Daily Bread for 8.5.19

Good morning.

Today is the one thousandth day.

Downtown Whitewater, Inc. meets at 5 PM.

On this day in 1825, a great council of native Americans and settlers begins at Prairie du Chien.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Reed Galen writes Republicans: The Whigs of the 21st Century:

The Whigs’ support for the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act precipitated their near-electoral destruction in the first half of that decade. The party’s leaders, split between North and South, publicly projected an ambivalence about the future of slavery in the United States. While slavery served as the lever around which the Whigs would spin into oblivion, it was their moral failure regarding so odious an institution to so many Americans that ultimately killed them off.

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Like the Whigs of old, Donald Trump’s GOP is staring at a similar fate should it continue on this path. Many evangelical Christians, seeing themselves as arbiters of moral righteousness, tout the president as the tonic to so many of the country’s problems. The reality is, however, that the party’s outward failures are distinctly grounded in a lack of moral compass, ugly politics and nonexistent policy; for which the electoral consequences have only just begun.

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Regarding how they see the world, their personal priorities, what they believe to be the most pressing issues facing the country, the GOP is out of step with a large and growing cohort. On the other hand, the older voters that Republicans have long relied on — white, more conservative, more working class — will represent a plurality of registered voters and their impact will drop accordingly.

Jennifer Rubin writes First, the GOP shrinks. Next it should get crushed:

Not coincidentally, Republicans in the Trump era are losing House seats (more than 40 in 2018), governorships (down a net 6 in 2018) and state legislatures. (“Six chambers changed partisan control in the 2018 elections. Democrats captured the Colorado State Senate, Maine State Senate, Minnesota House of Representatives, New Hampshire House of Representatives, New Hampshire State Senate, and New York State Senate. . . . In 2018, 322 incumbents, including 49 Democrats and 253 Republicans, were defeated in the general elections.”)

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Shouting into the wind brings us no closer to a Trump-free GOP or a Trump-free White House. The only plausible path at this point is to crush the Republican Party so resoundingly at every level that it is forced to abandon Trumpism, recruit an entirely different generation of leadership and devise an agenda that is not based on right-wing nationalism. Helping Democrats achieve that end should be the goal of all decent Americans — including Republicans who want one day to be able to vote in good faith for a Republican Party true to the tradition of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.

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