Palm Beach Daily News
Paul Krugman
Sun, November 7, 2021, 5:00 AM
Back in July, Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama, had some strong and sensible things to say about C****-** v*****es. “I want folks to get v******ted,” she declared. “That’s the cure. That prevents everything.” She went on to say that the unv******ted are “letting us down.”
Three months later Ivey directed state agencies not to cooperate with federal C****-** v******tion mandates.
Ivey’s swift journey from common sense and respect for science to destructive partisan nonsense — nonsense that is k*****g tens of thousands of Americans — wasn’t unique. On the contrary, it was a recapitulation of the journey the whole Republican Party has taken on issue after issue, from tax cuts to the Big Lie about the 2020 e******n.
When we talk about the GOP’s moral descent, we tend to focus on the obvious extremists, like the conspiracy theorists who claim that c*****e c****e is a h**x and J*** 6 was a false-f**g operation. But the crazies wouldn’t be driving the Republican agenda so completely if it weren’t for the cowards, Republicans who clearly know better but reliably swallow their misgivings and go along with the party line. And at this point crazies and cowards essentially make up the party’s entire elected wing.
Consider, for example, the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. In 1980 George H.W. Bush, running against Ronald Reagan for the Republican p**********l nomination, called that assertion “voodoo economic policy.” Everything we’ve seen since then says that he was right. But Bush soon climbed down, and by 2017 even supposed “moderates” like Susan Collins accepted claims that the Trump tax cut would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. (It increased the deficit.)
Or consider c*****e c****e. As recently as 2008 John McCain campaigned for president in part on a proposal to put a cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But at this point Republicans in Congress are united in their opposition to any substantive action to limit g****l w*****g, with 30 GOP senators outright denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activities are causing c*****e c****e.
The falsehoods that are poisoning America’s politics tend to share similar life histories. They begin in cynicism, spread through disinformation and culminate in capitulation as Republicans who know the t***h decide to acquiesce in lies.
Take the claim of a s****n e******n. Donald Trump never had any evidence on his side, but he didn’t care; he just wanted to hold on to power or, failing that, promulgate a lie that would help him retain his hold on the GOP. Despite the lack of evidence and the failure of every attempt to produce or create a case, however, a steady drumbeat of propaganda has persuaded an overwhelming majority of Republicans that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.
And establishment Republicans, who at first pushed back against the Big Lie, have gone quiet or even begun to promote the falsehood. Thus last week The Wall Street Journal published, without corrections or fact checks, a letter to the editor from Trump that was full of demonstrable lies — and in so doing gave those lies a new, prominent platform.
The GOP’s journey toward what it is now with respect to C****-** — an anti-v*****e, objectively pro-p******c party — followed the same trajectory.
Although Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott claim that their opposition to v*****e requirements is about freedom, the fact that both governors have tried to stop private businesses from requiring customers or staff to be v******ted shows this is a smoke screen. Pretty clearly, the anti-v*****e push began as an act of politically motivated sabotage. After all, a successful v******tion campaign that ended the p******c would have been good political news for Biden.
We should note, by the way, that this sabotage has, so far at least, paid off. While there are multiple reasons many Americans remain unv******ted, there’s a strong correlation between a county’s political lean and both its v******tion rate and its death rate in recent months. And the persistence of C***D, which has in turn been a d**g on the economy, has been an important factor d**gging down Biden’s approval rating.
More important for the internal dynamics of the GOP, however, is that many in the party’s base have bought into assertions that requiring v******tion against C****-** is somehow a tyrannical intrusion of the state into personal decisions. In fact, many Republican v**ers appear to have turned against long-standing requirements that parents have their children v******ted against other contagious diseases.
And true to form, elected Republicans like Ivey who initially spoke in favor of v*****es have folded and surrendered to the extremists, even though they must know that in so doing they will cause many deaths.
I’m not sure exactly why cowardice has become the norm among elected Republicans who aren’t dedicated extremists. But if you want to understand how the GOP became such a threat to everything America should stand for, the cowards are at least as important a factor as the crazies.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/cowards-not-crazies-destroying-america-120020484.html