Dig deep enough in Webster's dictionary under the word "rank" and you come to the sense that we often apply to dirty socks or rotting garbage.
We talk a lot about political parties as organizations with leadership structure and policy goals, but the vast majority of party members -- the massive base of the pyramid that gives them strength, are just ordinary citizens who have chosen a brand and remain unshakably loyal to it. We let analysts absolve the masses of responsibility by discussing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the party's leaders and prominent members.
There is one political party in this country, and one unstable coalition of opposition groups that sometimes manages to come together as the other party. Maybe that was less true around the middle of the twentieth century, but I had just arrived and was more concerned with the basics of learning to be human. I can say that special interests like minorities, women, and labor, presented themselves to both parties and shifted as seemed best to advance their causes. As the party leadership evolved, these minority positions gravitated to the Democrats. However, as Clarence Thomas pointed out in his supreme court confirmation hearings, and women, labor unions, and gays voting Republican have continued to demonstrate, these are not monolithic blocs ready made to plug into the party that embraces them completely.
The power of any party comes from the rank and file voters who mass in sufficient numbers to push the marker of their chosen champion across the finish line first. "Overperforming surprisingly well" doesn't mean shit if you don't get into office. The winners won't pay attention to the issues that helped you almost beat them. They'll just revel in victory. Maybe their strategists will take note of tweaks they can add to the rhetoric, but it won't change their essential aims.
The faithful members of any party might be completely uninformed about the actual issues facing the country, or even their locality. Government is complicated and boring. Democracy fails because so few people have time or brain space to coordinate all the variables or even collect the information necessary to know a fraction of what those variables are, while also contributing to the economy through some kind of employment. Committed researchers themselves are fully occupied figuring things out and distilling their findings into some understandable form to communicate. Anyone who can blurt some quick oversimplification can take control of the story to advance a political agenda.
Humans look at their lives on a short horizon. Through recorded history we can look at a century, two centuries, five centuries, connecting dots and charting trends, but almost none of us get to live for one complete century, and the few who do might not have full use of their faculties for their last years of pulse and respiration. We look at the monthly bills, the weekly grocery and fuel costs, the growth of children and grandchildren one school year at a time. We go through school, then emerge into working adulthood. Ten years seems like a long time until you've racked up a number of decades that startles you.
At this point, Republican leadership is undeniably odious. The bloated vulgarian occupying the White House with the blessing of the right wing majority on the Supreme Court and the unswerving devotion of the Republican congressional leadership still only got there because voters put him there. His grotesque lifestyle and abysmal architectural sense would not have been inflicted on public spaces all over the District of Columbia if millions of voters hadn't decided that he should be there.
To the rank and file voter, the grotesque lifestyle and architectural sense don't matter. What matters to the rank and file is household expenses and team spirit.
Republican team spirit is predominantly mean-spirited. Who lines up to vote in favor of racism as free speech? Who lines up to vote in favor of making certain health procedures for women illegal? It's a rare individual who goes to both law school and med school and gets licensed to practice both simultaneously. Rarer still is such an individual in elected office. Who lines up to vote in favor of religious law applied to all citizens, as long as it's the right brand of religion? Who cops a moral stance and then champions cruelty to immigrants and refugees? Who openly states that they'll take quite a bit of pain in their own lives just for inflicting pain on their perceived social and political opponents? A really rank rank and file. I mean rotting corpses on a pile of shit rank.
If Democrats were really the antidote to this, they would have worked their magic before this. There's no magic in a vote for Democrats. Texas Paul has put out the call for independents to join up officially and swell the ranks of the Democratic Party. He acknowledges that they aren't perfect, but they're closer to perfectible. They're at least interested in evolving. Their detractors among the perennially disaffected leftists will sneer, but the perennially disaffected leftists are as much of a drag as the perennially fascistic far right. You're not going to get rid of our two-party system, in the next week, so hold your nose and vote for Democrats. Or maybe do it with some semblance of enthusiasm.
Trump won in 2016 because millions of voters embraced his caustic vulgarity as "refreshingly honest." In other words, they were just as vulgar and caustic and were thrilled to have someone famous celebrate those qualities. Yeah, that's the guy we want representing our country on the world stage! That's the guy we want running things domestically. The first time around they can be forgiven for the mistake of believing that a government should be run like a business. That bullshit gets shoved at us constantly.
Trump lost in 2020 because a compound of factors made just enough people determined to vote against him. Significantly, the dissatisfaction only led to a paper-thin Democratic margin in the senate, which was largely sabotaged by Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema. Even so, the Biden administration did an amazing job of digging us out of the hole created by Trump's incompetence and the global pandemic that had damaged the economy in every country that has one. The public could not have been less impressed. And Trump came roaring back.
Republican office holders could have joined with the Democrats to impeach and convict Trump, assuring that he would be prosecuted without delay for his crimes. The media said that those leaders were afraid of Trump, but why should they be? They were afraid of their own rank and file. Rank, rank, rank rank and file, still in thrall to the avatar of their worst impulses.
I've heard unsubstantiated tales of Republicans who actually voted against the party in each of the elections of the Trump era, but I have no solid statistics. We got that secret ballot in this country, so how can you know for sure? Mostly you have self-reporting. But if you were going to be a traitor to a party that sends Christmas pictures of the family arsenal and considers the murder of schoolchildren to be a regrettable but necessary price to pay for the freedom to carry deadly weapons everywhere, would you want to tell some loudmouth pollster or reporter about it?
Firebrands on the right and the left like to cite the principle that "when the government fears the people there is liberty," but when the government fears the people what you actually get is bad government. The rest of the line says, "When the people fear the government there is tyranny." Nice oversimplification. Who are "the people" exactly when women don't have full autonomy, systemic racism still afflicts public and private sectors alike, and a poorly trained, undisciplined legion of armed thugs is snatching people off the streets and making them disappear, sometimes permanently?
The Republicans fear their own voters. They can't control the monster they created. They're also beholden to the rich donors who don't give a crap about them personally and equally don't give a crap about the problems of the ordinary rabble, natural born or recently arrived.
It would be nice, and maybe it actually will be nice, to see the whole squirming tangle ejected from the seats of power to writhe in a rank mass on the ground below because it couldn't purge itself of the spite that it had cultivated for so long. Maybe a little time to think in the fresh air will dispel the miasma. Or maybe we just watch it dissolve into slimy goo and seep into the mud. Either way, they are not really the majority. Something has to break the spell that keeps the non-rank, non-file from joining with the putrid throng that makes up the basest of the base.
