June 22, 2022
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
False Hope in the
Republican Party? Where Do We Go from Here? A Southerner Responds
Friends,
It did not dawn on me until I walked out to my mailbox Monday,
June 20…and there was no mail. “What’s up?” I thought. “It’s Monday, and I
always get mail on Monday, since it piles up on Sunday when there is no
delivery.” What had happened, I wondered.
Then, I witnessed one of those special delivery postal agents
who work on holidays, and I flagged her down. And come to find out that Monday
was “Juneteenth,” a new Federal holiday (actually it was Sunday, but the Feds,
as is their wont, postponed the observance until June 20th). So,
there was no regular mail delivery.
That explained it; I had forgotten the latest government
concession in the name of “equity” and “liberal democracy,” and advancing the
“ideals of America” as exemplified somehow in the Declaration of Independence.
As a national Federal holiday “Juneteenth,” this latest paean
to political correctness and abject apology for our past sins as a nation, was enacted by the US senate
unanimously on June 17, 2021, and by a vote in the House of
Representative of 415 to 14. Literally no one stood forth to explain what
actually was occurring: politically craven expediency and servile acquiescence
to ideology.
That set me to thinking, and I recalled the debate years ago over
the creation of Martin Luther King Day, enacted back in
1983, with overwhelming Democratic AND Republican support in the US
Senate (among the Democrats, by 41 to 4; among the GOP, by 37 to 18). Despite
the efforts of Senator Jesse Helms and the initial opposition of President
Reagan (who caved under pressure), King Day was steamrolled into law. And since
then it has arguably become more important in these United States than Memorial
Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and most other observed holidays.
We should have probably known then that the Republicans, the so-called
“conservative party,” which had presented itself as the replacement for the old
conservative Southern Democrats, were not, as my Uncle Clete used to say,
“worth tits on a boar hog.” The “Southern strategy,” as strategized
by Kevin Phillips and executed by Richard Nixon and his minions (with not a
little assistance from the Democrats at the time who went crazy Left in 1972
and nominated George McGovern), paid good dividends. Between 1968 and 1988 the
Republican Party…the political party which had been rightfully an anathema to
millions of Southerners after the War Between the States…managed to convince us
that the home-grown, traditional conservatism of older Democrats, leaders like
Harry Byrd, Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin, was now incarnate, alive and well
in the GOP.
And, at least for the moment, we thought we had witnessed that
as reality. Reagan was in the White House, re-elected overwhelmingly; and in
the US senate there was that former Democrat, elected in 1972 as North
Carolina’s first Republican senator in seventy years, conservative Jesse Helms.
Millions of disaffected conservative Democrats would vote for him. And there
were others, as well: the indomitable Strom Thurmond in South Carolina was now
a Republican, and John East—the scholarly professor—was North Carolina’s other
US senator.
The presence of Reagan, Helms, and their like reassured us
that we were doing the right thing, and, in a certain sense, continuing the heritage
and beliefs that had for so long guided us when we were all Southern Democrats.
But we were, in fact, deceived. And the MLK Day debate and
fiasco, and Republican presidential and legislative politics, both on the
national level as well as the state level, since then should have dispelled our
initial enthusiasm. For it was but a long history of broken promises and
continued deception. We should have known better as the national GOP nominated
such disastrous candidates on the presidential level as John McCain, Mitt
Romney and George W. Bush. Yes, when they came South they talked a good game
and explained that they could be trusted, but we should have known better.
They lied.
We should have known better when President Reagan signed off
on the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform Bill of 1986 which “legalized most undocumented
immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982.”
It was touted as the “final solution” to our illegal immigration question.
It wasn’t.
Rather, it did little but open the door wide to more “reform”
and an influx of millions more illegals.
We should have known better when so-called “conservative
Republicans,” boasting of their steadfast opposition to same sex marriage, all
of a sudden ceased to mention the topic after the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 Obergefell v Hodges
decision (June 2015). Never mind that in states where the question had been on
the ballot, twenty-nine of them had approved
by popular vote bans on same sex marriage (by 2008). But after that
decision, the GOP and Fox News essentially renounced their earlier “steadfast”
opposition, while embracing as many same sex personalities and prominent
figures as they could find. “Look at us,” Fox seemed to be saying to their
competitors further to the Left, “we have Guy Benson, Tammy Bruce, Rick Grenell,
and Douglas Murray, all of them happily consorting with their partners.”
We should have known better as the newest—and logical—manifestation
of the sexual revolution raised its head: transgenderism and the gender-fluid
destruction of traditional natural biology.
With alacrity Fox and the GOP jumped on board, after all they always had
to protect their Left flank from criticism and prove just how progressive they
were. Thus, Fox invited transgendered
Caitlyn Jenner to come on board as a contributor (making her first
appearance on the Hannity program, March 31, 2o22). And then in June 2022 they lauded
a family that had their infant girl—so young she was unable to actually
communicate with her parents—undergo sex “transitioning”
to a boy.
We should have known better when then Republican governor of
South Carolina Nikki Haley ordered that “the
Confederate flag” which hitherto had flown on the South Carolina capitol grounds
be removed. “It should never have been there,” she offered. And Haley’s
reaction illustrated the GOP’s retreat not just on flags of the Confederacy
that were once celebrated nationally as symbols of valor and devotion, but increasingly
on monuments commemorating not just Confederates but other Americans who could
in any way be tainted with the historic “sins” of racism. The GOP temporized,
and such opposition as there was has mostly been from the grassroots.
We should have also known better when (in 2020) the US
Senate voted 86-14—with a large majority of Republican senators joining in
the mad scramble—to remove the names of American military institutions named
for Confederate leaders. Our arguments to the contrary, our petitions, the
polling—all were to no avail. “We mustn’t be seen as ‘racists’,” we were
answered.
Gun control and “red flag” laws? Fourteen
Republican senators, including John Cornyn (TX), Thom Tillis (NC), Lindsey
Graham (SC), Bill Cassidy (LA), Roy Blount (MO), and Richard Burr (NC)—all Southerners—joined
Democrats in insuring that greater government control over gun ownership and
the gutting of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution would proceed.
And these solons are just the tip of the iceberg. For an agenda
of dissimulation and deception pervades and infects the GOP all the way down to
the state and local level in many cases.
The advent of Donald Trump and his incredibly surprising
victory in the 2016 presidential contest changed all that, at least for a while.
Admittedly, he ran against perhaps the most loathsome candidate ever chosen to
represent either political party, Hillary Clinton. But his election still was
unique. For what Trump did—and I suggest it was his major accomplishment amidst
many failures—is that he, at least partially, tore off the forbidding mask that
hid the evil intent and designs of what we call “the deep state” and the national
political duopoly. By that I mean he was able through his abrasive personality,
one would say his almost irascible nature, to force the agents of America’s
long-running and practically impervious managerial bureaucracy, and its pliant
prostitutes in the media (most all of it) and political minions in Congress, to
show themselves for what they were and what they intended for us.
As never before those apparatchiks in the managerial class,
the Washington “insiders,” the permanent bureaucrats and politicians, saw their
hegemony threatened. And they telegraphed this immediately to the networks and
online journals that acted on their behalf. Trump became, as it were, a
larger-than-life menace and danger to “our liberal democracy” (understood to
actually mean that if they let him get away with his bravado, it endangered
their increasing stranglehold on what was left of the collapsing American
republic). Thus, the two impeachment charades, and the ultimate immense and
diabolical act of ideological political theater, the “January 6 Committee.”
Perhaps Trump’s most serious failing was in his appointments.
Many of them were essentially and profoundly opposed to him as well as his
agenda. His explanation was that he was attempting to create “party unity” by
naming individuals who had originally opposed him, and somehow building an
administration that drew on the available talent in the party. His willingness
to listen to some individuals close to him (Jared Kushner comes to mind) was
disastrous. From the beginning, party unity was a pipe dream.
To even have considered Mitt Romney for a pivotal position in
his administration, to have named neoconservative Elliott Abrams to represent the
United States in dealings with Venezuela and Iran, to have appointed
Never-Trumper John Bolton as national security advisor, to have made Nikki
Haley ambassador to the United Nations—these were just a few of the horrid
miscues, the abject failure in following the advice of some of those
individuals who grouped around him.
But it also illustrates a permanent disease within the
Republican establishment and amongst its votaries. Many of them begrudgingly
accepted Trump when he became the party nominee, while secretly (and
not-so-secretly) harboring a desire to see him fail on major portions of his
agenda, and in various instances attempting to insure that failure.
Nikki Haley stands out as a conspicuous example of, first,
damning and blasting Trump, then embracing him in one of those particularly nauseating
efforts at ingratiation and self-serving about faces, only to once again
position herself for a potential presidential run either in 2024 or later. The
lady has no shame, just overweening ambition.
There are some—a few—true conservatives, a few Republican
office holders who have risen a bit above this process, figures who refuse to
follow the poisonous agenda and template. But they are notable because
they are exceptions. Their number up to now has been relatively small.
A Marjorie Taylor-Greene and a Lauren Boebert and a Thomas
Massie stand out in the House of Representatives, even as they are given cold
shoulder by the GOP leadership. You can see that by the number and viciousness
of attacks loosed upon them. They deserve our support. While over in the US
Senate Mitch McConnell exemplifies the “good ole’ boy” network which
continually gives way to the next installment of Democrat and “woke”
radicalism.
On the ground there are now voters who view perhaps for the
first time in their lives the real and actual corrupt nature of our current political
system. And even if only vaguely, what they behold is nothing more than a forbidding
playground for our unelected oligarchs of Silicon Valley, international corporations,
and foul politics which have turned this republic into a kratocracy, in which
the more those elites scream at us about the necessity to “defend our
democracy,” the more they control our expression, destroy our liberties, and control
our destiny, and, in fact, demolish what is left of that “democracy.”
We should have known better—we should have recognized the
signs and the markers along the way. We should have taken notice of the disturbing
events and the history—it was there for us to see. But it perhaps took an
unlikely brash New York businessman, who didn’t always watch his language, to
cause the “deep state” serpent to strike back and, ironically, reveal its
nefarious and diabolical intents and program.
Since then the managerial elites, the permanent bureaucracy,
both Democrat and Republican, have sought, as it were, to put the genie back in
the lamp. In the end perhaps their mistake was to react so violently and
hysterically to what happened in 2016 (and then in 2020). It was bound to
unleash a reaction. But their calculus was that events—and their revolution—had
proceeded too far that there was nothing really effective that we could do in
response. Things were, as they say, too far gone.
Trump, perhaps unknown to him, did open a slight crack in the
unrelenting façade of the Behemoth that has progressively taken control of our
country and our lives.
But the old republic is, in fact, effectively dead…and what we
can and must do is salvage what we can, doing our duty, fighting like Hell,
while waiting upon the judgment of God who will in His judgment decide the fate
of our nation. That must be our hope and what motivates us to continue this
humanly unequal struggle.
