Raphael Warnock's Senate-seat victory over Hershel Walker has its roots in the Republican Party's indulgence of the Very Stable Genius's big-baby reality denial in late 2020 and early 2021. His allies urged rural Georgia voters to boycott the January 5 runoff election pitting Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue against Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Trump himself kept his drool-besotted cult followers agitated with his hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger ("The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated.")
Georgia had been a pretty reliably red state for some time. It still is, to a considerable degree. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger handily won re-election last month. And Warnock is an extreme leftist. But the state's voters wisely backed away from the Trumpist Kool-Aid. I don't envy their options at all.
So the Senate is now 51-49. It didn't have to be this way, but it's what you get when Trump still looms so large in the national psyche.
In Arizona, Kari Lake has taken that page out of the Trumpist playbook. She is still calling her defeat a sham even as all counties in the state have certified the election results. She looks poised to do what she can to burn down any vestige of political good will, just as the VSG is determined to do to the national Republican Party if it dares to veer even slightly from kowtowing to him.
The party is definitely still less than hospitable to actual conservatives - you know, the ones who saw that embracing Trump and what he was unleashing from the summer of 2015 onward. Those who aren't nuts or sycophants never pass up a chance to show that they are cowards.
I'm not impressed by this Forward Party, and my early enthusiasm for Principles First has atrophied a bit.
So I remain politically homeless. But I remain vexed by this question: How hard can it be to articulate the convincing message of real conservatism and keep the batshit nuttery out of it?
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