The Coming Political Realignment Bill Lasarow
I want to take a deeper dive into a matter I’ve commented on only briefly about before: the birth of a True Republican Party (TRP) that emerges from the ruins of the NPP (if you don’t know NPP now you have to be a new visitor; the National Predatory Party is what used to be called the Republican Party, or GOP). What was once the proud GOP, a party I almost never voted for but generally respected (I’m not going into that here). Politically I grew up and remain a proud Liberal, and a central tenant is to be open minded. And as we say, Country over Party. I take that chestnut dead seriously. That means negotiating and working together with the opposition party when necessary. We need to pick and choose our battles and our alliances.
William Kent, “The Battle of Agincourt,” ca. 1729, oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 48”. Courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust, London
The probability of the new TRP was enhanced with the internal defeat of the execrable Jim Jordan followed bye the selection of the polite Christian Nationalist Mike Johnson. When Jordan tried to imitate the very, very most offensive and dangerous talent of a certain indicted individual it did not work. Suddenly his close peers in the House destroyed the Trumpian pillar he wanted to stand on. He really thought that the bullying, menacing style he arrived at the House 17 years ago with was ready for prime time. He used it to yank, by force, members of his own party who were not inclined to vote for him. He would FORCE them to give him their vote just like his avatar forced them to vote against impeachment. If the attempt to abscond with the US government failed once, Jordan would be the one to storm the Bastille, or rather get others to do so on his behalf, with Trump as his Napoleon. He would vault into the position of heir apparent.
If Jordan had visions of becoming the English King Henry V, his Agincourt instead became his Waterloo.
Ernest Crofts, “On the Evening of the Battle of Waterloo,” 1879, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
The daily news story has shifted from the dysfunction within the GOP to its functional disintegration, the exasperated vote for Mr. Johnson notwithstanding. This is not a normal crisis, but it is an opportunity to right the ship. More important, we have an opportunity to have learned our national lesson: we must always be prepared to address the medieval minds who would return America’s precious democracy to a state rooted firmly of the power of the church and monarch. I’m not saying this is easy, much is at risk. But it is what I see, and I see a path to get us there. We are regularly and correctly reminded that we got through the Civil War and the Nazi/Fascist disaster to have some excellent stretches. During the Great Depression there were more new patents than any time previous. That New Deal government helped out, but, given some errors such as the Japanese internment camps, it did not dictate. Present day Democrats primarily seek to govern as a matter of public service. The NPP’s mission is to dominate and rule, if necessary, by force. The TRP’s first mission will be to further the former and politically attack the latter in an alliance with the Democratic Party.
Enough members of the current GOP resisted their in-house snake to now form an alliance with many, many disillusioned conservatives to form the most serious third party since … the Republican Party. If that party forms it may well be voted into power in 8 to 12 years. But its first priority will be to rout the NPP. The original Republican Party that absorbed the Whigs was very often referred to as the Radical Republican Party. The reason is that their leadership was unwilling to negotiate the excuse that a race of people should be enslaved for no other reason than their race. The Democratic Party of the 1930s was also unwilling to negotiate the excuse that religion or ethnicity demanded the extermination of 7 million.
Alessandro Sanquirico, 1827, hand colored aquatint, set design of the eruption of Vesuvius, the climactic scene
of Giovanni Panini’s opera, “The Last Day of Pompeii,” 1825. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute
By now many millions of Americans understand that we are at a key time in the current historical cycle, that inflection point that the current Presdient spoke of. It’s happened before. But never the same way. In spite of the directed use of political violence by the NPP, in spite of the Hamas atrocity, in spite of the barbaric invasion of Ukraine, in spite of a shooter going on a spree in Lewiston, Maine, conditions today are different, and different at multiple levels. Will we return to an era in which kids were murdered (brutally) for looking at a woman the wrong way? Where women die on a table with a coat hanger in hand? Don’t kid yourself, if too many of us stop paying attention these things and more will happen, darn tootin’.
But the defeat of Jordan, together with the past week’s flip of three of Trump’s closes lieutenants tells me that, yes, the walls ARE closing in, a day of reckoning grows closer, the wheels of justice are grinding. I have not been willing to use that phrase until right now: “The walls are closing in.” As Trump put it so elegantly way back when Robert Mueller was named Special Prosecutor, “we’re fucked.” That was some great fucking Presidential language. So here is the direction that I think gravity will pull, just as long as all of the rest of us keep nudging. And I think we will.
The new TRP, with Liz Cheney serving as its first Presidential candidate in the 2024 elections, will essentially go Lincoln Project on a much larger scale. They will form an alliance of political salvation (or even just convenience) with Democrats to achieve the strategic goal of destroying the NPP. Not just defeating, destroying. Deconstructing not the Deep State, the construction of which is actually one of our major achievements, a true public asset. No, deconstructing the unholy alliancee, the Ship of Fools of Nazis, white nationalists, anti-semites, and Christian Nationalists, all of whom deserve to life free in America, just as the founders hoped for.
Oskar Laske, “The Ship of Fools,” 1922, tempera and gold leaf on canvas, 76 3/4 x 94 1/2”.
Courtesy of the Belvedere Museum Vienna
What if we and the Germans (after WWII) had failed to destroy Nazism? We will always birth a certain number among us who are born bigots, who quite enjoy spectacles of violence; yummy, more bloodletting, more bullets, more cities and towns reduced to rubble. The kind of people that require you to fall in line or else. The late Senator Everette Dirksen would be able to do this because many among his generation of Republicans had character and principles (McCarthy and Nixon, not so much). Even if their policy priorities were wrong. But that is what Democracies are designed to do, they debate and, yes, they collaborate. The NPP rank and file do not want to do any of those things, so they love to be told that they will win so much they will get tired of it. Truly, it is a rank and file any decent liberal will vote against when the bills come to the floor. But then they will work through their differences.
The need for a TRP is so obvious. Loads of conservatives, but still a decisive minority, will abandon the NPP and accept an alliance with the Democratic Party in a revolution of comity.
There is another key component that is now realistic, the final and complete removal of the Hated One from public life (yes sir, oh so many of us do hate, hate you with great passion for what you have done to America, and for just being the lowlife criminal you are). Mr. Trump is a talented performer who long since mastered effective ways to perform lies with conviction, real conviction, truly in the manner of a Sunday preacher.
Individuals gather at the Little White Schoolhouse in 1954 for a 100th-anniversary celebration
of the founding of the Republican Party. Published 1922, Courtesy of the Ripon Press
There are 13 more co-conspirators in the crosshairs of the Georgia RICO charges. Will 12 of them flip too leaving the fat man with the comb over to defend just himself? Is that even necessary? At what point will DA Willis no longer offer these deals? A gathering storm is is directed at one singular target, stripping him down to no one but himself and a shrinking cast of lackeys who lie and manipulate acts of violence. Maybe there will just be dad, Eric and Junior. An emboldened TRP will not and should not “take back” the old GOP. That option is dead, dead, dead. They can build a new conservative culture on the ashes of a brute who favors true, malignant fascism.
The best outcome for America will be to defang the head of the snake. A plea deal with Trump only needs to exclude him from ever running for public office again. No jail time? No breaking him financially? It’s a plea deal that I would be content with even if that deal is generous in every way except one: this guy richly deserves to be put away. And if he still attempted to mobilize his brownshirts? We would get the more emotionally satisfying image of a 6’3” fat old guy stripped down to an orange jump suit and escorted to his new home as he cries out for the death of all the traitors who betrayed his perfection. We will happily throw away the key. Either way we will ignore him. Along with Jim Jordan.
