Conservative warns Republicans are deep in their 'Jonestown phase'

Conservative writer Nick Catoggio tells the Dispatch the fallout in the Texas Republican primary has everything to do with the party’s race down to a lowly cult.

“Regular readers know my theory about why Republican voters are suddenly hellbent on purging incumbents in primaries: They’re in their Jonestown phase,” said Catoggio. “Disappointed in Trump’s economic failures yet psychologically unable to hold him (or themselves) accountable, they’re coping by turning more radically cultish and flogging heretics like [Texas incumbent Sen. John] Cornyn, Thomas Massie, and Bill Cassidy instead. Surely things in America will improve if the president faces even less resistance inside the GOP.”

But “the truth is that Republican voters preferred Paxton because he’s a bad guy,” argues Catoggio. “Trumpism is a depraved anti-morality that treats sociopathy as a political virtue inasmuch as it’s defined by ruthless amoral determination in pursuing one’s interests. The challenger in this race fit that description to a T. The incumbent, a more dignified figure, plainly did not. They liked Paxton because he’s a bad guy, not in spite of it. Which made it baffling that Cornyn chose to campaign on … what a bad guy Paxton is.”

On the last leg of the election, Catoggio says Cornyn was claiming Paxton had “gotten away with so much for so long and not been held accountable for it, but I think he is an embarrassment, his misbehavior. And he’s completely unrepentant. … It’s just emboldened him to the point of recklessness, and now to the point of self-destructiveness, especially with regard to his own family.”

But after all that, on the night of his concession, Cornyn said: “I’ve always supported the Republican ticket, and I intend to do so again in this general election.”

“He intends to support a ticket led by someone he spent the last year rightly calling a scumbag?” Catoggio said. “… Some might find John Cornyn’s affirmation of partisan devotion amid intense humiliation by his party affecting. I find it pitiful.”

Cornyn “spent the entire primary insisting that good character should matter, only to immediately decide that it shouldn’t if there’s a Democrat on the other side of the ballot,” said Catoggio. “That’s 10 years of Republican politics in one soundbite.”

So, Republicans are now on their way to the November election with Paxton, but Catoggio said Trump at least has charisma, while Paxton “gets you all of the same moral downside with none of the retail upside. He’d be a horrendous advertisement for the party in the Senate, especially once the scandals begin piling up.”

Catoggio said he can also “all but guarantee that Paxton, Trump, and Texas’ Republican government will connive to try to overturn the result” if Democratic candidate James Talarico ends up winning a tight race, but that’s what Republican voters “are signing up to enable by turning out for Paxton this fall — another wrenching, country-destroying, self-serving ‘rigged election’ fairy tale.”

“There is no bottom to this candidacy or to this party, and it’s long past time for well-meaning people to stop pretending otherwise, even if John Cornyn can’t,” said Catoggio. “You’re on a ship of Theseus. The lifeboat is waiting.”

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