The Monsters Are Due on Pennsylvania Avenue
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to be the next President and VP of the United States. The election is over, but not to a frighteningly large portion of the country, the monsters are due.. The blame for this ridiculous narrative cannot be solely pinned on Donald Trump, as he is acting perfectly within character. He’s behaving exactly the way we all expected and the way he promised. In 2016, he was the only Republican presidential nominee who refused to back their eventual primary winner, same as he refused to accept that year’s general election results should he lose. Trump hasn’t changed in four years, but the party around him certainly has.
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” aired in 1960 as an episode of the anthology series, The Twilight Zone. Residents of a small town begin to suspect and turn on each other as fear and paranoia mount that one of them is an imposter; an alien invader among them that doesn’t belong. Heavily influenced at the time by the Red Scare that took over America and turned neighbors against each other during the Cold War, it once again serves as an appropriate allegory today, this time, for what is happening within the Republican Party. Conservatives once united, are now turning on their fellow townsfolk suspected of insufficient loyalty to their dear leader. How pathetic it is to see the same politicians and pundits who, in 2016, called Trump a bigoted con artist, amoral pathological liar, and serial philanderer, happily get in line to beg for scraps from his table like the loyal dogs they are. There is no courage of conviction within the GOP and they’ll sacrifice everything (in Ted Cruz’s case, even the respect of both his wife and father) for proximity to power. As was true in that 1960 episode, the real monsters aren’t the ones they fear, but the ones they’ve allowed themselves to become.
The monsters are due.
The Republican party deserves this loss, but it won’t change them. Without a substantive policy platform that speaks to the majority of Americans, the GOP and the right-wing media have embraced grievance politics. Trump is the perfect arbiter of the narrative pushed by right-wing media for over a decade. Snowflakes line the streets demanding the stoppage of ballot counting, or the continuation of it depending on what the talking points call for. The same America that elected Joe Biden also elected Republicans to the House and Senate, but those votes aren’t the ones being disputed. Their criteria for a “legitimate” election is only that they win. As the smoke clears and their coup inevitably fails, they’ll retreat to their safe spaces on Fox News and OANN, where they’ll whine continuously for the next four years and once again pretend to care about deficits and ruling by executive order.
To save their town, Republicans must root out the monsters among them. They must remember the people they were elected to serve and who they should be fighting for. Fear, hatred, and paranoia won’t get them there. Humanity and compassion will. It’s there, deep inside them, but it’s grip is slipping. Catching it before it falls means first letting go of the biggest Monster of them all.