WHAT ROUGH BEAST, ITS HOUR COME ROUND AT LAST, SLOUCHES TOWARDS BETHLEHEM TO BE BORN?

Fifty years ago this month, the Rolling Stones released their last album of the Sixties.  It was a fitting coda to the decade, opening with “Gimmie Shelter,” and closing with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”  Hold that thought. 

Of course, I approve of the House’s vote to impeach Donald Trump.  One branch of the American government is on record as condemning Trump’s disgraceful record.  That’s important, even if a Senate trial results in acquittal.  It’s important even if Mitch McConnell refuses to hold a trial.

Besides, Trump gonna Trump.  As winter turns to spring, we’re likely to see revelations of more past wrongdoing.  And it’s almost inevitable that Trump will commit new high crimes and misdemeanors along the way. He can’t help himself. 

Meanwhile, in less than eleven months, American voters will collectively decide whether America will remain an independent democracy, or instead join the ranks of what Sarah Kendzior calls a "transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government."

In Congress, Republicans are reduced to spewing word salad in defense of the Donald Trump’s criminality.  What they say makes little sense, but they say it loud and fast, and their soundbites wind up on Fox News.  I’ve read speculation that some of these grifters are auditioning for a job with Fox after the election. 

I think they’re auditioning, all right, but I suspect they’ve set their sights higher than Fox.  I’m cynical enough to believe that their target audience is Vladimir Putin.  A few of them may see themselves as a potential successor to Trump himself, once the Chosen One either steps down or is carried out of the White House feet first.  Others probably just want to make sure that they’re at the head of the line when Russia begins to pump laundered money into the campaign.   

The dishonesty is now so blatant that even compulsively even-handed pundits, who’ve made careers out of looking the other way when prominent politicians tell them obvious lies, have begun to realize that the Republican Party has mutated into something unrecognizable.  Occasionally, one of them will express outrage at the cowardice of Republican politicians, and even call out the lies of Trump’s most vocal enablers to their faces. 

Sadly, I’m afraid it’s too little, too late.  If they’d called out the gang of lying liars from the get-go, they might have had some effect.  Now, they’re reduced to lamenting the lack of statesmanship, and urging Republican congressmen to examine their consciences.

And those are the party professionals.  As for rank and file Republican voters – those salt-of-the-earth bastions of morality – conservative writer David French points to this language from a resolution passed by the Southern Baptist Convention: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” 

Of course, they passed that resolution way back in 1998, and they were talking about Bill Clinton’s blowjob.  Twenty years later, the God that Southern Baptists worship has apparently loosened up a bit.  For Trump Christians, the Ten Commandments have become the Ten Suggestions.

As Trump supporters cheer his unrestrained immorality and lawlessness, all that post-election analysis of the role of economic stagnation in the heartland rings hollow.  Instead, it’s becoming obvious that what most Trump voters wanted all along was white nationalism. 

In the early 21st century, there were racists, know-nothings, religious zealots, and just plain mean people all over the country who were looking for a leader.  They tended to gravitate to the Republican Party, and goodness knows the Republican establishment was eager to harvest their votes.  But John McCain and Mitt Romney weren’t the Chosen Ones.  The Deplorables-in-waiting liked Sarah Palin’s style, but McCain’s presence at the top of the ticket kept her from really soaring. 

Then the Chosen One arrived on a golden escalator to liberate the GOP from its stodgy principles.  Donald Trump was the full-blown embodiment of the Republican id.  It turns out that, despite all their talk about fiscal responsibility and family values, what most Republican politicians really wanted was to be rich and racist (and promiscuous, too, if they could get away with it).  Republican voters, for their part, would settle for being allowed to discriminate against people different than them.

But reporters, pundits, and talking heads couldn’t bring themselves to say that.  As Jay Rosen noted before the 2016 election, “Asymmetry between the parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.” 

It means that everything they know is wrong.

And they’ve been wrong for a while.  Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote about it in 2012, in a book called IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK.  Money quote: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

More Jay Rosen: “Now imagine what happens when over time the base of one party, far more than the base of the other, begins to treat the press as a hostile actor, and its own establishment as part of the rot; when it not only opposes but denies the legitimacy — and loyalty to the state — of the other side’s leader; when it prefers conspiracy theory to party-friendly narratives that at least cope with verified fact; when it is scornful of the reality that in a divided system you never get everything you want.”

Three years later, we don’t have to imagine what such a world would be like.  We’re living in it.

Mann and Ornstein not only analyzed the situation presciently; they also correctly predicted the outcome: “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

That’s another thing that the pundits can’t bring themselves to admit.  All they have left is whiny-sounding appeals to the patriotism and conscience of Republican politicians – who have all abandoned those virtues in return for money and power. 

There are allegedly twenty or so Republican senators who despise Donald Trump but are too scared to say so out loud.  I don’t know if those numbers are real, but I’m pretty sure that generic criticism won’t get the job done. 

I’m waiting for an influential member of the media, print or electronic, to call out specific senators – and especially those who enjoy reputations as moderates – by name: “Shame on you, Susan Collins.  You took an oath to protect the Constitution.  Do your job.”  But no doubt that would piss Susan Collins off mightily.  Heaven forfend that a pundit would lose access to Collins’ off-the-record expressions of “concern” about Donald Trump’s “troubling” behavior. 

Instead, my prediction is that most of them will pivot to concern-trolling Democratic impeachment efforts.  Rather than keep the attention on Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, they will nit-pick process issues.  They will absorb Russo-Republican talking points and suggest that impeachment actually helps Donald Trump.  Never mind that similar predictions that Robert Mueller’s investigation would hurt Democrats in the 2018 mid-terms turned out to be spectacularly wrong. 

Another tiny clue is the fact that neither Mitch McConnell nor Donald Trump himself are acting like impeachment is good for them.  And Rep. Mark Meadows, chair of the Freedom Caucus?  He’s so confident that Trump will lead Republicans to victory in 2020 that he’s retiring from Congress. 

I’m not pessimistic about a Democratic win next year.  But I’m having trouble imagining what comes next. 

Republican rhetoric has turned apocalyptic.  The GOP looks like nothing so much as the latest embodiment of William Butler Yeats’ nightmare vision of a rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem.

At this point, I’m caught between dueling quotations.  As Ramsay Bolton put it (Game of Thrones, Season 3): “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

On the other hand, as the Rolling Stones sang fifty years ago, “if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”