Dinesh D’Souza: What’s Up with the GOP?

September 19, 2024 by Dinesh D'Souza

What’s up with the GOP?

Even after two attempted assassinations, the GOP is largely silent.

And in general the leaders of the Republican Party have been silent through all the Trump criminal cases.

They were only minimally helpful during the two Trump impeachments.

They have not merely watched with indifference, they have in some cases actively abetted the political targeting and prosecution of Trump and Trump supporters.

Why else would the House GOP provide funding for a new and improved FBI headquarters?

The problem isn’t confined to the GOP leadership. Even rank-and-file Republicans, many of them, have been shockingly mute and lethargic in responding to the Left’s relentless attacks on Trump, from character assassination to legal assassination to, now, two actual assassination attempts.  

I’m not talking about the MAGA Republicans, but about traditional and establishment GOP types—a significant minority of the party.  

What accounts for this bizarre disengagement, when the GOP itself has a vital interest in Trump’s survival and Trump’s success in the 2024 election?

I’ll answer this question in a roundabout way by posing another: What gives the Left and the Democrats the chutzpah to do what they are doing?

What makes them think they can get away with squelching our free speech, restricting our freedom of assembly, charging us with bogus crimes, mobilizing the weaponry of the Justice Department against us, seeking to lock up our party nominee, and in general running roughshod over our basic constitutional rights and terrorizing us in the manner of a police state?

My answer to this question can be given in a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar where Cassius says regarding Caesar.

He would not be a wolf

But that he sees the Romans are but sheep.

In other words, Caesar becomes so tyrannical only because he knows that the Romans are willing to be subjected to tyranny.

And here’s how this point applies to our situation.  We’re all familiar with the phrase, “Critical Race Theory.”

Let’s ignore the race part and focus just on the word critical.  It means analytical.  It refers to the first thing you do, which is to carefully observe and study your adversary.

This is what the Left and the Democrats have been doing.  They have been studying us.  And what have they concluded?

That we—the patriots and conservatives and Republicans and Christians—are in general the party of the namby-pambies.

From their point of view—and truth be told, from ours also—we are the party of live and let live, of civility and good manners, of giving our opponents the benefit of the doubt,  of rising above their underhanded tactics and refusing to follow suit, of standing on high principle, of turning the other cheek.

In short, we are precisely the invertebrate wimps that the other side was hoping for.  The party of pusillanimity.

 Our pusillanimity encourages their aggression.  They say to themselves, why don’t we go ahead and try to stack the Supreme Court?

It doesn’t matter if we fail, because we know the other side is too “principled” to do the same.

They are congenitally wedded to having nine justices on the Court.  So even if we fail, we’ll come back and try again.

And in a similar vein, why don’t we censor and stigmatize and ostracize them?  They don’t have the power to do the same to us, and even if they did, they wouldn’t do it.

Come to think of it, let’s also deploy the institutions of the state—the FBI, CIA, the NSA, the IRS, the DOJ, DHS, even the military—against them.

Again, they would never dream of doing the same to us, even if they were in power and in a position to do so.

They wouldn’t lower themselves to our standards—at least that’s how those idiots see it—which means that we can continue to torment them with impunity.  Who wouldn’t want to take on such losers?

The Left and the Democrats are in the position of the schoolyard bully who has complete sway over his terrified victims.

And the GOP establishment are the terrified ones.  They are terrified of the Democrats.

They are terrified of the media.  They are terrified of being called “election deniers” and “insurrectionists.”

Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson live in fear that if the media were to target them and mercilessly assail them, they would be so badly wounded that their own side would bury them.

Consequently the GOP establishment operates as if its only viable strategy is to appease the bully, even though they know, deep down, that bullies can never be appeased, and any appeasement is only short lived, and in the end the bully gets so strong that he doesn’t even need their appeasement.

That’s when he throws them all into the ditch, enjoying himself immensely as he does it.  Tyranny, let’s not forget, is immensely enjoyable to tyrants.

But here comes  Trump who is himself—in his own way—a bully.  Trump doesn’t bully people who are below him, but he is quite capable of bullying other bullies.

He even seems to enjoy it, in his own way.  He likes seeing bullies get their comeuppance.  In a certain way, he has qualities that resemble those of his adversaries.

In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, we see that Coriolanus is a warrior and Aufidius is a warrior and even though they are on opposite sides, there is a kind of kinship between them.

So the Democrats recognize Trump as their foil.  This is easy to understand.

But why don’t the establishment Republicans, and even some rank and file Republicans, who are not capable of taking on the Democrats themselves, see that Trump is both willing and able to do it?

Why don’t they get behind him if he is ready to lead the fight?

I believe the answer is that not only are many of these people cowards, but they have figured out a way to turn cowardliness itself into a virtue.

In other words, to their great sin of cowardice they have added the sin of self-delusion.  They are cowards who think they are models of character and rectitude.

The philosopher  Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “So much kindness, so much weakness do I see.  Round, fair and considerate are they to one another, as grains of sand are round, fair and considerate to grains of sand.

 At bottom, they want a single thing most of all: that no one hurt them. Thus they try to please and gratify everybody. That, however, is cowardice, even if it be called virtue.

But they lack fists: their fingers do not know how to creep behind fists.

Virtue for them is that which makes modest and tame: with that they have turned the wolf a dog, and man himself into man’s best domestic animal.”

What is Nietzsche saying here? He’s saying that cowards don’t like to admit to themselves that they are cowardly.

They don’t want to look in the mirror.  And so they figure out a way to convert their cowardice into virtue, their weakness into an imaginary form of strength.

They say that they refuse to fight because they are too good to fight.

They are too noble to lower themselves to take on the bully.

They are better than the bully, and the bullies tactics are morally objectionable to them.  Even if the bully smashes them in the face, they will not gang up on the bully and kick him in the shins.

They will not teach the bully the only kind of lesson that would convince the bully to stop being a bully.

And since they know that Trump is willing to deal with the bully in the only manner that bullies recognize, they deplore Trump and accuse him of being the worst kind of bully himself.

They ask, “Why can’t you fight those bullies without using bullying tactics yourselves? Why can’t you fight virtuously like we do?”

This of course is not intended as a serious argument; rather, as Nietzsche points out, it is a salve for their sick consciences.

These weak and pathetic creatures can only live with themselves by convincing themselves that their groveling nature is indeed the greatest moral virtue of all.

They are in the mode of the craven deserter who tells himself that true courage is running away from the battlefield.

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This article is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book Vindicating Trump