In most modern zombie movies there is a trope where one of the protagonists is bitten by an infected zombie but hides it until it’s too late. Eventually, they turn on their cohorts, forcing former friends to do the unimaginable — kill their friend to save the living. There’s a scene in the movie World War Z where a solider is bitten on the hand by an infectious zombie. In that instance, our hero, Brad Pitt (I think that’s name of the character in the movie, don’t fact check me on that), immediately cuts off the woman’s arm to prevent the infection from spreading to her whole body. The Republican Party had a chance to cut out the infection (currently in exile at Mar-a-Lago) spreading through it’s body, limiting the damage to the body itself. Instead they hand waived it away, insisting that everyone move on while every rational person could see the infection spreading in real time. The infection is now beyond any remediation attempts. The GOP needs to be shot in the head and burned to ashes in order to save the Republic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72YaMl2Mxy8
In 2014/2015 I was deeply conservative (less and less so now as time passes and events transpire). I voted for Bush twice and then for McCain and Romney respectively. Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012 left me sad and depressed. I believed Romney would’ve been a great president. I genuinely believed in a smaller government with limited powers. I wanted a balanced budget and a pragmatic problem solver in office to balance out a democratic party that I perceived, at the time, was veering more and more leftward. I thought Romney was the guy who could do it. So, fast forward to 2015, I was ready to vote for whoever the Republican nominee was for president. I laugh now at how invested I was in Marco Rubio. I genuinely thought that he would be the face of the conservative movement in the 21st century, LOL (folks, I’m going to admit right here that sometimes — oftentimes — my political instincts are very bad). I honestly believed that Rubio believed in the same things that I did (again, LOL): smaller and less powerful government, civil rights, the Constitution, and the rule of law (the actual rule of law — not the Trump version that encourages state agents to abuse citizens). I also genuinely believed that he and the GOP were fighting for those principles (again, I’m naïve and dumb).
Like a lot of people, I considered Donald Trump’s candidacy to be a joke and a publicity stunt. I didn’t think that the GOP would be stupid enough to vote for someone so ill equipped to lead a nation. I even wrote a few pieces on Medium about how destructive Donald Trump would be to the GOP (you can look at my former posts and laugh at me, I’m a big boy, I can take it). 2016 Me, In my naivety, believed that the damage that Trump would do to the GOP and conservatives would be limited to electoral destruction, making it harder for conservatives to win elections because they would be tethered to such an awful candidate and man. 2016 Me could not have guessed that ostensibly republican candidates and legislators would welcome the tether, beg for the tether, absolutely debase themselves for the tether. 2016 Me could not have conceived that Trump would lead the GOP to embrace authoritarianism and a personality cult. 2016 Me could not have fathomed that Trump would incite his followers to storm the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of an election based on his lies and provide a complicit republican party with the blueprint to seize power even when they’d lost a free and fair election. 2016 Me would have been absolutely flabbergasted that only 3 members of congress (I can only name three off the top of my head (Romney, Cheney, and Kinzinger), I’m sure there are a handful more) would be willing to stand on principle against Trump.
2016 Me would have been certain that conservatives generally and the GOP specifically would have cut the Trump infection out of the party after a day like January 6th to allow the rest of the GOP, though scarred and mangled, to heal. It turns out that the infection was already irreversible. Liz Cheney commented today, after being removed from her leadership role for challenging Trump’s lies, that “I think that the party is in a place that we’ve got to bring it back from, And we’ve got to get back to a position where we are a party that can fight for conservative principles that can fight for substance, we cannot be dragged backward, by the very dangerous lies of a former president…” There’s nothing to bring back. The GOP has been bitten, infected, and no-one with the power attempted to cut the infection off before it spread. There is no cure — it’s just going to get worse and worse until someone shoots it in the head or until it infects the body politic and destroys the Republic.
2016 Me would have never thought about emigrating to Canada or Iceland or wherever would take me because one of the two political parties in the nation of my birth represented an existential threat to the democratic order. 2016 Me believed that America was the greatest country on earth — why would I want to live anywhere else? America is a beacon to rest of world for principles of liberty, justice, civil rights, the rule of law, and democracy. It turns out we’re no better than any other liberal democracy and in a lot of ways, demonstrably worse. The GOP hides behind ideals (the Constitution, free speech, the rule of law, small government, etc…) that it doesn’t really believe in and would never fight for in the context of actually governing, except to pay lip service on the cable news circuit to human cancers like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. 2016 Me thought that attempts to overturn a free and fair election led by a former executive and loser in that election wasn’t something that happened in liberal democracies. 2016 Me naively believed that kind of thing to be more suited to tin pot dictatorships, banana republics, and Putin’s Russia. In fact, 2016 Me would have never believed that 1) such an attack was even a possible outcome of Trump’s election, or 2) that the GOP would insist that the instigator of such a riot suffer no consequences and in fact be embraced as the head of the party, forcing everyone who wanted his approval (and his increasingly unhinged supporters’ approval) to embrace the insidious lies that led to the attack and threaten to undermine the foundations of democracy in America. 2016 Me would have called you a damned liar if you would have told me that the GOP would expel Liz Cheney from leadership for challenging the lies and speaking out in favor of the rule of law and the Constitution.
2016 Me would have also scoffed at the idea that in 2025 there’s a significant risk that a GOP controlled congress will disregard the results of a free and fair election and attempt to install the loser because they can. Trump has given them the blueprint and proven that the consequences will be minimal if they do. 2021 Me understands, though. Someone needs to shoot the GOP in the head but no-one has a gun or the will to pull the trigger. So I’ll prepare myself accordingly. After all, Canada isn’t so bad, if they’ll have me.
