Politics is rich valley of Rubicons; lines crossed that forever define the character of our Parties, elections and country. Roy Moore’s candidacy is such a line today. Where we stand on it matters.
First, some context.
America is in the midst of a great political realignment, where the norms of recent decades no longer apply. To see how far the needle has moved, consider the major Party candidates from 1992 – George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Neither would be welcome in the Republican and Democrat parties of 2016.
The vital middle of politics, with its centrifugal power to shift policy slightly to the left or right as national priorities dictated, has all but collapsed, replaced by political trench warfare,where the opponents are not simply on the other aisle, but within your own ranks.
Compromise is out. Purity is in. It is better to lose spectacularly attempting the impossible, than win 50 percent. Tactical has become strategic where even minor questions take on life and death import. Knowledge and experience are the discredited tools of elitism. Rage substitutes for reason. Winning, to turn a phrase, is everything.
“Grievance” politics is not new, but it is now universal in America. Today’s scapegoats are not simply elected officials who have somehow failed to make the grade, but the very structure of governance to which they become part. Cross the Potomac into DC and you have suddenly joined the most detested club in America, and are guilty of collective sin.
This animates our choices.
Sober, informed, reasonable, and measured candidates, who promote thoughtful plans to solve tangible, even existential problems, are out. 140 character answers, no matter how preposterous, are in. Problem-solving is easy if you just elect the loudest mouth that expresses neither doubt nor apology.
Which presents the paradox.
If we posit that the discontent is real, and it has been catalyzed, at least in part, by elected leaders of both Parties, who have failed to adequately address root causes, how does electing people who know everything about framing grievance, but nothing about governance make things better? Worse, this singular litmus test of anti-establishment bone fides has not simply crowded out the value of expertise and knowledge, it is infecting our core sense of decency as a citizenry in the name of hyper-partisanship.
Which brings us to Roy Moore.
Moore is unfit to sit in the United States Senate. Moreover, he was unfit before the allegations of sexual assault became public.
- Moore was removed from office in 2003 for failing to follow a federal court order to remove a monument of the 10 Commandments from a public, judicial building.
- In 2016, having been re-elected to his previous position, Moore was suspended for directing probate judges to enforce Alabama’s ban on “same-sex” marriage, which was invalidated by SCOTUS.
- Moore believes religious law trumps secular law, but only so long as that is based on the Christian faith. He has called Islam a “false” religion.
- Moore secretly paid himself more than $1 million from a charity he founded, The Foundation for Moral Law.
I could go on, but you get the point. This kind of history makes Moore a more logical choice to replace Pat Robertson on the 700 Club than an office of public trust. The Senate oath of office requires a commitment to the US Constitution that Moore already holds in contempt. He is a zealot, not a patriot.
And now, with the five women having come forward with credible stories of sexual assault, Moore appears not only as a hypocrite to the religious values he espouses, but also as a likely predator, all the more foul because the women involved were under-age.
And yet, the unconscionable is defended.
It’s a liberal dirty trick right before an election. The women are Hillary/Jones supporters. The stories are fabricated. The women have failed to live upstanding lives themselves, with a history of broken marriages, thus they cannot stand in judgement. On his show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh even went so far to posit that the whole sordid mess was Establishment Mitch McConnell’s way of getting even with Moore supporter Steve Bannon.
We are better than this.
Yes, the charges this late in the game creates suspicion, but that doesn’t make the testimonials untrue. Four of the five women involved were contacted by the Washington Post. Trust me when I say that these contacts are not genteel. The women were probably given a choice of telling the stories themselves, or letting the Post publish the story based on accounts that these women had given to friends over the years since the alleged assaults. If it is going to go public, you will want to own the story yourself.
Yes, the Post editorial board would love nothing more than to see the GOP lose in the deep South. But again, this is not a manufactured story. If there is anger over the timing, it should be directed at the GOP for failing to make public what seemed like an open secret in Alabama regarding Moore’s conduct.
Yes, pulling support from Moore at this juncture threatens the GOP’s hold on a seat that was all but guaranteed. Blame here goes to the actual selection process and Steve Bannon, who disrupted a slam dunk win for a conservative new-comer to the Senate, simply because he was endorsed by Mitch McConnell, in favor of the deeply flawed Moore. Indeed, Moore is the candidate of the Republican Party because he won seven percent (7%) of total Alabama voters. That’s many things, but a popular mandate is not among them.
Americans are known as a people of conviction, conscience and decency. In today’s hyper-partisan world, we need those qualities more, not less.
While it is fine – even necessary – to point to the blatant hypocrisy of the Democrats and their media enablers on the issue of sexual assault – and particularly the conduct of Bill Clinton – that does not absolve Republicans of the consequential decision they must make, nor to justify it. To vote for Moore because Democrats voted for Clinton is a moral abdication and a choice to define decency downward.
We are at an inflection point.
We can use this sorry state in Alabama as a cautionary tale, and consciously choose to better align our goals with candidates who can act on that vision. Or we can continue on the current path and support blowhards and snake oil salesmen, who we absolve of ignorance, incompetence, and serial failures of integrity, so long as they tell us only what we want to hear, with the hoary conviction of the righteous. One path leads to redemption and a better country. The other, to the cesspool of bromides masquerading as achievement.
If Moore refuses to leave the race on his own, Republicans need to stand on the side of decency. That is not the side of Roy Moore.