We know we’re not the only ones who feel guilty for secretly hoping that Donald J. Trump got the Republican nomination. After all, who could have imagined that he might actually win? It wasn’t the racism and misogyny and Muslim-bashing that we thought might derail his candidacy – while he was more obvious about it than his compadres, he was hardly more sincere. Rather, we assumed he was just too buffoonish to be taken seriously, what with his moronic baseball hat, insipid slogans, and seeming inability to complete a sentence without repeating it again, to emphasize the profoundly middle-schoolish nature of his thought. Even in our feverish imaginations, we did not see this coming.
We know we’re not the only ones who hate the idea that the Republicans have co-opted the word “conservative” – have we become so academically illiterate, or the Republicans so good at stealing language, that we’ve forgotten the meaning of the word “conservative?” Is denial of global warming conservative? Or this, from our potential future Vice President, Mike Pence – “Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” Or this from Ted Cruz at the RNC – “We [the GOP] passed the Civil Rights Act, and fought to eliminate Jim Crow laws.” Unless conservatism now means ignoring facts, debunking science, and rewriting history, none of the above has anything to do with the meaning of the word conservative. Indeed, it is hard not to recall the great Helen Hayes line from Anastasia: “Truth serves only a world that lives by it.”
Which brings us to the capital punishment platform of the Republican party: “The constitutionality of the death penalty is firmly settled by its explicit mention in the Fifth Amendment. With the murder rate soaring in our great cities, we condemn the Supreme Court’s erosion of the right of the people to enact capital punishment in their states.” Where to begin?
Well, for starters, while the Fifth Amendment mentions capital punishment, it certainly does not endorse it as a timeless penalty beyond future scrutiny. For 70 years our courts have assessed the constitutionality of punishment by the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,” rather than by the opinions of the Framers, who viewed blacks as three-fifths of a person and women as unfit to vote. But why should the Republicans worry about obscuring the law, when they can simply lie about the facts? Murder rates are not “soaring” – of the 63 jurisdictions surveyed by the Major Cities Chiefs Association in May 2016, 32 showed an increase in homicides, while 27 showed a decrease and four remained the same in a first quarter comparison between 2016 and 2015. This is more of a little bump in the road than a major trend. But even these statistics can be very misleading.
Here are some facts that cannot be controverted. Murder rates across the country are as low as they’ve been in decades; and these rates are occurring at the same time executions and death sentences have plummeted. While no honest statistician would draw the conclusion that the lack of a viable death penalty has caused such declines, only a perniciously dishonest one would advocate capital punishment as a cure for the nonexistent problem of soaring homicide rates.
Finally, the GOP has condemned the Supreme Court’s “erosion of the right of the people to enact capital punishment in their states.” If saying it, or writing it in a platform, only made it so! There’s nothing – other than the good sense of legislatures who think money can be better spent on schools or roads or drug treatment facilities than on a mostly imaginary punishment fraught with error – stopping states from enacting death penalty statutes.
The trend among the states, of course, is in the opposite direction. And regardless of the code words and dog whistles used by Trump and the RNC, our country’s inclination is against racism, misogyny and Muslim-bashing as well. There may be the occasional electoral blip, but this sort of hatred can never prevail for long. Indeed, many true conservatives have rejected the vitriol, just as they have come to understand capital punishment as an anachronistic throw-back to an era long gone.
Now if only we can say the same thing about morons with orange hair wearing really stupid hats.
View from the Atlantic Center 