Joe Tharakan | The conservative crisis

Cup O' Joe | And how to cure it

By Joe Tharakan 11/02/16 11:01pm

You don’t have to be a Republican to know that “The Donald” is not the best candidate Republicans have to offer. Trump’s alumni status continues to embarrass Penn, to the extent that Columbia University mocked him in a football halftime show two weeks ago.

Trump seems to inhabit an alternate reality where the election is rigged by the “dishonest media” and “people in certain areas,” where global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese to steal our jobs and where Ted Cruz’s father helped assassinate JFK.

Where did he get such wacky ideas? Perhaps from Fox News, or the even more partisan Breitbart.com, which has published headlines such as “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” Considering that the former chairman of Breitbart.com is now Trump’s campaign manager, it isn’t a stretch to believe that Trump willingly surrounds himself with conservative conspiracy theorists.

But Trump didn’t create the far right fringe — decades of increasingly fearmongering rhetoric from Republican politicians did. Even (relatively) sane Marco Rubio’s famous gaffe: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing ... ” implies that President Obama is deliberately trying to undermine the United States. The idea that the president is intentionally sabotaging his country is ridiculous, but some people — probably including Rubio himself — believe it. In fact, it’s one of the tamer things Republicans believe about Obama. Out of all Trump supporters, 65 percent believe Obama is a Muslim and 59 percent believe Obama was not born in the United States — both obviously untrue.

This separation from reality is the biggest problem that Republicans face nationally. The collective party has surrounded itself in a thought bubble, which is older, whiter, more male, more rural and more religious than the voting population at large.

Only an overwhelmingly white group could sincerely believe that asking a black audience, “What the hell do you have to lose?” is a smart idea.

Only an overwhelmingly male group could sincerely believe that an on-tape admission to sexual assault could be hand-waved away as “locker room talk.”

Only a group of rabid Clinton-haters could sincerely believe that Trump’s press conference stunt before the second debate with Bill Clinton’s accusers was some stroke of genius instead of predictable, pathetic nonsense.

And only an erratic campaign with a single consistency — antagonizing Mexican immigrants — could still sincerely believe that the stench of racism could be washed away with a tweet of the candidate eating a taco bowl, literally captioned “I love Hispanics!”

These delusions are not sustainable in the long-term.

I am not the best political strategist, but even I know that there are some things that Republicans must do in order to move forward and prevent the next Trump.

For one, stop abusing and obstructing government. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) proudly promised four more years of investigations into Clinton should she win the White House. Maybe the first Benghazi investigation was warranted, but the seventh was not, and nakedly partisan attempts to smear political opponents through Congressional means don’t help your party, they just ruin Congress. It is tempting to offer red meat to your base through “principled obstructionism,” but it isn’t a good long-term governing philosophy.

Secondly, stop cheating. Stop disenfranchising people who disproportionately vote against you. Over and over we see Republican state officials pass voter ID laws in an attempt to ensure that demographics that vote Democrat face barriers to voting. These laws were recently struck down by federal courts in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Texas among other places.

If you can’t win a free and fair election based on your ideas, then your ideas suck and you should change them. You should not try to artificially keep your party alive by suppressing opposing viewpoints.

Finally, enter the same reality the rest of us live in. Blaming the liberal media at every turn can lead to echo-chamber lunacy quite quickly — no matter how biased they are. As one disgruntled conservative at Penn put it, if the media is biased against Republicans, then “more Republicans should become journalists.”

There is plenty of room for a conservative party in American political discourse. I’m sure there are many right-leaning Penn students longing for a party that can reflect their values. At the moment, the GOP isn’t it.