Five poisonous ideas that are killing the Republican Party
In politics, it’s hard to admit when things aren’t going as planned—particularly when your party holds almost all the cards. While people across the political spectrum may also suffer these intellectual maladies, Republicans must address them within before looking elsewhere:
- Whatever you don’t agree with is ‘fake.’ Sometimes people will disagree with you. At times, those people might even have good arguments as to why they hold those views. From time to time, you should consider why that disagreement makes you uncomfortable. It could be that you’re wrong. The ability to change and grow as we mature is a gift rather than a weakness. Slapping a “fake” label on anything that challenges us is the equivalent of a child putting his fingers in his ears and yelling loudly. Don’t be that kid.
- The government should regulate the press to ensure fairness. The Constitution ensures a free press for a reason—and it isn’t simply to provide box scores to football games. Many politicians don’t enjoy public critique or accountability. If we allow them effectively to regulate or marginalize unflattering coverage, we’ve lost one of liberty’s most vital guardians. Much of the mainstream legacy media leans to the political left. So what? We shouldn’t marginalize the Constitution because we don’t like the politics of those exercising rights it protects.
- Lies are acceptable in politics. The very fact this needs to be addressed should tell us we have a problem. We’ve accepted that lies are part and parcel of our political activities for far too long. Publicly standing up to powerful politicians when they lie is a tall order for most people. Start with the easy stuff. If you’re not sure about the credibility of a piece of information, don’t pass it along until you verify it. It doesn’t matter who forwarded the email you want to believe. If your sentence or tweet starts with the phrase “If true” then the subsequent information probably isn’t.
- A Republican Congress should simply rubber-stamp President Trump’s agenda. The Constitution is clear that the Congress wields the legislative power. The president checks that power with the powerful veto pen as legislation hits his desk. Congress and the president ought to check and balance each other even when they’re from the same party. Republican legislators in the U.S. House and Senate can and should exercise independence from the president where they disagree with him. Republicans should be more shocked by legislators who never disagree with the president than those who occasionally do.
- Moderate Republicans are the greatest hurdles to legislative progress. The most significant hurdle to legislative progress is trying to form a single-party majority with only two votes to spare in the Senate. When the president routinely attacks multiple Republican senators on social media, rallying votes becomes that much more difficult. I don’t care if the Democrats did use the budget reconciliation process to force the Affordable Care Act. It shouldn’t be a normal vehicle for passing major legislation. Here’s a novel idea: Try courting a few Democrats. Senators like Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., aren’t exactly cut from the same mold as Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
The Republican Party needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. We’ve been mainlining outrage for the better part of a decade. It is exhausting and not nearly as productive as we’d like. We must be honest even as we strive to be civil with each other. Our current mode of operation leaves much to be desired, and a little sober self-awareness could go a long way toward setting the Republican Party and our nation on a better trajectory.
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