Charles Blow: The GOP May Never Survive Roy Moore
Roy Moore is not a bad apple within the Republican Party; he's what the Republican party has become, despite many well-meaning Americans attempts to claim otherwise. In fact, Charles Blow writes in his Monday column, if Roy Moore wins the Alabama Senate race on Tuesday, "the Donald Trump-diseased party once known as the Republicans may as well call themselves Roypublicans."
Pundits and average voters alike have been comforting themselves with fantasies of a kinder, non-sexist, non-racist Republican party which may or may not have existed in the first place, but certainly doesn't now. How could it when "Moore has been fully endorsed by the Republican 'president' of the United States, the leader of his party, and is now fully supported by the Republican National Committee."
Even if there was a better Republican party in previous decades, or at least a better faction, Trump's rise all but assured its destruction. Even evangelicals, who in previous years shunned Trump's gold-plated excesses and multiple marriages, have flocked to his side. In doing so, Blow writes, "Republicans have surrendered the moral high ground they thought they held, and have dived face-first into the sewer."
With a known child molester in the Senate, "There will be no way to simply say that Moore is the abominable outgrowth of Alabama voters’ anger. There will be no way to shake the stench of this homophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, racist apologist and accused pedophile. He is them, and they are him. Any pretense of tolerance and egalitarianism, already damaged by a Republican history of words and deeds, will be completely obliterated."
As if the sexual abuse charges weren't enough, Moore is also an unabashed racist. Blow reminds his readers of a September campaign event, in which one the few Black people in attendence asked what Moore thinks Trump means when he says "Make America Great Again." At the time, Moore replied, “I think it was great at the time when families were united, even though we had slavery, they cared for one another. People were strong in the family.”.
Yes, Moore thinks America was greatest when Black people were enslaved. And the Republican party thinks this is fine.
It was bad enough when the Republican party framed taking away Social Security and Medicare as the growth of "personal responsibility," when they the first claimed that cutting taxes on corporations would magically produce benefits that trickle down to the poorest Americans. In 2017, "The Trump agenda is the Republican agenda: hostility to women and minorities, white supremacy and white nationalism, xenophobia, protectionist trade policies, tax policies that punish the poor and working class and people living in blue states."
Moore and his Democratic rival Jones are neck and neck in the polls. If Moore wins, Blow warns us, "Trump will solidify his position as the author of the rewritten conservative. He will have led to the rise of the Roypublicans."
Read the entire column here.
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