Nick Catoggio:, on Angela Paxton’s “get the whole team across the finish line” add:
What even is “the team” at this point?
Millions of Republicans joined the team years ago because they believed in free markets, limited government, and advancing America’s interests by encouraging Western liberal values abroad. The leadership of Team GOP no longer supports any of that. The president levies tariffs by whim, demands government stakes in private companies, wages unauthorized wars, sics law enforcement on his political enemies, and routinely behaves more aggressively toward traditional American allies than toward enemies. […]
Angela Paxton’s pitch is the political equivalent of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous bit about sports fandom being a matter of “rooting for laundry.” The entire roster might be replaced within a few seasons, he observed, but the fans’ loyalty persists because ultimately they’re cheering for the franchise—for its uniforms, i.e., laundry—more so than its individual personnel.
That’s a defensible attitude for a silly pastime. But apply it to politics and you get anti-anti-Trumpism, the belief that being governed by any Republican beats being governed by any Democrat because the Republican laundry is better, however filthy it may have become. […]
The “team” the president and both Paxtons are playing for isn’t actually the Republican Party. Partisanship is simply what they’re selling to immiserated right-wing suckers to try to goose their enthusiasm and get them to turn out this year, another “lesser of two evils” pitch from a political movement that’s morally incapable of offering anything else. […]
The team they’re playing for is postliberalism. Given how comprehensive Ken Paxton’s unfitness for office is, encompassing not just personal sins like philandering but all manner of abuses of his public office, the inescapable takeaway from Angela Paxton’s ad is that no amount of immorality committed by a right-wing candidate can ever disqualify him from wielding power. That’s an essential pillar of postliberal thought, essential to the core conviction that power must be wielded immorally to have any chance of defeating the left.
I am a happily “unaffiliated registered voter.” I left the GOP a decade ago without the slightest hesitation, but I have never been called a RINO (“Republican in name only”). I am constantly pushing back against things people say are really just problems for the “very online.” (The response to Charlie Kirk’s shooting was far worse in real life than it was online.) The spillover or cross-contamination or whatever is under-appreciated. I do maintain that the spell can be broken anytime. If you can get people away from the screens and algorithms and turbo-charged individualism, I think it could be broken very quickly. But that “if” has a broken back, two left feet, each in need of an ankle fusion, and hasn’t had a single vegetable or protein in its diet for over two decades. So let your heart be ready when it happens, but don’t hold your breath until the power goes out.
But the term RINO really is, I think, reserved for Online Speak and right wing camera virtue-signaling. Though it may have been implied, no one has ever called me a RINO. But I’ve called myself one! Honestly, I’m kinda bummed no one has called me that. I have never understood why it is anything other than a compliment. If it isn’t a compliment, then politics really is just Seinfeld’s laundry-sports — if not Seinfeld writ large, where nothing meaningful ever really happens.
I do not believe in the principle of voting for the lesser of two weevils — sorry: the lesser of two evils. I do believe in the freedom to make occasional exceptions. But the principle, which strangles the oxygen out of every voting booth in the country (by shoving pie in your face, or whatever) — nope, nope, nope.
If I was going to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’d certainly vote Democrat. Why? Because I’m a RINO, that’s why. (A former RINO, anyway.) It’s because I am, among other things, a conservative, which is a principle and a mentality rather than a name glued over an amorphous tent. The fact that I find the Democratic Party to be the more conservative of the two parties is shocking given a long backward glance; less shocking given a 10-year glance.
Don’t think I don’t notice that other “if” — it may have more athleticism in it, but it is still an if. I don’t know yet how I’ll vote in Maine. I’d like to see every Republican seat up for reelection overturned, but generally speaking Susan Collins is about as straight a politician as you’re likely to find in this here world of ours, and I’m reluctant to kick over tables anywhere but in the houses of religious hypocrisy.
I’m not looking for a revolution and I don’t trust revolutionaries. If I voted for the Democratic ticket, it would be with a conservative-liberal impulse that wants to preserve a world worth witnessing to outside the pie-eating contest.
In spite of it all, I think that’s still a big IF.