Mitt Romney, John McCain And The Myth Of The 'Good Republicans'

Binders Full of Nonsense

John McCain and Sarah Palin Happened, You Didn’t Imagine It

Mitt Romney isn’t running for reelection and as the serial hagiographers would have you believe, the Senate is losing one of the good ones. The narrative is simplistic and follows the kind of arc that is pleasing to human senses, which are continually looking for patterns that stimulate the primitive centers of the brain.

After all, Romney voted to impeach Trump at his second impeachment trial following the January 6 attack, and Trump and Romney regularly sparred in public. That sets him apart from most Republicans, who have marched in embarrassing lockstep with the presidential failure. Of course, if you look just a little closer Romney doesn’t come across as quite the voice of sanity he has been touted as. Romney was a split vote on Trump’s first impeachment when the facts were no less damning about his use of his office for corrupt purposes.

The Romney record on Trump is even worse if you dial things back a few years to when the former Massachusetts governor seemed on the verge of winning the presidency. Romney needed racist white votes as part of the backlash against the first Black president, and he mugged for the cameras as he embraced Donald Trump at the height of his filthy “birther” crusade against Obama. A profile in courage! Bold truthteller.

Even beyond his ties to Trump (remember how he lusted after becoming Trump’s Secretary of State), Romney showed himself as no hero. This is a vulture capitalist in its most pure form, willing to upend the lives of the working class so he could pose with his private equity bros. Romney, a self-described “severe conservative” filled his 2012 presidential campaigns with endless lies, claiming that Obama called those killed at Benghazi “bumps” on the road and lamenting Obama’s decision to quit the Iraq War (for Romney, thousands of Americans dead for George W. Bush’s lies were not enough, he wanted more).

The pattern is the same with the late John McCain, who mocked the notion that there should be abortion available in instances where the life of the mother was threatened, sung rapturously about bombing Iran, and was happy to campaign with another bigoted goon — Sarah Palin — when he seemed on the verge of presidential success.

And George W. Bush? The butcher of Baghdad. The man who lied us into a war, let the man responsible for 9/11 escape, installed religious ideologues in the government, watched on as Katrina drowned Blacks in New Orleans, tried to pass a constitutional amendment to block same-sex marriage, pushed to disqualify Black voters, and —oh— helped to set in motion the Great Recession.

That isn’t even getting into the major Republican figures of the last two decades who tore down America while propping up the conservative movement: Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, Tom DeLay, John Boehner, and convicted pedophile Dennis Hastert, among so many others.

Trump is the leader of the modern conservative movement and the likely next presidential nominee of the Republican Party, making him the biggest symbol of the right’s rotten excess and hate. But his existence doesn’t negate what the Republican Party and conservatism has been for decades, ever since Dr. Martin Luther King warned about the dangers of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election. Just because Trump is so terrible and particularly blunt about being terrible, doesn’t undo the damage that people like Romney, McCain, Bush and beyond have done to the country. None of these men had the fortitude to openly oppose Trump’s ascension within the ranks of the Republican Party nor did they use their positions to openly endorse the only viable alternatives to Trump in the presidency— Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.

No, these men all went along with either Trump himself, or in the era before Trump was a major figure, the same destructive ideas and rot that are the foundations of Trumpism.

The “good” Republican Party is mythology. It is a story people tell themselves because it allows the brain to construct a false narrative absolving the party of its ills. You see, the Republican Party once stood for principled ideas that it forthrightly pursued following the rules, and it was only when the barbarian Trump showed up circa 2016 that everything went bad. If it can only rid itself of this meddlesome beast, things can go back to “normal.”

This argument ignores the notion that normalcy for Republicans pre-Trump was storming state election offices to ensure that votes for Al Gore weren’t counted. Normal was Supreme Court justices nominated by George H.W. Bush coming up with creative one-time interpretations of the law that led to his son, George W. Bush, becoming president. Normal was Ronald Reagan ignoring AIDS deaths because the victims were gay and making up lies about Black welfare cheats. Normal was John Boehner refusing to pass immigration reform as he did the dirty work of racist white supremacist nativists. Normal was Bill Frist diagnosing Terry Schiavo via video footage so extremists anti-abortion zealots could control the narrative. Narrative was Newt Gingrich shutting down the government and doing his best to kick the vulnerable out of the social safety net.

But sure, the problem is just Trump, everything was hunky dory before, right?

We have to get over this recency bias, this belief that because what we are experiencing today is so terrible that it retroactively turns the horrors of the past into some sort of funhouse mirror golden age.

We have to understand that the fundamental ideas of the modern conservative movement, the ideology that has underlined the Republican Party for over six decades, was built on the concrete notions that equality for Black, LGBTQ+ people and women should never occur and that any movement towards that equity should be undermined. That is what motivated people voting for Goldwater in the 1960s, Reagan in the 1980s, McCain in the early 2000s, and Trump in the last two elections. The faces have changed but the intense, searing hate remains the same.

It is hard for people to reconcile the harshness they face now with what seems like a warm and fuzzy memory of the past. We tell ourselves it couldn’t have been as bad as what we are feeling right now, and our brains do the rest, rewriting reality to accommodate bad actors and convert them into knights in shining armor from Utah, Arizona, and Texas.

To be extremely blunt: It’s bullshit.

They were never good and their actions are not separate from Trump. He does not live in a world completely outside of conservatism. The reality of the situation is that Trump is the logical endpoint of what his predecessors did. Goldwater, Bush, Romney, and McCain walked so that Trump could fly — and as we can already see by the likes of figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz — it’s just going to continue to get worse. There is no reset button that will extricate the Trump disasters from the good Republican Party, returning us to civil bipartisanship and an honest conservative movement.

Kill the myth. The Republican Party is fully the terror it appears to be, and we have to deal with reality instead of telling collective fairy tales.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977/Bluesky @owillis

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