Friends of the Republican Party

The Republican Party is a party in need of friends. They don’t have many right now. They have a number of loyalists among their members and voters, and they have their opponents in the Democrats. They even have outright enemies all over the place. But they don’t have a whole lot of friends. Perhaps the long talked of revolution in the Republican Party is finally at hand.

There is a sad fact that there is a misunderstanding of what friendship really is. Friendship is about standing by each other. It is about helping each other out. It isn’t that you follow your friend off a cliff. It isn’t that you shout support from the sides while they do something stupid. Sometimes being a good friend means telling your friend that they’re being stupid, or that their ideas are bad. Your friend wants to get in their car and drive home after you’ve been out drinking, you don’t wish them good luck, you take their keys and put them in a cab. They may be pissed, and they might not like it, but you’ve probably saved them and someone else a lot of money, if not their lives.

The Republican Party right now is like a big bus, and its got a few people on board who don’t have a license and are probably drunk, who think they should be allowed to drive the bus. They don’t even know very well the roads they want to take the rest of the passengers down – whether the road leads to a dead end, or even a different destination – but are nonetheless intent on wresting the wheel from the appropriate driver and steer the bus themselves.

The Democrats are in another bus. They are supposed to be heading to the same destination, so for now all they can do is follow along from a safe distance. The American people are the pedestrians on the sidewalks and the other drivers in their cars. We all stand to be the ones that suffer as the rancorous, reckless, passengers on the Republican bus look to take everyone else down with them in their mad quest.

Before the 2008 election, as the Democrats seemed poised to win the White House, the Senate, and the House, I was in a classroom talking to some people about that election (as irony would have it I was set to deliver a presentation about Syria specifically, chemical and nuclear weapons generally). In the political discussion, I noted that I was hoping for a split Congress – one chamber Democrats and one chamber Republicans. I had, I still do have, a belief that two ideologically different but reasoned and informed and reasonable political parties debating issues makes for better government than a single party able to unopposed push anything at all through at any time.

Unfortunately that sentiment rested on the idea that the other party was indeed rational, reasonable, and reasoned. That clearly was not the case with the Republican Party in 2008, got much worse after 2010, and so far after 2012 has seemed to, as inconceivable as it was just a year ago, has gotten even worse.

There are those within the Republican Party who have been elected on, and have fully bought into, the ill-conceived rhetoric of “government as small as possible, small enough to drown in the bathtub”. Anyone who offers any logical thought on the matter at all knows that it is a purely rhetorical exaggeration, not a true policy stance. But there are members of the Republican Party who have determined that whether they believe it or not, whether it is a true gut belief or just a play for votes, they will do everything they can to make government so small it is venerably invisible. To those people, a government shutdown isn’t a problem, it’s a success. The prospect of defaulting on the debt isn’t a concern; it’s a natural step to squashing the government.

Yet, how many of them are going to voluntarily surrender their taxpayer provided healthcare? How many of them are going to give up the perks afforded them at the taxpayer’s expense? How many of them will surrender their taxpayer provided paychecks? Compare that to how many people their actions stand to hurt – the government employees from the parks staff to the processors of the passport requests, gun checks, and more, the soldiers and their spouses and beneficiaries who will see paychecks and benefits services put on hold. Will these same lawmakers pay the bills that those people who see their paychecks stopped and are relying on those paychecks to cover their bills?

And this is all over these people’s desire to stop a piece of legislation voted on and passed with the intent to secure a means for millions of people to have health insurance. Rather than working to improve the legislation or even proposing or pushing a bill that can do the same things in a better way, they want to simply eliminate the law, before it has had a proper chance to work, and want to hold hostage the government and the nation’s future to do it.

To a great extent it is because they are in an echo chamber. The voices they hear are their so-called friends, the misguided who are pursuing their own agendas and doing so by proffering bad advice. They are the bad friends, the false friends, who urge you on to go and start a fight they have little to no stake in, only for you to be the one who ends up charged with assault. They laugh and tell you not to worry, letting you drive home drunk while they catch a cab, then pretend to stand by your side later when you’ve got a ton of legal trouble for getting pulled over for DUI.

The Republican Party needs some friends. Right now they have so-called friends, but what they need are real friends. There are some out there in their party. They will hopefully stand up soon, tell the self-destructive elements to sit down and shut up. Otherwise, I fear not only for the Republican Party, but for all of us in the United Sates, and many people around the world. The strength of democracy is in the fact that many voices come together, bicker a little, discuss a lot, and arrive at a consensus that represents a perceived best path forward. The existence of political parties is simply the alignment of a group of ideas under a single umbrella. The U.S system is dominated by two parties right now. If one of those parties fails, it will be a relatively long time before a new party can rise to enough prominence to effectively counter the other.

The lack of that counterbalance is what I did not look forward to in 2008. The presence of an effective counterbalance keeps both sides working hard to present the best case. The extent to which they fail to do so leads them to defeat in elections, and should that persist long enough there is little reason for the other side to work too hard as an opposition. If one side becomes so discredited as an opposition party they cease to seem like a credible alternative, the other becomes little more than becomes a default position that has little input to reshape it into something better. But if the other party’s best argument is “do what we want or we’ll keep pushing you until the whole thing crashes” then perhaps I can be convinced that we don’t need to worry too much about the ideal of balance. For now I might just settle for not having this nation ripped apart by a misguided political minority. Are there any friends for the Republicans out there that can help?