How Sleazy is the GOP?
The GOP Has Become the Party of an Off-the-Charts Level of Corruption, Indecency, and Depravity
If there’s one word I’d use to describe what the modern day GOP has become, it’d be: sleaze. The GOP is a party so amazingly sleazy, it boggles the mind. And it wrinkles the nose. It’s foul with the stench of every kind of corruption imaginable — openly, enthusiastically, to rapt applause.
Take the latest exemplar. “The truth,” Matt Gaetz said at the ‘Save America Summit’…. “will prevail.” Go ahead and laugh, if you know the story. Matt Gaetz is so sleazy that words begin to fail. Let’s leave aside the strange issue of his adopted son — Gaetz has been “linked to a federal sex trafficking charge.” Think about that for a moment. Here’s a man who’s become one of the GOP’s firebrands — and the Feds are onto him for sex trafficking.
Now that’s sleazy. Caligula himself might have shuddered at the sleaziness of the GOP — or maybe applied for membership.
And yet I’m leaving so, so much out. Like what? Like the House Ethics Committee opening an investigation, looking into allegations of “sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift.” Enough sleaze for you?
You can name all the kinds of depravity you want, and the GOP delivers in spades. Cronyism? The Trumpists have gone on to money and power and fortune — Mike Pence just signed a seven figure book deal, and Stephen Miller’s a Fox News pundit? Mere corruption? The scandals are too many to even begin to name, and the cast of characters packs the very top of the party, from Chris Christie to Mitch McConnell. Alleged sexual predation? Again, it’d take a book to do the subject justice. How about alleged violence and intimidation? Meet Lauren Boebert. The GOP is a pustule oozing every last kind of sleaze known in the history of humankind, and if anything, I’m being kind, because as we’ll discuss, while Americans tend to shrug it off, none of this is remotely normal.
At this juncture, Americans of a certain kind will object. “Hey! Don’t judge a person before they’re proven guilty!” Here’s the thing. Americans appear to be terrible judges of character. Just awful.
What do I mean? Those of us who have lived through authoritarian meltdowns before can see the moral corruption on their faces. We look at a guy like Matt Gaetz and we know. Doesn’t anyone sane? It’s literally written all over their faces, in their body language, in the way they express themselves. The void of moral fibre. The abusiveness. The total, absolute lack of character. It is as plain as day. Nobody else…is…like this. Sneers like this, screams like this, shouts, cajoles, pleads, incites, demands, lies…like this. Berate and insults and subjugates like this. The sleaze is the most obvious thing about modern day Republicans. Anyone with a working moral radar for dubious people with malign and corrupt motives should sense it in about five microseconds flat.
I shouldn’t have to give you more examples, but I will. Remember Brett Kavanaugh’s famous sneer? The one that said to every woman in the country: “You’ll always be under my thumb”? Or how about the way Mitch McConnell apologised for not impeaching Trump — one of the more pathetic spectacles in our lifetimes? Then there was the small matter of Trump himself, and the aura of sleaze surrounding him like a shadow made of merde.
Of course, the GOP doesn’t have a monopoly on indecency. Democrats are hardly paragons of virtue. A virtuous politician is like a 40 year old virgin. There might be a few, but even most of the ones who say they are are probably lying. My kid sis, aka the editor-in-chief, will be the first to remind you of Biden’s sexual harassment allegations. (Ed. note: I will.) Still, though, the Democrats are not a party of sleaze in remotely the same way the GOP is — literally made of it, like a walking colossus of moral sewage, dropping garbage and toxic waste every juddering step he takes.
So how come those of us who’ve lived through authoritarian meltdowns know that these guys are super ultra mega sleazy, to the bone — and yet Americans, at least millions of them, don’t? I’m not making some kind of legal judgment — I’m just talking to you like a human being. The same way that you might see someone at party and say: “That dude looks like an abuser. See the way he’s talking to his girlfriend? I’m going to keep my distance.” I’m just making a simple moral observation, about character, or a lack thereof, which, yes, can be observed in the tiniest things.
It’s an old, old pattern. What’s happening in America. The sordid have formed a kind of devil’s alliance with the religious, the fanatical, the pure. The sleazemongers realize, somehow, that by covering themselves with a halo of religiosity and patriotism, that they can pull the wool over the eyes of the conservative.
Hence, the absolutely bizarre spectacle of a guy like Matt Gaetz — investigated for sex trafficking, remember, with moral corruption literally written all over his grin — being met with rapt applause by “evangelicals.” What on earth?
(Ed. note: Let’s be real here. What else is QAnon’s obsession with a Democrat child trafficking ring if not a denial and project of the GOP’s moral corruption — that Republicans refuse to accept?)
Only that pattern is hardly bizarre. Where else have we seen it? The best example is probably the Muslim world.There, ayatollahs and sheikhs and whatnot have convinced whole societies to put on the pretence of religiosity. So in Saudi Arabia, you can’t buy alcohol, and you can’t have a relationship, all in the name of purity and yet people drink like fish, and women are systematically repressed, not to mention outright trafficked. Purity is a cover for sleaze — a story as old as time.
What’s different about America is how amazingly gullible so many Americans are. They’re a lot more like modern day Muslims than they care to admit. They’re sleaze-blind. How can you look at a guy like Matt Gaetz, the world wonders, and not think to yourself, “Wow, there goes a dude who’ll prey on anything that moves”? You have to be totally, wilfully, hopelessly naive not to recognize this level of moral corruption when you see it.
How did Americans get this naive? Well, in America, there’s always been this strange relationship between corruption and purity. America was founded by Puritans…and yet their descendants went on to enslave and genocide whole continents. And while they were doing that, they were saying “God Bless America,” and thinking of it as a new Promised Land.
Think about how messed up that is for a second. And what it means. In America, Godliness and purity have always disguised the most incredible levels of toxicity and harm imaginable, from the Puritans founding a nation that happily committed genocide and slavery, and imagined itself blessed — right down to a grinning Matt Gaetz screaming about the “truth” to the gullible in Trumpland, who think of him as pure-blooded, so all is forgiven.
Europeans have always had a more comfortable relationship with the grey zones of being human. A politician has an affair? Shrug. That doesn’t mean Europeans are bad judges of character, it means they’re better ones than Americans. They know that an affair between consenting adults doesn’t matter much if your job is managing a country’s bureaucracy. But because Americans insist on a kind of extreme level of virtue — moral perfection — what they get is charlatans and sleazeballs, who are the only people who can even pretend to live up to that unattainable standard.
Combined with this, I think, is a strange underlying fear that haunts America — the fear of “white genocide.” Why is it that conservatives will forgive someone like Matt Gaetz for anything and everything — and yet insist that someone like George Floyd deserved what he got? What does that insane, senseless double standard say? That all will be forgiven — for a certain kind of person. A white one, of course. And that is because, I imagine, the fear of “white genocide” ripples through the American conservative subconscious like a tidal wave — and therefore, better to forgive a fellow white person, especially when your own kind is under threat. When it comes to anyone else, though, the harshest punishment is what should be meted out.
The moral sewage in the modern day GOP, in other words, is a kind of pact. The base forgives them anything — because they are willing to forego anything to support the cause of a nationalist ethnically cleansed state. To put that in a simpler way, as long as you’re pretty fascist, you can be forgiven anything, because having a pure homeland is priority number one for the Trumpist base, who are still very much there, and more extreme than ever.
That’s precisely the same pact that has led society after society to collapse. It’s precisely what happened in the Muslim world, for example. You know who gets beheaded? It’s not sheikhs and ayatollahs. It’s hated minorities, usually, or someone inconsequential. When the power figures misstep, they’re forgiven, too, because the masses have made a deal: they want a land of the pure, and they’re willing to forgive anything to get one, accept any level of corruption or corrosion or outright criminality. That’s how you get to sheikhs driving around London and New York and Washington DC between mansions in supercars with escorts in the passenger seat — and then go home and pretend they’re saints. It’s the Matt Gaetz playbook, writ large.
Americans need to begin understanding that the level of complete indecency, or utter degeneracy in the modern day GOP is super, super extreme. It’s totally off the charts for anything but a failed state. Characters like these? Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump…the list is endless. They should not exist in a modern democracy. The fact that such figures are anywhere remotely near the workings of power is a testament to how badly a failed society America really is.
The only other societies that are even remotely this sleazy are a collection of places nobody should want to be. North Korea. Iran. Saudi Arabia. That’s the kind of list America’s on at the moment. The GOP’s resume is more suited for a mafia or a cartel than governing a modern society.
And after Americans begin understanding how sleazy the GOP really is, that such levels of sleaze — from human trafficking to corruption to systematic lies to intimidation and violence — are super extreme, they need to stop normalising it. That’s going to be hard work. It’s going to take questioning why and how America has this warped, perverse relationship where Godliness and purity excuse and mask and justify toxicity of every kind — just like “God Bless America” whitewashed away genocide and slavery from society’s moral balance sheet, or just like how Matt Gaetz has his abusiveness written all over his smirk. You should know a likely predator when you see one. It’s part of being a functioning adult.
Americans need to become better judges of character. Way, way better judges of character. It’s not remotely normal, like I said, to have such mind-boggling levels of moral corruption that a top politician is accused of human trafficking. But you know what else isn’t normal? For this kind of sleaze to have even reached such epic, bizarre, grotesque, perverse proportions. Because a lot of people — too many — lie to to themselves, saying: “Well, those guys pray together, so they can’t possibly be doing anything bad, can they?” I can give you a long, long list of societies gullible enough to believe that — especially when they were promised fascism’s seductions. We call them failed states, though, and the bad news is that America has yet to outgrow being one.
Umair
April 2021