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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Voting has already started, and the election has begun with a bang [1]
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Date: 2022-10-19
And it’s not “the media.”
Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, an industry of rationalization and justification has thrived. The theme is clear: Look what you made us do. The argument is simple: Democratic unfairness and media bias radicalized Republicans to such an extent that they turned to Trump in understandable outrage. Republicans had been bullied, so they turned to a bully of their own.
No aspect of that theory has been more enduring than what I’ll call the Mitt Romney martyr thesis. The Republicans nominated a good and decent man—so the argument goes—and the Democrats and the media savaged him. Republicans respected norms, Democrats did not, and now those same Democrats have the gall to savage the GOP for Trump?
I happen to agree that there has been, in fact, a Mitt Romney radicalization process. But it is quite the opposite of what this narrative suggests. It isn’t rooted in Republican anger on behalf of Romney but in Republican anger against Romney, and over time that anger has grown to be not just against Romney the man but also against the values he represents.
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