Opinion: A party of vengeance, not governance

Logic would dictate that if you’re interested in becoming a party that is capable of governing, your first step would be to start electing people who are themselves interested and capable of governing, right?

Nope. Quite the opposite. The Republicans have undertaken a generation-long purge of people capable of governing, a purge that now seems to be accelerating rather than receding. They hunt down the RINOs in their midst with all the passion and discretion of Puritans hunting down witches. Politics is no longer treated as a mechanism of self-government or as a means of achieving policy goals, but as an outlet for expressing a deep cultural resentment, and for wreaking havoc and revenge on those what done ‘em wrong.

So last year, GOP voters tossed aside what some had described as the strongest presidential field in GOP history, chock full of governors and senators, so that they could embrace the likes of Donald Trump, a man who knows nothing about how to govern but everything about how to stir resentment.

In Alabama on Tuesday, they voted to nominate Roy Moore, an ultra-right, gay-hating, Muslim-bashing throwback, to serve as their U.S. senator. In Tennessee, Sen. Bob Corker — one of the saner, more reasonable members of the GOP caucus — announced this week that he would not run for re-election, probably because he fears a challenge from his right and because Washington increasingly has no place for a conservative of his temperament and skills. He too is likely to be replaced by a Republican far more adept at voicing resentments than in enacting legislation.

The lesson that the GOP seems to be drawing is that if your party can’t and won’t govern, you should elect even more people who can’t and won’t govern.

You see that dynamic play out on issues as well as personalities. The GOP had seven years to produce a policy to replace Obamacare, yet it never came close to doing so. Why? Because they never really saw it as a fight about policy in the first place. Obamacare wasn’t so much a health-care law as it was a symbol of President Obama and of their own hated impotence, and they want it wiped from the legislative landscape in much the same way that others want to see Confederate monuments removed. They just hate what it stands for.

Viewed through that perspective, the repeated failure to repeal and replace Obamacare doesn’t become cause for reflection about improving the party’s capacity to draft policy or get bills passed. It certainly doesn’t open the door to a more bipartisan operating style. Instead, the base embraces it as further proof of betrayal by their party leadership, and further evidence of the need for more Roy Moores and fewer Bob Corkers.

Steve Bannon could not be more thrilled.