With all due respect and deference to President Obama's handling of a very difficult political situation over the past 8 years, some of his recent comments to the press have driven home for me both the consistency in his political thinking and its fatal flaws. In his final press conference Friday, he discussed what the Republican response to the Russian election hacking means about that party and American politics more generally.
Speaking about widespread Republican voter support for Vladimir Putin - 37% approval in a recent poll, Obama said, "How did that happen? It happened in part because, for too long everything that happens in this town, everything that's said is seen through the lens of does this help or hurt us relative to Democrats or relative to President Obama? And unless that changes, we're going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence because we've lost track of what it is that we're about and what we stand for.” He also said, “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us. But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values. Mr. Putin can weaken us, just like he's trying to weaken Europe, if we start buying into notions that it's okay to intimidate the press. Or lock up dissidents. Or discriminate against people because of their faith or what they look like.”
I'm all for Obama calling out Republicans for their absurd lionization of Putin and drawing connections between the illiberal attitudes of Republicans and the Russian leader. But even as he bemoans Republican opposition to everything the Democrats do as being their guiding light, Obama suggests that this attitude might change. Unfortunately, if there's one thing the Obama presidency has taught us, it's that the absolutism of the Republican Party only trends in one direction. This did not change through his entire presidency, and it is not going to change now that the Republicans have control of all three branches of the federal government. This is who they are.
Over the years, President Obama has often employed the metaphor of a right-wing fever gripping the GOP, and talked of how this fever needed to break in order for Republicans to return to the norms and niceties of American politics. This fever analogy has proved accurate, but unfortunately not in the way Obama intended. The fever did not break; rather, the fever has broken the GOP. We can see now that the infection has run its course -- but the underlying disease has transformed the Republicans, and has left them in a permanently altered and monstrous state: a major American political party firmly rooted in white supremacism, dedicated to the continued enrichment of the upper reaches of the upper 1%, and necessarily anti-democratic as it seeks to impose an agenda that flies in the face of the economic needs and basic decency of the majority of the American people. The new president and his team have a sophisticated understanding of the new media and communications environment in which our politics increasingly reach the public, but the ends to which this understanding is aimed are age-old and crude - ever more wealth for those who already have more than enough, and an amoral exploitation of the common good for narrow private ends.
For too long, President Obama has acted like the GOP is a normal political party, even as it consistently sought to delegitimize his presidency. For him to suggest that the Republican Party is copying Putin's policies is laughable: the Republicans found their way to authoritarianism all on their lonesome. With a party like this, you don't negotiate and cross your fingers hoping that they'll eventually see the light. The only way forward, as it's always been, is to fight them, and beat them.