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Some Things Do Matter After All

We thought it was a fixed feature of our new era. We thought that objective reality didn’t matter anymore, if it even existed at all. We thought we were so entrapped by our information silos that nothing could penetrate. “LOL. Nothing matters” ran the Twitter meme.

What we’ve learned in the past two weeks is that we were wrong. Reality reasserts itself. Minds can change. Just weeks ago, Black Lives Matter was regarded as a fringe movement, a response to a real problem perhaps, but a vastly exaggerated one. Today, the slogan emblazons 16th Street in front of the White House. As Politico’s Tim Alberta reports, in 2014, after Eric Garner was choked by police, only 33% of Americans believed that blacks were more likely to be mistreated by police than others. Only 26% of whites thought so. Today, 57% of Americans, including 49% of whites, believe police are more likely to use force against African Americans. This week, the 2012 Republican nominee for president marched in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in Washington, D.C. The last two-term Republican president released a statement using the term “systemic racism,” which curled the toes of some right-wing commentators but comports with the views of more than 80% of Americans. An eyebrow-raising 29% of Republicans say President Donald Trump has “mostly increased” racial tensions, along with 92% of Democrats and 73% of independents. The conservative Drudge Report website, once a redoubt of Trump enthusiasm, hawked “Justice for George Floyd” T-shirts.

After the president tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump’s approval rating among independents dropped 10 points, from 40 to 30%. His handling of the Floyd murder aftermath has cost him even among Republicans, 83% of whom rated him favorably in May, compared with 90% in April. White evangelical Christians, the constituency that inspired Trump’s Bible semaphore in front of St. John’s Church, have also soured a bit on the “law and order” president. In May, 62% rated him favorably, down from 77% in April.

The country is executing a dramatic turn on questions of racial justice. That vile video of depraved police suffocating a handcuffed man has penetrated our armor-plated opinion silos. Coming after other high-profile outrages, it has ignited a movement. And while some have allowed the moment to overwhelm their judgment, calling for example, not just to reform the police but to “defund” the police (which will. not. happen.), it will be interesting to see where this leaves the Republican Party.

Have a look at this email I received from Amanda Chase, the first announced Republican candidate for Virginia governor in 2021. “Help me save the Robert E. Lee statue!” she pleads. That’s what the Republican Party of Virginia now stands for?

One extremist does not a party define. True enough. But the Republican Party of Virginia previously nominated Corey Stewart for a U.S. Senate seat. He defended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and had previously made a name for himself by defending Confederate monuments, or “taking back our heritage” as he put it, which is odd because Stewart grew up in Minnesota, the first state to send volunteers to quell the rebellion in 1861.

The Republican Party of Alabama nominated Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate. Aside from his predation on young teenage girls, Moore was an enthusiastic “birther.” The Republican Party of Oregon has nominated Jo Rae Perkins, a promoter of the QAnon conspiracy, for the U.S. Senate.

The list goes on and on. The alt-right and the nutty right have made inroads into the Republican Party with only occasional pushback, as when the Republican caucus denied committee assignments to defeated Iowa Rep. Steve (“When did white supremacist become offensive?”) King.

The party of Lincoln has assented to the pardon of Joe Arpaio. It found nothing much to say about the smearing of Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists. When the president said an Indiana-born judge could not be fair because his parents were from Mexico, one prominent Republican, Paul Ryan, called that “classic racism.” He’s gone now. When the president told four darker-skinned members of Congress to “go back where you came from,” (three were born here), the Republican Party had nothing.

Most Republicans are not extremists or conspiracists or racists, but they look at their shoes and kick the dirt when those elements succeed in their party. Now the country is reevaluating questions of policing and race, finding previously elusive agreement on the need for reform, and exposing just how lost the Republican Party has become.

Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her new book is “Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense.”

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Copyright 2020 The Associated Press.

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