by Matthew Boose
Republicans are facing their biggest test in generations.
The mentality of a psychotic mob of radicals has taken control of the country and its institutions. With remarkable speed, America’s mayors, governors, media, lawmakers, health experts, artists, sports leagues, generals and troops, powerful corporations, and the wealthiest men on the planet, have all loudly endorsed this mob, its hatred of America, and its demands for radical transformation.
The mob has been given blanket permission not just to riot and destroy America physically—to desecrate its monuments and harass enemies of the revolution—but to define America, its history and its future, and its deserved punishment for what they call “systemic racism,” the existence of which is entirely uncontested by anyone in any position to resist it. Wholly convinced of their rightfulness, wholly convinced of America’s evil, these radicals have taken the country hostage, and nobody is stopping them.
America’s elites, once decent and patriotic, have turned against their own people in a frenzy of destructive ideological lunacy. The will to enforce the law has evaporated. No one is protecting the silent majority.
No, not even the Republicans.
Republicans think that coming out against defunding the police will somehow distinguish them from the Left and reward them politically. This is nonsense. The Democrats have also pushed back on defunding the police, because they aren’t stupid.
As usual, the Republicans have simply rejected the most extreme demands of the Left while swallowing the substance of the Left’s criticism, which is that America is a racist country in need of fundamental change.
Republicans have all but endorsed Black Lives Matter, the group’s ethnic chauvinism, and their murky grievances with America’s putative “systemic racism.”
Here was Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) the other day:
You know, none of us have had the experience of being an African American in this country and dealing with this discrimination, which persists here some 50 years after the 1964 civil rights bill and the 1965 civil rights bill—we’re still wrestling with America’s original sin.
Original sin!
If Republicans reject defunding the police, then logically they should reject Black Lives Matter, which advocates defunding the police. They should do so loudly, vigorously, and articulately. But they haven’t, and they won’t.
If the Republican Party won’t defend the rule of law, protect the silent majority, and push back against calumnies against America and its people, then what are they there for?
Good question.
A recent investigation by the Claremont Institute’s Thomas Klingenstein is worth noting. It’s a lengthy piece, but the essence of the argument is that Republicans don’t stand for anything. Unlike the Left, they don’t argue from basic principles of justice; all they have are cheap slogans. “Limited government! Lower taxes! Decentralization!” You get the idea. The Republican Party doesn’t operate with deliberation and purpose; they’re shadowboxers.
That purpose ought to be preserving what Klingenstein calls “the American way of life,” which obviously is threatened at the moment.
One key point that Klingenstein raises concerns rhetoric: lawmakers aren’t just there to pass laws, but to edify the public and explain to them the threats to their way of life. But unlike Democrats, Republicans don’t bother to explain the things they want or think we should want as Americans.
To adapt Klingenstein’s argument to the present moment, it’s obvious what the Republican Party should be doing. They should be standing up for law and order while explaining to the American people how Black Lives Matter, its anti-American slander, and its program of racial extremism is hostile to Americans, their institutions, and their welfare.
Instead of saying, “Defund the police is crazy socialism, but some reforms are probably needed to address America’s painful history of genocide,” they should be saying, “America is a great country, not a racist country, and we will defend it to the very last day.”
While appearing to adopt contrary rhetoric, the Republicans have endorsed the Left’s principle, which means they have no argument against the Left’s demands.
They have surrendered to the narrative of anti-American hatred.
The Republican Party lacks either the intelligence or the courage to sense the big picture and engage accordingly. This is not just about the police. America is facing an elite uprising with the objective of reconstituting America at its very core and punishing all dissenters.
It is a matter not just of political interest, but of duty, that president Trump and the Republicans forcefully oppose Black Lives Matter and the woke faction that is working with them to destroy the United States.
If they can’t do that, then there is no reason for the Republican Party to exist.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
Photo “Mitch McConnell” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
