When It Isn't Worth It

 

Mitt Romney said he was stepping aside to make room for the next generation. But here’s the real reason he isn’t running for re-election — and it’s a sad one…

Romney feels he no longer fits in the Republican party and he is physically afraid of his party’s base. pic.twitter.com/OvRprw9LIF

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) September 14, 2023

I'm not going to be misty-eyed over what the Republican party has lost or make over-effusive praise of Mitt Romney because both things would be both highly disingenuous and out of character for me. I don't think it can escape one that in the course of his 2012 presidential campaign and in trying to maintain ties with the GOP's newly-crowned leader in 2016, Romney wasn't above the kinds of comments and sacrifices of his dignity that we associate with the Trump era of politics. If anything, his realization that Trump was a disaster that his party was all too willing to follow seems too late because Trump isn't that new--his is just the most-recent incarnation of where the party has been headed for the entirety of Romney's career. 

Of course, it's easy to view Romney as one of the "good ones" and appreciate his intelligent and dishy commentary on the perfidy, fakeness and fears of his Senate colleagues, but the reason he seems like such a stand-out is precisely because the GOP has become so bad that criticism of his own party and its members and taking a stand in favor of facts as if it were his job have become acts of courage and never should have been. Such behavior should have been commonplace. More members of his party could have tried it over the years and simply...never did.

What we've experienced instead over the years from right-wing media and Republican politicians alike is an extremism, ideation of violence and oppositionalism for its own sake from the conservative wing because a kind of positive feedback loop has existed that exacerbated the inherent paranoid tendencies extant on the right for ages. 

So, when Romney (or John McCain or Liz Cheney) buck that trend, even marginally, they earn some liberal admiration--and the enmity of their party. I can't like Mitt Romney more than a true MAGA might hate him for being insufficiently loyal. 

Being physically afraid of one's base is a horrific thought. There's something to be said too, for what one might have to lose of oneself to be the person who doesn't have to be afraid of or in opposition to that mass of armed maniacs. It seems that it requires a kind of moral lobotomy. When a Mitt Romney looks with disdain on the younger characters of this scene, the J. D. Vance's and Josh Hawley's, maybe it's with some recognition and rue:

It isn't worth it.