The sad state of the Republican Party in Arkansas was evident again earlier this month when none of the members of our U.S. House delegation spoke up for U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, who was ousted from her post as the No. 3 GOP House leader.
Cheney's crime: having the nerve to speak the truth about former President Donald Trump.
While the woman from Wyoming says what every educated person knows to be the truth, the men in her party quiver, fearful that some loudmouth Trump supporter might confront them. Profiles in courage, these fellows.
Two of this state's U.S. representatives, French Hill and Bruce Westerman, were at the conference meeting but wouldn't say how they voted. Rep. Steve Womack was missing in action, not even bothering to attend the important gathering.
The worst of the bunch, hapless Rep. Rick Crawford, proudly announced that he had voted to remove Cheney. Crawford is such a nonentity in the halls of power that Arkansas' geographically sprawling 1st Congressional District is essentially without representation in the nation's capital.
You'll remember that Crawford and Westerman supported the frivolous lawsuit by the clownish attorney general of Texas that challenged the election results in four states carried by President Joe Biden. The cowardly Crawford then went so far as to object on the day of the U.S. Capitol insurrection to certified election returns from Pennsylvania and Arizona.
The sorry showing by our state's four House members came on the heels of a legislative session in Little Rock during which the far-right fringe I call the Know Nothings hijacked the session. They fought culture wars that have nothing to do with the operation of state government.
Republicans who know better--the group I dub the Cowards--let them get away with it. Just as is the case in Washington, there aren't many examples of GOP courage at the state Capitol.
When I worked in Republican politics, the goal was to win. Under Trump's watch, though, the party lost control of the White House, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House. To use one of the former president's favorite words, he's clearly a loser.
Rather than change course, as parties typically do when facing such losses, the goal of current Republican officeholders seems to be to appease the Loser-In-Chief and his delusional band of supporters.
Given its present course, the GOP might become simply a regional force with its power base in rural states such as Arkansas and Mississippi. The question is whether the party will continue to be a player on the national stage.
"In the six presidential elections since 2000, Democrats have lost the white vote every time, but prevailed in half of them even without it," Jelani Cobb wrote recently in The New Yorker. "The day before the 2020 election, Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, who represented the George W. Bush campaign in 2000 and 2004, published an op-ed in The Washington Post, warning that the party could find itself a 'permanent minority.'
"The fraught discussions over the GOP's future are really debates about whether the current party is capable of adapting to modern circumstances again--or whether it will turn into a more malign version of itself, one even more dependent on white status anxieties."
"When you see the collapse of parties, it is usually because you have some problem of the existing party system coming up against a major new change," says Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian.
Cobb notes: "The Republican Party itself was built on the ruins of the Whigs, a party that broke apart in the tempests leading up to the Civil War. . . . The GOP's travails echo a historical pattern. Despite the United States' reputation as the most stable democracy in the world, most of the political parties born in this country, including major ones, have ceased to exist.
"The list of those that have collapsed includes, in addition to the Whigs, the Federalists, the Democratic-Republicans, the American Party (also called the Know Nothings), the Free-Soil Party, the Populist Party, the National Party Republicans, the Anti-Masonic Party and three iterations of the Progressive Party.
"The Socialist and Communist parties also briefly commanded public attention. What we refer to as the two-party system has collapsed twice before. The Democratic and Republican parties have endured as long as they have because they have significantly altered their identities to remain viable. In a sense, each has come to represent what it once reviled."
Peggy Noonan, who wrote many of Ronald Reagan's most famous speeches, said in her Wall Street Journal column last month: "No one likes the Republican Party. Pretty much every power center in America is arrayed against it--the media, the academy, the entertainment culture, what remains of our high culture, the corporate suite, the nonprofit world. The young aren't drawn to it. The party is split, if not shattered. The opposition has a new presidency, almost a Senate majority, the House, albeit by a hair.
"President Biden . . . has yet to make masses of voters crazy with rage. His approval numbers are steady. Everything's against the Republicans nationally, even many of their leaders in Washington, many of whom don't trend toward brightness. What would constitute an active civic and political good in America in 2021? Helping to bring that party back. It is worth saving, even from itself."
My phone has rung more than once this year with calls from distraught Arkansas Republicans I first met in the 1980s. There were so few of us who identified ourselves as Republicans back then that we all knew each other.
The callers wonder if there's a way to get their party back. These are people who stood for less government, not more. They believed in efficient government and putting smart, capable people in state jobs to make sure tax dollars were spent wisely.
The Know Nothings in the Legislature are all about more government--passing bills to deal with problems that don't exist. They show little interest in the budget, in government efficiency and in attracting the best and brightest to government service. Many, in fact, are there because they've failed to succeed in the private sector.
"It is a badly divided party," Noonan writes. "It will have to work through a great deal. It can't keep existing only to own the libs, manipulate the distracted, monetize grievance and plot revenge against those who spent the past few years on the wrong side. Sometimes you have to look to who will follow you if only you take right and serious stands aimed at helping the people of your country.
"The exact nature of the new Democratic Party now emerging will help the GOP find an agreed-on mission, but it won't be enough. What you favor is as important as what you oppose."
Before last November's election, David Brooks wrote in The New York Times: "If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues--people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes.
"For decades, conservatives were happy to live in that paradigm. But as years went by, many came to see its limits. It was so comprehensively anti-government that it had no way to use government to solve common problems. It was so focused on cultivating strong individuals that it had no language to cultivate a sense of community and belonging. So if you were right of center, you leapt. You broke from the Reagan paradigm and tried to create a new, updated conservative paradigm."
Do current Republican officeholders have the intellectual heft needed to create that new conservative paradigm? The results since last year's election are far from encouraging.
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.