But I just read George F. Will's Washington Post column for today. He made my email look like a fan letter.
George F. Will is a well known conservative writer. His Wikipedia page starts out with this:
"George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is an American conservative political commentator. He writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NBC News and MSNBC.[3] In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America," in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).[4][5] He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977."After trashing the president he goes on to do the same to the Republicans in the US Senate:
The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.
A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:
We are the hollow men . . .Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassor rats’ feet over broken glass . . ."
In a remarkable and far more complex and academic article in The Atlantic, "History Will Judge the Complicit: Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?" Anne Applebaum asks why some people become collaborators (in the negative connotation)?
"Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject—as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” Still, Hoffmann made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into “voluntary” and “involuntary.” Many people in the latter group had no choice. Forced into a “reluctant recognition of necessity,” they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.One East German she interviewed said that was not an interesting question. More interesting was why some people do NOT become collaborators. This article puts the question about why Republican Senators stay loyal to Trump into a much larger historical context. She looks at the Nazi occupied France, East Germany, and Poland - all countries taken over by a different ideology - and looks at people who did and did not become collaborators with the new regimes. Then applies that discussion to the Republicans in the Senate. She goes far beyond voluntary and involuntary.
