Country Before Partisanship

The American experiment in democracy, unlike our Indian understanding of ‘internal democracy’ does not entail blind-adherence to party leadership or their deification. Questioning one’s own leaders and their position, is the norm.

Often the internal party primaries to select the respective candidate before the formal Presidential face-off is more keenly contested and debated. Those candidates who do not make the final cut do not suddenly find a bolting-purpose, cause, or ‘ticket’ (as it happens here) in their ideological rivals.

Whatever be the individual differences, most candidates from the intra-party fray, ultimately agree to subscribe and support the winning candidate’s nomination, or at worst, stay out of the final electoral discourse. But jumping political ‘ships’ isn’t the norm.

Usually, Republicans stay Republicans, just as Democrats support Democrat candidature, even if their favoured and specific representative isn’t the one going to the hustings.

But Donald Trump is a rare phenomenon that has challenged the ‘normalcy’ of American partisanship. For starters, he has been ideologically unanchored and uncommitted, right throughout – a practitioner of opportunities for self-aggrandisement, self-valorising and self-promotion, nonpareil.

He signed up for the Republican Party in 1987, Reform Party in 1999, Democratic Party in 2001, Republican Party again in 2009, became unaffiliated in 2011, and then back to the Republican Party in 2012! Yet incredulously, the fabled ‘American Dream’ saw the quintessential party-hopper to become the 45th President of the United States of America.

True to his fickle and unpredictable history, he remained unhinged, disloyal and untrustworthy to his ‘own’ (read, Republican values, let alone the proverbial ‘others’) during his Presidency.

The party that once boasted of the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan suddenly had to deal with sensibilities that were suddenly alien to it – so alien that even the so-called rivals in Democrat rank seemed more preferable to Donald Trump.

Admittedly, his appeal was deep amongst the vast expanse of subliminal racists, bitter haters, and ultraconservatives who would naturally see a ‘champion’ of these amoralities, in Donald Trump.

Yet the lifelong Republicans endured his ascendancy initially, hoping that either he would improve himself, or the nightmare to defend him out of sheer partisanship, would end – sadly neither happened, he only got worse and is now back as the official Republican candidate for the 47th President of the United States.

Perhaps the first major Republican figure to rebel openly against the gradual reneging of Republican values with Donald Trump in charge, was the late Senator and former combatant, John McCain. Even when the majority of co-Republicans were still shy of publicly criticising Trump’s incorrigible ways – McCain had stood up to be counted.

McCain was a proud, fierce, and committed Republican (who never jumped ships) who could still demonstrate the magnanimity, decency, and willingness to find common ground across the political aisle, to honour a cause greater than himself. Trump never understood such values and maturity, as for him, it was always and only about himself.

Even in his death, John McCain sent out a deep symbolic message when he pre-planned the invite list to his funeral (as he was dying of brain cancer) to include lifelong rivals like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W Bush, Joe Biden etc., to reflect on a person that many of them had vehemently disagreed with, but still revered and acknowledged as an all-American Hero, partisanship aside.

Importantly, John McCain had disavowed and spurned Donald Trump the individual, not his Republican Party, or its values. He died a Republican.

While the McCain family remained distant from Donald Trump and everything that he was seeking to change in the Republican ‘ways’ – they remained Republicans even though they had endorsed Joe Biden in the previous Presidential race.

John McCain’s daughter Meghan sought to explain the conundrum by explaining “I’m a lifelong, generational conservative,”. But now with Donald Trump’s re-endorsement as Republican Party candidate, they too have had enough and Meghan’s brother and military veteran, Jimmy McCain, has sought to register as a Democrat to support Kamala Harris candidature.

Old-time and lifelong Republican hawks like the former Vice President Dick Cheney have joined the chorus and have openly acknowledged, “never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and goaded his fellow dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution”.

Expectedly, Donald Trump reacted in the way, as only he knows, with patent inelegance and profanity by calling Dick Cheney, “an irrelevant RINO” i.e., Republican in name only.

But the thought of safeguarding the constitution by rising above partisanship, that was once seeded by the likes of John McCain (unsuccessfully then) is now fructifying into a virtual movement. Recently, more than 200 Republicans who had previously worked for Republican luminaries like the former President George W. Bush, the late Senator John McCain, Senator Mitt Romney, have openly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the 47th POTUS.

This follows another list of 150 anti-Trump staffers from Republican offices. Tellingly, even Donald Trump’s own former Vice President, Mike Pence, has refused to endorse his former boss, Donald Trump. Many like the Republican Bush family are embarrassed to criticise Trump publicly, but they have noticeably refused to participate in the Republican National Convention, this year. Counterintuitively and unbelievably, a virtual ‘Republicans for Kamala Harris’ looms large, surreally.

The letter by one disgruntled Republican group typifies the mood, “for the first time, jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November.”

They go on to accept the issue of partisan concern, “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.” The message is then made abundantly clear by insisting that they are going to, “put the country far before party”.

The tide seems to be turning in Kamala Harris’s favour and the tailwind afforded by diehard Republicans themselves will be invaluable as her campaign gains momentum.

Importantly, the ‘questioning’ and therefore genuinely concerned and loyal Republicans are asking themselves if indeed their official candidate i.e., Donald Trump, does personify their ideological values or if he is driving it extreme hard-right into unrecognisable, uncomfortable and bigoted corners?

They are not disavowing from their ideological commitment, but only putting the country before blind adherence to partisan candidature. It is a great lesson for democracies like ours with multiple national and regional parties that have taken extremist positions (to the far left or right) and remain supremely insulated from ‘internal democracy’, or questioning from within, let alone others.

Lt. General Bhopinder Singh is the former Lieutenant Governor of The Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Pondicherry and an Indian Army officer who was awarded the PVSM. Views are the writer’s own.