have to be at war with Eastasia.” Just 30 years later. Now you need to add to this pervasive wiretapping of all communications due to the treat of terrorism.

The look how easily the deep state derailed Sanders candidacy. Nobody even managed to scream, until it was too late. As Professor Sheldon Wolin put it we live under "inverted totalitarianism ":

“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic… surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

Wolin showed us all the realities of and limits of the US form of government. It is still a livable space and if you do not try to undermine
the neoliberal social order they will leave you alone. There not much forceful indoctrination that was a hallmark of the USSR. It's
still a better country, I can attest.

Also the USA "nomenklatura" is more agile, less fossilized in comparison with Brezhnev’s nomenkatura.

But "we are an empire now" as Karl rove told us. Even formally it is no longer republic as elected President is more or less ceremonial figure, who does not control non-elected bureaucrats of the executive branch. they (aka "deep state") control him.

Even in a sense of oligarchic republic (the democracy for the top 1% or less) the democracy is under assault. The "Deep state" is effectively strangulated even this, very limited form, that existed before 1991 (the year of dissolution of the USSR). As we can see from Sanders case, or Supreme Court role in Bush II case. And Sanders was definitely a member of the elite, not some random guy from nowhere. The same was true for Al Gore. But they stole the election from him, plain and simple.

Wendy Brown moved Wolin ideas further suggesting that neoliberalism is the novel fusion of economic with political power (one dollar one vote; voters turned into consumers; neoliberal rationality) and that alone completely "poison democracy at its root” It think I
already wrote about those topics. My judgment here is highly suspect — I never lived in Washington and never studied history or political
science professionally.

Let's hope for the best. Our great advantage is that we are old and are probably the only generation that managed to live without
the major war. Let's hope that we will be able to die before WWIII 😉

Still, I think Trump entered (not without influence of Russiagate;
and those sleazy intelligence crooks like Comey, Brennan and Mueller and their clan of "national security parasites" be those scoundrels internally damned) a very dangerous path — the path advocated by neocons and MIC.

As Biney said on Jan 1, 2018 (
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/01/the-still-missing-evidence-of-russia-gate/
):

"Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional."

IMHO the current neo-McCarthysim campaign that was deployed to solve some internal problems within the Democratic Party (rejection by
electorate and subsequent political fiasco of Hillary Clinton) is a very dangerous tool. You can't blame Trump victory on Russia. That's simply stupid or disingenuous. Trump election is a sign of systemic crisis of neoliberalism in the USA, somewhat similar to the crisis of Marxism the the USSR experienced before dissolution. Rust Belt voters rejected Hillary as the establishment candidate who symbolized the status quo (which they hate) and that was it.

In such crisis the elite is de-legitimized and often resort to dirty tricks to regain the lost legitimacy. A war is one such trick. Neo-McCarthyism campaign is another. Of course, Russia in far from being a saint and bear a part of responsibility for unleashing the civil war
in Donbass (and generally destabilizing Ukraine — it is a curse to be a neighbor our of such a large and powerful country; Canadians
and Mexicans probably think the same 😉 ,

But what currently we see in major MSM looks to me like a classic witch hunt with the implicit goal to whitewash humiliating for neoliberal Democrats (Clinton wing of the party) defeat and blame it on the external force (Putin looks really like "Deus Ex Machina" for democrats 😉 . <

While Trump run brilliant election campaign based on opposition to neoliberal status quo, his elections slogans were completely fake.
He completely folded three month after the elections and now symbolizes "empty governance" as if somebody changed the man. During election the New York billionaire structured his campaign around three topics which propelled him to victory.

First, he seemed to comprehend America’s status quo crisis — the disintegration of neoliberalism that had defined
the country since Reagan. Large numbers of voters understood immediately what he was saying, particularly since the crisis of working
class was largely ignored by the other candidates.

Second, he positioned himself as an "anti-neoliberal status quo" candidate. While two neoliberal parties instinctively clung
to time-tested positions and neoliberal groupthink, shunning any changes. Trump sidestepped this rigid political thinking of both
parties and crafted a new mix of issues cutting across partisan lines. He embraced traditional GOP positions such as reduced taxes,
school choice, increased defense spending, and rejection of the idea of human-induced climate change. But he also took positions
contrary to Republican orthodoxy— Social security and Medicare protection, attacks on neoliberal globalization and "free trade" regime, rejection of austerity economics . And he manifested contempt for an important part of neoliberal ideology embraced by both parties — neoliberal view of immigration

Third, Trump’s disdain for political niceties suggested to voters what he declared political war on the country’s neoliberal elite — all those despicable neocon think tanks, university professors, the neoliberal MSM, the managerial class, "national security parasites", Hollywood, and Wall Street financial titans.

Like Don Quixote he was alone warrior against neoliberalism and all-powerful adversaries. And he wouldn’t buckle when they fought back to protect their cherished neoliberal globalization and privileged standing of multinationals as the real power behind the throne

What emerged from the campaign was a growing recognition that the country stands at a fundamental crossroads — whether to follow
the elite vision of neoliberal globalism and "anti-nationalism", with money, people, ideas, and cultures moving freely across increasingly indistinct borders (Biden administration path); or to retreat to traditional nationalism including fealty to Western cultural heritage and reject multiculturalism.

In other words the main battle lines in 2020 are really ideological.

But there a lot of problems with painting Trump as a fighter against Clinton/Bush/Obama-style of neoliberal globalization. After
inauguration we saw quite different Trump. He’s abandoned all of his "anti-neoliberal" election promises, particularly in foreign policy and dealing with Wall Street titans, that helped propel him into office. And he started openly flirting with prospects of a war with
Iran. Probably to please his Zionist sponsors, but also may be out of his complete and utter incompetence.

That means that now he is unable conduct a meaningful conversation with his voters. Outside fanatics who will support him in any case, he definitely betrayed them. In this sense he might have difficulties to preserve his base in 2020. Due to his foreign policy blunder and Pompeo brass style of gangsterism
in foreign policy some of his political capital among independents shrunk. That same is true with his tax cut. This was a clear betrayal.
Add to this that he was pinned down by Mueller investigation until December 2017, when Strzok-gate scandal broke and only in 2019 Mueller (and Rosenstein) lost credibility and became a joke. Mueller investigation actually was a shroud gambit against him based on his
own blunders.

But BLM and, especially, riots gave his a short in the arm. So everything is possible now.

Also one clear achievement of Trump is that clearly and convincingly demonstrated how corrupt and crooked are neoliberal MSM. As the result I even started watching some Fox news (Tucker) recently ;-). If somebody predicted that a couple of years ago I would laugh in his/her face.

A very good (IMHO) overview of the current situation can be found in London review of books. See

What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears