Joy Pullmann of the Federalist offers suggestions for a Republican Party willing to stand up to Democrats.
If the United States had an effective two-party system, instead of a ruling class and its cardboard-cutout opposition, more of the nation would have changed course on COVID-19 with Florida in September 2020. But this crisis posed too great an opportunity for the left to destroy more constitutional and social norms, paving their path to unified power over the tiniest details of Americans’ lives.
It has been clear since the Obama years that the left has abandoned the rule of law, constitutional norms, even the commitments to objective truth and open inquiry that are required for scientific pursuit and rational discourse. Yet Republican leaders are somehow still playing a pre-Obama fantasy game that exists only in their heads.
It’s hard to understand how people who were not only merely alive but full-time, 24/7 politicos in 2008 and going forward haven’t in the decade since figured out the new norms that have been imposed on American governance and applied that information to shift their behavior accordingly. We’re talking the era of Mr. “Pen and Phone” Obama, who openly celebrated disregarding American legal precedent, norms, and restraints for one-man rule. …
… Republicans need to do a lot better for the voters who feel they’ve been abandoned by the party than tell us, like they did in the Obama and Trump years, that we need to give them the majority back in Congress that they went on to squander like fools. They need to do a lot better than say to us that Democrats can break the law with impunity but they’re going to make sure we spend months allowing a smear circus of unsubstantiated allegations of gang rape against Republican nominees and agree that it seems reasonable to live under an indefinite state of “emergency.”
They need to treat voters like a husband would treat a wife he’s trying to win back after cheating on her. …
