Mitt Romney is the fixed point revealing the Republicans’ slide
So a politician in the evening of his career, with a vast family, a rich spiritual life and great wealth to fall back upon, summoned the nerve to declare what his peers muttered privately: that a man who was obviously unfit to be president was, in fact, unfit to be president. Does the courage of Mitt Romney in standing up to Donald Trump really say something wonderful about Mr Romney, or just something dismal about American democracy?
The grim answer is that it does say something good about Mr Romney precisely because it illuminates how debased the leadership of the Republican Party has become. Only against the shadow of dire compromise and cowardice could Mr Romney’s sense and decency gleam so brightly.
Not that American politics looked so great even before Mr Trump ran for president in 2016. As McKay Coppins writes in a new biography, “Romney: A Reckoning,” Mr Romney made compromises of his own to run for office, including to become the Republican nominee for president in 2012. He was also subject to the kind of hysterical demonisation that has long been standard partisan practice: Joe Biden, then the vice-president, warned a mostly black crowd in 2012 that Mr Romney and his banker allies wanted to “put ya’ll back in chains”. Maybe politicians of both parties cried wolf for so long that they—and thus voters—failed to recognise him when he appeared at the door.
2023-10-26 07:35:33
Original from www.economist.com
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