They were all there, hovering in the same mist from which Donald Trump emerged to the rousing music of Queen’s “We are the Champions,” used, in classic Trump fashion, without the permission of its owners.
There was Freddy Kreuger, Chuckie, Jack with his ax, an undead Osama, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Mao, Pol Pot, Willie Horton and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. They embodied the theme of the Republican National Convention, which is “Be Afraid, Be Very, Very Afraid.”
That, too, is the theme of the party platform Republicans adopted Monday. Be afraid of gays, Muslims, minorities, immigrants, frivolous litigation, liberal judges, big government, unwalled borders, impending national bankruptcy, schools without religion, gun control, the EPA, Obamacare, a reliance on outdated nuclear weapons and above all things, Hillary Clinton.
The platform, created with plenty of input from the nation’s most fervent conservatives but little from Trump, won cheers from the hard right for its ideological purity and from Democrats for making their job easier.
Four years after the party resolved to become more inclusive and reach out to the nation’s growing Hispanic population, the platform shrinks the party.
It is a platform that in its harsh stance on immigration excludes and demonizes immigrants. It is a platform that in its pledge to limit abortion even in cases of rape and incest alienates women. It is a platform that in its repudiation of gay rights and gay marriage ignores public sentiment and offends a youth that has become more and more color and gender blind.
Moderate Republicans, to the extent there are any left, and those with foresight rue the platform’s narrow-minded extremism and pursuit of the past.
“Has a dead horse been beaten enough yet?” asked Annie Dickerson, a committee member from New York, said of the platform’s repeated gay-bashing.
In what may be the first reference to bathrooms in political platform history, the document decries the use of the Title IX education act to define sexual discrimination in a way that allows transgender students to use the bathroom of their chosen identity.
The party platform supports the right of parents to ignore scientific evidence and force their minor children to be subjected to so-called conversion therapy, which treats homosexuality as a disease that can be cured with harsh measures.
The platform not only fails to mention climate change, which the Pentagon has identified as the nation’s biggest security threat, but it calls for the burning of more coal and far greater exploitation of the nation’s natural resources.
Republicans want control of federal lands and environmental regulations turned over to the states. They want a return to Bible – but not Koran – reading in public schools, a ban on women in combat, strict limits on gun control and a ban on federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
It’s clear that social hyper-conservatives in the party dictated the 2016 platform and Trump, whose positions historically have differed in many respects, decided to acquiesce rather than battle.
He is unlikely, should he become president, to feel the least bit bound by the platform of a party he adopted for convenience and hijacked – and that’s a good thing for the nation.
It is not, or would not be, a good thing for the Republican Party, an organization that has lost all cohesiveness and thus all meaning.