Alec Baldwin—who serves on the board of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way—has used his platform as an Honorary Resister to talk about why he thinks the Republican Party should have some power to stop the government from doing anything remotely useful.
“I don’t want [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi to run everything either. I want the Democrats to have a smart opposition to keep them on their toes,” Baldwin said in an interview with Howard Stern on Monday.
According to the Hill, Baldwin said he wants to see the party “get back to” a time when it had candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney, who both lost their races against Barack Obama. “I’d like to think that this thing with Trump is a one-off,” he said.
Translation: the sooner the Republicans can get back to their roots in warmongering and destroying the safety net and keeping their racism quiet without a cartoon character at the helm—”smart opposition”—the better. But even that’s wishful thinking: the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party in the Trump era has been a series of capitulations and failures as the right-wingers who run the federal government have launched a full-throated attack on basically anyone who isn’t rich or white.
This is where the party is now, and where it will be for the foreseeable future, until what Trump sold voters in 2016 proves to be a losing strategy. Pretending the Republican Party can be something that it’s not helps no one, nor does pretending that politics isn’t about power and who wins it.
Taking power away from the Republicans is the first step towards undoing the damage they’ve wrought. And as frustrating as Nancy Pelosi can be, the past sixty years have proven that any checks on liberal power that come from the GOP are likely going to be the kind that render government ineffective if not actively harmful.
In related news, Politico reports that top Democrats (including DNC chairman Tom Perez) have been consulting with a group of about 35 Hollywood-affiliated actors, producers, showrunners, and more on how to reframe their messaging and turn out the vote in November and beyond. Can’t wait to see how this turns out.