The collapse of the Grand Old Party has been so rapid and so complete during the last four years that watching it happen has been like watching the implosion of a venerable old building from a distance: a puff of smoke, a loud bang and suddenly there is a pile of ruins enveloped in a cloud of dust.
![Mac Stipanovich was chief of staff to former Gov. Bob Martinez and a long-time Republican strategist and lobbyist. He has since registered as no party affiliation and as a Democrat, and his voter registration now varies with the election cycle.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 1521 2000"/%3E "Mac Stipanovich was chief of staff to former Gov. Bob Martinez and a long-time Republican strategist and lobbyist. He has since registered as no party affiliation and as a Democrat, and his voter registration now varies with the election cycle.")
Wandering among the ruins are millions of people, including a newly elected member of Congress, who believe the federal government is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. More millions believe the COVID-19 pandemic is the result of a conspiracy between the Chinese Communist Party and the Democratic Party to defeat Donald Trump. Tens of millions more believe the presidential election was stolen from Trump by a centrally directed conspiracy involving thousands of people in six states whose total silence makes the Mafia look like chatterboxes by comparison, a conspiracy that may have been financed by China, Venezuela and George Soros and might have involved bogus ballots landed in Maine harbors in the dead of night from North Korean ships as well as vote-switching computers in Europe. And almost all believe Joe Biden is a senescent stalking horse for a carefully calculated socialist takeover of the country. In short, most of those who call themselves Republicans today are barking mad.
Or so I say. They, of course, say otherwise. And therein lies what Barack Obama has correctly called our epistemic crisis, a radical divergence of how and what we know, the existence of alternate universes with alternate facts, with some of us living in one universe and the rest of us in another.
We cannot long survive as a nation without shared facts, common truths and the same reality. But how do we get from where we are back to where we were?
First and foremost, elected enablers of Republican idiocy must start speaking truth to those to whom they now pander out of fear. They must stop following the crazed crowd and start trying to lead it. Would they survive the inevitable primary challenges from the Trump base? No, many would not. Would their sacrifice be worth it? Absolutely. By speaking up, each could alter the destructive course we are currently on by just a bit, and together they could make a significant difference. And isn’t making a positive difference why they ran for public office in the first place?
Courage is perseverance in the face of fear. Heroism is extraordinary courage. Cowardice, on the other hand, is shirking one’s duty because of fear.
At the moment, we are blessed with precious few heroes in the ranks of elected Republicans, but we are cursed with a gracious plenty of cowards, men and women who shirk their duty because they have persuaded themselves that now is not the time to risk all, that the Trump threat to the American democracy is overstated and will fade, that it is important that they remain in office because whatever damage they do by doing nothing today will be outweighed by the good they intend to do tomorrow.
These are transparent rationalizations. Now is the time. The threat is real and will persist. And those who fall can easily be replaced. They are on the firing line in this moment. This is on them.
The situation in which these faint hearted Republicans find themselves reminds me of a scene in an old movie, Zulu, which was based on the battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879, at which abut 140 British soldiers and a dozen colonial militia at an outpost on a river ford in South Africa fought off several thousand Zulu warriors fresh from participating in the annihilation of a large British column at nearby Isandlwana. A frightened young private looks out over his not very imposing barricade at the Zulus deploying to attack. Just behind him stands Color Sgt. Bourne, ramrod straight, uniform correct, moustaches bristling, swagger stick in hand, ready for what is coming.
“Why is it us?’ the private asks. “Why us?”
“Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.”
Mac Stipanovich was chief of staff to former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez and a longtime Republican strategist who is currently registered No Party Affiliation.
