[ad_1]
It seems like every day is Festivus in today’s Republican Party. It may be a joke holiday invented on the “Seinfeld” show, but the “Airing of the Grievances” is all too real and now happens every day instead of once a year. Who needs a special occasion to whine, complain and lash out at everyone who has been a disappointment to you?
Grievance airing, closely related to entitlement and privilege, reached an all-time peak (or maybe just my personal aggravation limit) last week after a woman charged in the U.S. Capitol insurrection asked for permission to go to Mexico; so many House members (some of them armed) were hassling Capitol Police and trying to dodge metal detectors installed after the attack that the House approved steep fines for scofflaws; and a Trump political appointee at the Commerce Department, who like all political appointees knew she’d lose her job if her boss lost, complained that her paid parental leave ended when President Joe Biden was inaugurated.
“I got completely screwed,” Vanessa Ambrosini, the new mom, told Politico.
This is not, however, a family new to how politics works. Her husband, a former Trump White House official, is executive director of the Michigan GOP, which tried to disrupt the vote count during election week and later tried to delay certification that Biden won the state.
Any punishment is ‘cancel culture’
All these people consider themselves victims, so why should they have to pay any price? And if that suddenly looms as a possibility, the privilege and entitlement whine moves seamlessly into the cancel culture whine. Consequences and accountability? So unfair. At least that’s how you see it if you believe you are above the law, above the rules and entitled to special treatment.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, believes she should pay no price for trafficking in conspiracy theories that are painful for real victims of 9/11 and school shootings, and violent threats that are frightening for those (including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and three congresswomen of color) in her crosshairs. The great majority of her Republican colleagues agreed, but House Democrats threw her off her committees.
Alas, that won’t cancel Greene. “I feel freed,” she said Friday and added (irony alert!), “I’m going to be holding the Republican Party accountable and pushing them to the right.”
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is another “victim” of cancel culture. He lost a book contract. That is, as they say, a first-world problem. He quickly got another publisher and, last I heard, he is still in the Senate — even though he was a ringleader of efforts to block a routine and peaceful transfer of power from President Donald Trump to Biden, the fight that fueled the Capitol insurrection.
No discussion of entitlement would be complete without a nod to Trump, the king of grievance. Nobody was ever nice or grateful enough to him, from governors to the news media to Ukraine’s president to Georgia’s secretary of state. Nothing was ever his fault, especially America’s abysmal and tragic coronavirus response.
And it was of course not his fault that he lost the election, because, in fact, he won — by a landslide! If it seemed like voters had canceled him, well, that was “fraud on a scale never seen before,” because the election was “stolen” by radical Democrats and the fake news media. So head for the Capitol and fight for right: “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” Senators will decide in the trial starting this week whether they’ll let Trump get away with this deadly incitement.
Armed and annoyed: House members aren’t an elite excused from rules on guns, security and respect for police
Not that there’s much suspense, given the GOP path since it embraced Trump and, in the memorable phrase from the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, defined deviancy down. Moynihan was talking about mental health, family structure and crime. Trump has spearheaded the downward redefinition of personal responsibility. The expectation is that bad behavior will carry no consequences, and if there are some, that’s liberals trying to cancel conservatives.
From personal responsibility to Trump
Throughout the Reagan-Bush era — in 1980, 1984 and 1988 — Republican Party platforms emphasized people’s “personal responsibility” for their own health and wellness, and the role of personal responsibility in national life. The 1984 document said schools had “lost sight of their traditional task of developing good character and moral discernment. The result for many was a decline in personal responsibility.”
In 1992, the phrase made the top three values — “individual freedom, hard work and personal responsibility” — the GOP platform said were basic to free society and effective government. The party also said the real solution to stopping the spread of AIDS was “personal responsibility and moral behavior,” not condoms and clean needles.
A language he understands: Biden administration should sue Donald Trump to pay for Capitol riot cleanup
The 2000 Republican platform cited “our long tradition of personal responsibility” as the first of three foremost reasons that America is a great country. The 2016 platform focused on the responsibility of spouses to each other and their children within traditional marriage. This is the platform Trump ran on — he of the three marriages, “Access Hollywood” p—y-grabbing disaster and payoffs to buy silence from a porn star and a Playboy playmate about their alleged affairs with him.
Most Republican senators have signaled they will vote to acquit Trump of inciting the deadly Capitol insurrection. They will not cancel him, convict him or ban him from holding future office. He will, once again, evade consequences. And the GOP (now an acronym for Grievances On Parade) will complete its journey to a planet far, far away from the principles of personal responsibility that Republicans once at least pretended to hold close.
Jill Lawrence is the commentary editor of USA TODAY and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.” Follow her on Twitter: @JillDLawrence
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump and Greene show Republican contempt for personal responsibility
[ad_2]
Source link
