The Golden Rule of Politics

 By David K. Shipler

 

                According to the Golden Rule of politics—Do Unto Others  As They Have Done Unto You—Democrats now have an opportunity to smear all Republicans, just as Republicans have smeared them, with a fringe candidate likely to go to Congress. She is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her Republican primary in a Georgia district so extreme that she’s bound to be elected to the House of Representatives in November, and then carry into the halls of the Capitol her anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, racist rants about Trump’s opposition by Satan-worshiping child sex traffickers. She is an aficionado of QAnon, the inchoate association of conspiracy theorists that the FBI regards as having the potential for domestic terrorism.

The fact that Greene’s attitudes are not shared across the Republican spectrum—albeit the narrowing Republican spectrum—would not deter astute Democratic campaign operatives from casting them as representative, as they’ve already begun to do. “Georgia Republicans, and Republican candidates running across the country, will have to answer for her hateful views in their own campaigns,” said the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Cheri Bustos.

In this they’ve had help from President Trump, who called her a “future Republican star.” So too, the Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, first denounced her statements but then rebuffed pleas from some of his colleagues to support her opponent in the primary, John Cowan, a conservative physician. The minority whip, Steve Scalise, did campaign and raise money for Cowan. Still, funding help for Greene reportedly came from other prominent Republicans, including Mark Meadows, now Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, and Congressman Jim Jordan, the outspoken Trump defender.

Democrats have traction here to discredit the Republican establishment as moving in the opposite direction of most Americans in an age of heightened consciousness about racial injustice and yearning for national healing. Should they do it?

It’s tempting. When Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota began her tenure two years ago with a couple of remarks tapping into old stereotypes of Jews—that money buys Congressional support for Israel by people who “push for allegiance to a foreign country”—Republicans turned her into a poster child of the Democratic Party, peddling the calumny that a Democratic White House would be populated by anti-Semites. When she and her “progressive” colleagues, Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, proposed left-wing policies on social safety nets, corporate regulation, climate change, and the like, Republicans pictured all Democrats as socialists, a stereotype that took hold in some quarters of the electorate, even as the moderate Joe Biden ascended toward the nomination.

Republicans continued the tactic after the Greene victory. Instead of disavowing her paranoid bigotry and wild fantasies about Satan and an “Islamic invasion,” the Republican National Campaign Committee answered Newsweek’s question about Greene this way, through its communications director, Chris Pack: "Have you asked every Democrat if they will support racist anti-Semite Ilhan Omar since she's won her primary last night?"

The Republican Party’s inability to distance itself from nutty conspiracy theories and hate-filled candidates has overwhelmed its dwindling band of better angels. Dissident movements have emerged, most notably the Lincoln Project of canny Republicans who are producing devastating ads against Trump. Now and then, some elected leaders struggle against their party’s downward spiral into racist xenophobia, but mostly in vain. They removed Rep. Steve King of Iowa from his committee assignments after he wondered in an interview what was wrong with “white supremacy.” He then lost his primary. Some pundits think McCarthy and other Republican leaders will have the same problem with Greene and will try to temper her tantrums once she gets to Washington.

Unfortunately, though, her views have resonance in the Republican mainstream, starting in the White House. She is no farther from the core of the current Republican base than the few remaining Republican moderates, who also sit at the margins a party that needs a resounding defeat in November to collapse and reconstitute itself in a responsible form.

Having inherited the Southern Democrats’ mantle of segregationist support after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, the Republicans under Trump have spread the flames of ethnocentric resentment into parts of the Northern white working class. “Trump says what I think,” is a line heard often from his supporters. No doubt, “Greene says what I think” could be heard from her supporters as well.

Trump, Greene, and others have made vivid the Republican Party’s disdain and resentment for  Americans who are not white. It is easy to tick off the methods: The party seeks in multiple ways to suppress minority voting and picks judges who allow protections to be undermined; Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices have gutted the Voting Rights Act, with catastrophic disenfranchisement of black and Latino voters. Its governors and state legislators block the expansion of Medicaid for the poor, bringing disproportionate harm to the health of people of color—an obstruction also facilitated by Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who ordered that the expansion be optional. Similarly, Republican-led states with large non-white populations impose lower caps on unemployment benefits, according to a Rand Corporation report. And on and on.

Trump cleverly combines racist innuendo with explicit policy aimed at reducing the impact of minorities. He wonders aloud if Kamala Harris is eligible, given that she is the child of immigrants. He orders the Post Office to cut out overtime and take other measures to impede the delivery of mail-in ballots in a time of Covid. He orders the Census Bureau to stop counting a month early, obviously hoping for an undercount of minorities, who tend to need door-to-door interviewing to get into the numbers—numbers that will determine the allocation of seats in Congress and the flow of federal funds to localities.

It would be strangely comforting to be able to say that the Democrats would be intellectually dishonest to use Greene as their poster child for the Republicans. She is extreme, to be sure. Sadly, however, she taps something deep and ugly in today’s Republican Party. And since American election campaigns are actually anti-educational, lowering debate to slogans and smears, since they contain nothing of the the elevating, informative exercises to which a great democracy aspires, since they are not the platform for serious deliberation over competing ideas for solving the momentous problems of our time, perhaps Greene can be cited to expose further the vein of vile dysfunction that afflicts political thinking.

In 2016, Michelle Obama said nobly that when they go low, we go high. Yes, it’s mostly the way of Democrats, who have a penchant for embracing complexity and nuance, for eschewing calumny, and for mostly—not always, certainly—respecting truth as the key nourishment of an open, pluralistic society. Does a large enough majority of American voters also respect truth and decency for those ingredients to produce a winning campaign? It’s an open question.

It’s also a question for centrist Republicans who happen to admire their particular senator or representative and want to vote for the person not the party. The hard fact is that when you vote for a legislator and help give that person’s party a majority in the chamber, you are voting for the party’s positions, perhaps those you detest.

Take Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of a dying breed of moderate Republicans. She supports abortion rights but contributes to the Republican’s majority in a Senate that has confirmed anti-abortion Supreme Court justices, including Brett Kavanaugh, whom she voted to confirm after he insincerely pledged to respect precedent in abortion cases. He broke his word the first chance he got, by joining the dissent when the Court ruled unconstitutional a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges in hospitals. The law would have disqualified all but one doctor in the state from performing abortions, and the Court had previously struck down a nearly identical law in Texas, which set the precedent for the Louisiana case. Kavanaugh’s defiance of that precedent made Collins look either naïve or hypocritical. Her voters who share her support for abortion rights might justifiably feel betrayed as well.

            So, you can’t reasonably vote for a party’s candidate without accepting the party as a whole—its policies and priorities and values. And as Donald Trump has demonstrated, what seems a marginal aberration today might very well be governing tomorrow. The Democrats ought to keep a spotlight on Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is not alone.