"Getting" the Republican Joke

By Izzy Stone
Washington Bureau

Last Sunday, Carlos Lozada in The New York Times explained the hidden story of Republican loyalty to the Russian-owned corrupt criminal racist bigot who has led the party for the past seven years – it's all a joke:

the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.

The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.

When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for. 

Indeed, the big joke has been at the core of the Republican Party since the election of a washed-up B-movie actor in 1980, who ran for President by attacking “welfare queens” and intoning in his best radio-announcer baritone that the most dangerous words in the English language were “we're from the government and we're here to help.” 

Speaking of the dangers of government workers sent in to help, let's check in with the stricken southwest of Florida, ravaged by an utterly foreseeable natural disaster that Republicans have spent decades denying to please their fossil-fuel dark-money benefactors (another hilarious joke!), where FEMA personnel have been working nonstop to rescue and succor the hurricane's thousands of victims on the Florida coast:

Gee, they look like they're trying pretty hard to help.  What did St. Ronald of Bitburg know that the rest of us didn't?  Oh, wait, that was part of the joke.

Washington has always been a pretty cynical place, but there's a difference.  Democrats come to Washington to do stuff: provide health care, combat racism, protect the environment.  Republicans come to Washington to reward their benefactors, promote bigotry and racism, and entrench the rule of rich white men from generation to generation.

That doesn't sound too good for Republicans, which is why they work so hard to pretend that you can't take governing seriously:

Miller lingers on this game — the amoral world of tactics, messaging and opposition research, the realm of politics where facts matter less than cleverness and nothing matters more than results. He once thought of it as winning the race, being a killer, just a dishonest buck for a dishonest day’s work. “Practitioners of politics could easily dismiss moralistic or technical concerns just by throwing down their trump card: ‘It’s all part of the Game,’” Miller writes. He has a nickname for the comrades so immersed in the game that they are oblivious to its consequences: the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans.

Promoting the Republican Big Joke has been a time-tested method for mediocre white men (and the very occasional and very shameless person of color) to cash in.  

Pat Buchanan, staunch Republican

We were in Washington when St. Ronald of Bitburg rode into town bringing scads of money-grubbing Republicans with him, eager to take government jobs that would lead to lucrative private-sector lobbying or finagling gigs.  It was nice work if you could suppress your gag reflex.

But Lozada is on to something when he notes that Republican whack jobs propagating the Big Joke weren't just cynical:

For Hemmer, the Republican Party’s evolution from the party of Reagan to the party of [the FLG] began with Pat Buchanan, the White House aide, television pundit and authoritarian-curious presidential candidate who “fashioned grievance politics into an agenda,” she writes — a program that emphasized identity, immigration and race as its battlegrounds.

Pat Buchanan? He's been dropped down the Republican memory hole, like (but for different reasons) George Bush or Michelle Bachmann, but he was a fierce and omnipresent presence in Republican politics and media for decades, starting with his work for crooked Dick Nixon.    He even gave the keynote speech at the 1992 Republican Convention, in which he sounded the themes of white supremacy and paranoia that animate the Republican Party today.

He was even a commentator on MSNBC and known as a charming colleague.  It was surely all a Big Joke, everyone thought.  Except he

8. Argued that Poland and the United Kingdom had it coming in World War II. Buchanan seems to suggest in a 2009 column that World War II — and all the atrocities that accompanied it — was really the fault of Poland and Britain, for refusing to engage in diplomacy with Germany. ...

9. Dabbled in Holocaust denial. Pat Buchanan danced alarmingly close to denying key facts of the Holocaust. In a 1990 column for the New York Post, he defended convicted Nazi war criminal Ivan Demjanjuk (whom he later compared to Jesus Christ)... by accusing the survivors of misremembering all of it: “This so-called ‘Holocaust Survivor Syndrome’ involves ‘group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.’ Reportedly, half of the 20,000 survivor testimonies in Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered ‘unreliable,’ not to be used in trials[…]The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.”

10. Argued Hitler was an individual of “great courage.” That’s just one of the quotes that the Anti-Defamation League attributes to Buchanan in their compendium of offensive remarks from Buchanan over the years. In 1977, he qualified his labeling of Hitler as racist and anti-semitic by adding that “...His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.” 

In fairness, he never said that Hitler could paint an apartment in one afternoon, two coats.  He got s**tcanned anyway.

Now we get to the heart of the artichoke.  Some Republicans are purely cynical opportunists who correctly see the chances for grift.

But, and we remember this from the days of St. Ronald, an alarming number only pretended to be cynical.  It turned out that once you got to know them, you realized that they weren't cynics; they had ideals.  Ideals like white supremacy, subjugation of women, and permanent enshrinement of white plutocracy.  They were true believers.

That's the punch line of the Big Joke.  When Stephen Miller beats on the bureaucracy until it accedes to his hateful plan to pull immigrant babies away from their parents permanently, it's no joke.  When Sullen Sam Alito boasts about making 12-year-old girls bear their rapists' children, he's not kidding.  The cruelty, the sadism, the racism he embodies is real.

And if you don't understand that basic truth about today's Republican Party, you just aren't in on The Joke.