Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks penned a scathing opinion piece that has prompted me to wonder if the stalwart Republican needs anything, anything at all, like some soup, some thoughts and prayers or a Xanax. The headline for the piece, “The G.O.P. is rotting,” has a real ring to it, but it leaves us with a damning assumption – that the Republican party is already dead.
Like an epic Katamari, Brooks rolled all his frustrations with Republican politics into a ball the size of the endangered African elephants that the Trump administration argued we should hunt for conservation’s sake or former Trump cheerleader Chris Christie. Just a really big ball of sadness, anger and regret.
Brooks’ piece shows us how hard it can be to cope with a political party that has grown away from you. His words drip with disappointment at his party’s willingness to bend to President Donald Trump’s will, accept a politician like Roy Moore and become a “party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.” He obliterates the G.O.P. tax plan as hopelessly lacking bipartisan support amid its transparent efforts to enrich already-wealthy Republican donors.
At the same time, Brooks runs awry of the increasingly far-right image conservatives have been building for about 10 years on Fox News and in darker, more openly bigoted corners of the Internet that rarely, if ever, defer to reality. His sentiments feel like a last-ditch effort to knock some sense into the G.O.P., but its transformation was slow and gradual, one piece at a time, and any reversal would take a radical reckoning within the heart of the Republican party, which seems unfathomable right now.
Brooks ends his piece by pointing out that Republicans are leaving the party and feel politically homeless, which is a difficult position to be in. But a two-party system like we have in the United States necessitates that people be left out, particularly during a dramatic shift like the one that the G.O.P. has undergone during the last decade. There simply aren’t enough options, particularly for socially liberal conservatives, centrists or far-left liberals who don’t really fit into the mold of either party’s platform.
When I’ve pointed this out in the past, the response has always been that this is just the way it is and the United States will always have a two-party system made up of the same two parties we’ve had forever, and there’s no possibility of change.
The radical transformation of the Republican party proves that things can and do change, and we should reevaluate our political system as a whole to reflect that. A growing number of people who feel politically homeless means there is a growing number of people disgruntled, disgusted and disengaged with the whole process, and that puts American democracy at serious risk.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.