Is It Time For Republican Leaders To Realign With Reality?

3 years ago Zachary Shahan
Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

There is no doubt about it — we are living in concerning times when it comes to US democracy. Many of our historical norms, including some that extend back to the founding fathers, have been shattered under Donald Trump. Many laws have been broken under the claim, essentially, that the president is above the law — something that most would not agree with (since we have a president, not a king), but one which the US Attorney General and others behind him made the key matter of the Mueller investigation.

At the moment, we are genuinely getting into spooky territory. We will hopefully skate across thin ice, not collapse into freezing water, but what is absolutely clear is that Donald Trump and his most loyal rebels (aka traitors) are following the playbook that every authoritarian dictator has followed on his rise to undemocratic power. Trump just lost an election, and not by a small margin. At the moment, Biden is 20 electoral votes above the 270 threshold to win, and he is going to end up at 306 once they finalize Georgia (there’s no doubt about this to anyone paying attention to reality). Incidentally, that’s also the electoral vote total Trump got 4 years ago, and by this point in time in 2016, Hillary Clinton had already conceded days earlier and Trump and Pence had been welcomed into the White House to begin the transition.

This was not a close election.

Of course, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by more than 3 million votes in 2016 and he is currently down by more than 5 million in this election. Although that technically doesn’t matter, it does show that Trump doesn’t even have an ideological reason to say he won and he is significantly down from 2016, an election he essentially won by fewer than 100,000 votes in a few key swing states.

At most, a recount may result in a few hundred votes going in the opposite direction. Trump isn’t anywhere close to that in any of the states he’s down in, let alone in several of them (which is what he’d need in order to get to 270). Ballots are still being processed (because it takes days to process more than 150 million ballots), but Trump is currently down by:

  • >12,000 in Georgia
  • >12,000 in Arizona
  • >20,000 in Wisconsin
  • ~50,000 in Pennsylvania (expected to be much higher by the time all ballots are processed)
  • >66,000 in Nevada
  • >150,000 in Michigan

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1326345253360635904

Nonetheless, almost no Republicans in Congress have publicly acknowledged that Joe Biden won the election. Former President George W. Bush has, former presidential nominee Mitt Romney has, and a few members of Congress have, but the vast majority of Republican politicians will not concede that Biden won. This is an absurdity that we have never seen before, but it’s at the tail end of years upon years of complete lies. It follows lies about the economy, lies about Obama, lies about Hillary Clinton, lies about Joe Biden, lies about supposed socialism coming to eat your kids, lies about crowd sizes, lies about hurricane paths drawn on a map with a Donald Trump Sharpie, and lies about covid-19. One outgoing Republican Congressman thinks enough is enough and that people should just start telling the truth. Whether that might mean that they someday lose a seat in Congress and have to do other work, so be it — their job is to be public servants working on behalf of Americans, not public liars and professional conspiracy theorists.

Let me be clear — I don’t expect Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) to completely stop spinning and misleading people. To some degree, the act of political persuasion is going to bleed over into misleading statements. It happens, and this world is not a saintly paradise.

However, given that things have gotten so ridiculous, I do think Republicans need to seriously consider the effects of continuous blatant lies year after year. The Republican Party is the only major political party in the world that denies clear climate science. The party has played with and pushed voodoo economics for approximately 40 years, leading to the unhappy voters who haven’t perfectly seen through those lies but who were unhappy enough with politicians screwing them to elect Donald Trump (a career con man who, incidentally, has screwed them even more). Many members of the party pushed birtherism nonsense for years, claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, which — again — ushered in the horrendous Trump presidency.

Herman Cain, one of the top candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in the early days of the last round of Republican primaries, has died of of covid-19, after downplaying it like most other Republicans and contracting the coronavirus at a mostly mask-less Trump rally.

There are many other disastrous examples to point out, but the message is clear: ignoring reality has resulted in horrible, horrible outcomes. So, at what point is it more worthwhile for Republican politicians to realign with reality instead of pushing one falsehood after another, one laughable (but influential) conspiracy theory after another?

At what point is their oath to the Constitution and to the American people worth more than scoring a few political points with the most extreme portions of their voting base?

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1326365399571714048

https://twitter.com/pelotonattacker/status/1326294833519063040

https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1326153646191554562

Houston, we have a problem. Is anyone going to stand up for American ideals and start telling the truth about important matters?

Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

CleanTechnica Holiday Wish Book

Holiday Wish Book Cover

Click to download.

Our Latest EVObsession Video

I don't like paywalls. You don't like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it!! So, we've decided to completely nix paywalls here at CleanTechnica. But...
 
Like other media companies, we need reader support! If you support us, please chip in a bit monthly to help our team write, edit, and publish 15 cleantech stories a day!
 
Thank you!
Advertisement
 
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

Zachary Shahan has 7140 posts and counting. See all posts by Zachary Shahan