By Wayne Allensworth
The silence, as they say, is deafening—the relative silence of the GOP, that is, which, with some exceptions, has hardly distinguished itself as the Trump administration contests the stolen election.
The Deplorables want to fight. They do not want Trump to concede, and they believe that Biden’s “win” was the result of fraud. It will be an uphill battle, an extremely difficult, but not impossible, fight to win, if the party rallies behind Trump, with all GOP hands on deck in support of the president. It’s a fight worth having, in any case. Do we want the Swamp to get away with the mother of all election steals, without putting up a fight?
The battle will require fortitude and resolve. Unfortunately, fortitude and resolve have not been hallmarks of the GOP.
The late Sam Francis is often quoted describing the GOP as the Stupid Party. But it has occurred to lots of us out here in flyover country that the GOP is not as stupid as it appears. I doubt, for instance, that Dr. Francis really believed that the national party’s favored policies of corporate tax cuts, perpetual war, mass immigration, and shipping American jobs overseas—policies that alienated the heartland—were mostly the result of stupidity, or even of willful ignorance. Assuming that stupidity and ignorance were the sources of those policies meant assuming that we could correct the situation by instructing the rather dim bulbs of the Grand Old Party about the means of achieving victory as well.
The chief assumption was that that the GOP really wanted to win.
As far as Dr. Francis’s actual view of the GOP, we should recall that he also dubbed the Republicans a bunch of “beautiful losers,” who were quite prepared to accept a place as a toothless opposition, and who lacked the will or the desire to wield power on behalf of their base when the opportunity arose.
Trump isn’t getting much, if any, help from the national party in the post-election struggle just now. The usual suspects want Trump to call it a day and have congratulated Biden on his alleged election victory. It’s up to Republicans at the state level to put up a fight—and the signals coming from the state level have so far been mixed (See here and here; This item, though not related to the election, is encouraging).
Here’s hoping that the Deplorables in the contested states exert strong pressure on their legislators to fight—and that they listen.
Wayne Allensworth is a Corresponding Editor of Chronicles magazine. He is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
