Republican officials’ timidity with regard to the outrages that the Democratic Party is committing against the American people under the Biden Administration dampens the American people’s urge to resist. Their default of leadership helps the Democrats’ seizure of long-term oligarchic power. The people’s deep resentment, however, will follow whoever and whatever ventures offer protection. As ever, leadership falls to whomever actually leads.
Unanimously, Republican officials denounce the Biden Administration’s decision to suspend laws requiring rent payments, while continuing to enforce landlords’ obligations to pay their mortgages. But no official is organizing landlords to band together to withhold their mortgage payments from banks.
Nearly all Republicans decry the government’s collaboration with airlines, schools, and big businesses to establish vaccine passports as conditions to return to normal life. The same goes for mask mandates. All know that public health is an excuse for long-term social control. Yet no one is organizing the majority of Americans who object to this into groups the size of which enable them to stop this power grab.
No Republican official dissents from the vast majority of Americans who are aghast at the opening of our southern border, and at certain Democrats’ assertion that illegal aliens are essentially “Americans” who should have the right to vote. No Republican has suggested that the next Congress and president has the power and obligation to deport each and every one of them.
Countless Americans seethe at being targeted as white supremacists whose every objection to government power is presumptively criminal. But no Republican politician has promised to hold to account any and all officials who so abuse their fellow citizens.
Most Republicans denounce the Biden Administration’s expenditure of trillions of borrowed dollars to further empower themselves, resulting immediately in higher prices for everything, and pricing more and more Americans out of home ownership. Yet nearly half of Senate Republicans voted to approve the $1.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill.
And yet we may be sure that any number of Republicans imagine themselves as candidates for the presidency in 2024. One may ask on what basis senators, who might have used their national standing to organize and lead Americans into collective protective actions but chose not to, will ask for the people’s votes. All will point to statements of theirs that complain about each and every abuse. But joining in the beleaguered Americans’ complaints does nothing to relieve them. Attitude is not the same thing as leadership. That goes for all, from former President Donald Trump to Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).