OldLady
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2015
- 69,568
- 19,611
- 2,220
We? I didn't know you were a Republican.Well said piece about the only real choice for normal Republicans... become Biden Republicans.
The GOP can’t be saved. Center-right voters need to become Biden Republicans.
Most Republicans don’t care that Trump locked up children, cozied up to white supremacists, tear-gassed peaceful protesters, benefited from Russian help in both of his campaigns, egregiously mishandled the pandemic, incited a violent attack on the Capitol and even faced fraud complaints from his own donors. A new Reuters-Ipsos pollfinds that 81 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump. Wait. It gets worse: 60 percent say the 2020 election was stolen from him, only 28 percent say he is even partly to blame for the Capitol insurrection, and 55 percent say that the Capitol attack “was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.”
This is a portrait of a party that can’t be saved — at least in the foreseeable future. The GOP remains a cult of personality for the worst president in U.S. history. It has become a bastion of irrationality, conspiracy mongering, racism, nativism and anti-scientific prejudices. So what should a sane, center-right voter — someone who might have voted for the GOP in the past — do under those circumstances?
Biden has turbocharged vaccinations with better management: The seven-day average of new vaccination doses has gone from 892,399on Inauguration Day to almost 3 million today. He has boosted the economic recoverywith a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill; the unemployment rate is down to 6 percent. Now he is pushing a $2 trillion plan to rebuild our dilapidated infrastructure — something that Trump only talked about doing.
Biden is governing from the “new center,” while Republicans are increasingly catering to the far right with shrill, divisive rhetoric and antidemocratic actions such as bills to restrict voting. Under those circumstances, those of us on the center-right can’t afford a third-party flirtation. We need to become Biden Republicans.
Anyway, a third party constituted of the reasonable Republicans in the country might actually have a chance of breaking the duopoly, because there are a lot of non-zombie Republicans out there. They will never become Democrats; and Biden is progressive, not moderate.
I've been wishing for a real third party (or fourth or fifth) for a long time. The closer we move to an organized moderate voice willing to look at both sides of an issue, the better.