[The Republican presidential debate last night was an unhinged
parade of War on Terror–style militarism and paranoid
saber-rattling. With or without Donald Trump, the GOP has absolutely
lost it.]
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LAST NIGHT’S GOP DEBATE SHOWED THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S LUNACY EVEN
WITHOUT DONALD TRUMP  
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Luke Savage
November 9, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The Republican presidential debate last night was an unhinged
parade of War on Terror–style militarism and paranoid
saber-rattling. With or without Donald Trump, the GOP has absolutely
lost it. _

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis during the Republican Presidential
Debate at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts on
November 8, 2023. , Jonathan Newton / the Washington Post via Getty
Images

 

In May 2022, Nancy Pelosi told
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a gathering at the Aspen Ideas Climate Conference in Miami that she
hoped true conservatives would liberate the Republican Party from the
clutches of Donald Trump and the faction around him. “Rather than
saying, ‘Well, we have to defeat them,’” Pelosi declared, “no,
let’s just try to persuade them . . . I want the Republican Party to
take back the party, take it back to where you were when you cared
about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment.”
Pelosi herself has made similar comments a number of times
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issuing yet another plea
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for Republicans to “take back their party” as recently as last
month.

Putting aside the obvious issues with the first statement — the
consensus within the GOP was neither green nor pro-choice prior to
Donald Trump — the sentiment remains emblematic of a kind of
thinking that has been prevalent in elite liberal circles since 2016.
The Republican Party, we are endlessly told, has been taken over by a
narrow cult (or “fringe element” in Pelosi’s words
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that has corrupted and debased the noble spirit of American
conservatism. Once that element has been defeated, it is typically
implied, the Republican Party will resume its historic role as an
honest and honorable interlocutor of the country’s progressives and
liberals.

Much in this story has never really made sense. In their revulsion
toward Trump, too many liberals have invested themselves in an
idealized version
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Republicanism that has never really existed. Since his hostile
takeover of the party, meanwhile, Trump has remained resoundingly
popular with actual Republican voters and rarely faced serious
resistance from GOP lawmakers during his term as president. Both these
facts are evident in the current primary polling, which has continued
to show Trump so far ahead of his rivals
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that the race’s outcome is basically a foregone conclusion.

The primary contest has also underscored the absurdity of thinking
that the mainstream Republican Party would somehow be saner or less
terrifying without Donald Trump. At last night’s debate in Miami,
the five qualifying candidates spent the better part of two hours
trying to one-up each other’s reactionary rhetoric and zealous
commitment to militarism. Though peppered with the usual conservative
boilerplate — Nikki Haley thinks America needs “an accountant in
the White House”; Tim Scott is a big fan of Ronald Reagan; Ron
DeSantis is worried about America’s national debt — much of the
evening was focused on foreign policy and saw the candidates dial up
“war on terror”–style jingoism to eleven.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all five candidates were evangelical in their
support for Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza — the word
“Palestine” not being uttered once over the entire debate. But
what was most striking was the way the likes of Haley and Scott
basically free-associated whenever they invoked a perceived adversary.
Calling Israel “the tip of the spear when it comes to Islamic
terrorism,” Haley proceeded to link Hamas with Iran and Iran with
China and Russia. Not to be outdone, Scott pledged to “cut the head
off the snake” and launch a direct strike against Iran, later
insisting that America is currently home to “thousands of terrorist
sleeper cells.” At one point, Christie seemed to improvise a new
Axis of Evil on the spot, linking Russia (led by a “communist KGB
dictator”), China, Iran, and North Korea as if they represented a
unitary geopolitical adversary.

With the sole exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, who attacked
neoconservatism while also spouting plenty of his own insanity, the
vision of the world projected by the Republican presidential hopefuls
was one where the United States should consider itself under
existential threat at all times — facing a nonstop invasion on its
southern border, sleeper cells consisting of Chinese agents and
jihadists who are poised to strike at any moment, and an alliance of
foreign powers so menacing that no amount of military spending should
ever be considered enough.

Given Trump’s iron grip on the GOP, last night’s debate will mean
very little and will soon be forgotten by the few who remember it at
all. Nevertheless, it stands as a useful reminder of how completely
insane the Republican Party is capable of being in his absence — and
the absurdity of liberal fairy tales about a righteous conservatism in
exile.

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* 2023 Republican Debate; Republican Presidential Race; Donald Trump;
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