Encapsulating my point in lower-key letters, the conflict now prevailing (as, ever, before) in the organisation usually described as the Grand Old Party, heralding greatness but also a sense of putrefaction, of a thing crawled out of the skin of former glories.
The snake metaphor is old, of course. For once, long before Obama's raging and seemingly pastoral cries for "change", smoked in the image of youth, there was William Jennings Bryan: A man of lesser hair, but , whose fiery oratory of both fire-and-brimstone Old Testament-like fervour and a radical cry for fundamental and economic "change", equally strong and blasphemous against current orthodoxies in its cry that the United States, a government of, by and for the people, "should not crucify mankind on a cross of gold". Well, gone - one hundred years hence - was the gold standard, and it was a GOP administration that did it, but gone was also the old Bourbon Democratic party. It had, frankly, been swallowed by something else, amidst a popular torrent. (This can be disputed, of course.)
Another point made by the equally once-illustrious The Atlantic, a name befitting the once-unconquerable ocean gone beyond the age of simply being trod over by the now-deceased Concorde, is that she has been a GOP firebrand for all of Trump's policies, meaning the hardest thunderbolt self-hurled at the Democrats "until the insurrection". Well excuse me, but since when has this thing, I mean critique (quotation marks being perhaps necessary, but then superfluous) been a thing of the age of Trumpism or "Trumpianism"? It would feel too obvious to I also don't grasp how much power the lie of the stolen election ("stolen" being a rhetorical, rather than a legal category, with many considering the elections of 2000 and 2016 stolen in every way other than the courts having affirmed it (the case of 1960, where Nixon actually can claim to have won, if yet a sliver, of the popular vote over Kennedy's, in my view only more sordid in its amelioration as by the fact that indeed it seems to have been).
The equally ludicrous proposition, now swiftly forgotten, that Cheney's lesbianism (or her fathers more-than-tacit liberalism on the issue, which exceeded of President Clinton or former president-elect Gore) should necessitate a more progressive, or "GOP Classic" agenda - the Trumpista movement being, of course, hallmarked by its rampant homophobia, as exemplified by its prime scion's stance on equally ludicrous, or let's say solipsistic "questions" over Mr. Jenner's bathroom of choice, or the more groundbreaking proposal by a GOP candidate that a clerk who refused to endorse gay marriage in her office should go to jail (you ask whether Kerry, or indeed Bush could have escaped without notice over that eleven summers before) - has not been left wayside either, however. In this cosmic, dualist strife, there can only be loyalty to my issues on the side of good.
One would thus ask, to ascertain whether the grand old conservative party, and party of the people at least at some of the time, has
For if anything, American firebrand conservative thought has been nothing if not principled, and simultaneously ready to set those values aside. For if the heart and soul of liberty, as the well-spoken (if not very much else) Ronald, as good a candidate from the right for kingship if there was any, is liberty, then steadfastness is, from the perspective of liberty, a virtue. But what principles? If Cheney, a congresswoman from Wyoming - can get away with this in one of the most red, and ostensibly conservative states in the union, if one is to forego it's birthday advent of the female franchise, for example, half a century before its supposed enactment throughout the United States, one would be forced to answer whether these principles are principles at all. More serious, and more chillingly, is the issue of fundamental constitutional liberties. But foregoing the debate on abortion rights, whether such a concept as "substantial due process" should or indeed was invented, the unquestioned (well, even here there is a history, a question of scope, whose end we may yet see closed in different tones) liberties of speech, press, of assembly and petition, and
What then is this new GOP? It has, clearly, no burden to show loyalty to with regard to the brand of conservative. And yet, anyone noticing or even hailing the Trumpist-Kekist usurpation of the red, and of red states, would still necessarily notice a certain symbios, if not exactly congruence between the Trumpists and traditional conservative interests. Indeed, while Justice Barrett may be a fascist firebrand, et cetera, she is not out of fashion as someone who could one day have been nominated by Bush Minor, and perhaps without much blood-curdling, to this highest court in the land, perhaps even in the universe. For even the most fragrant, flagrantly vitriolic opponent find the old, reeking conservatives in the mold of George Will and Bill Kristol a step up (or ten) over The Donald's strangely more natural hair. At the same time, the Trumpost popular appeal among certain core segments - unspokenly thought of as core, that is - is as unsettling as it is, so to speak, impossible.
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