The Republican Party Believes in Nothing

The Dude’s Nihilist antagonists, played by (l-r) Flea, Torsten Voges and Peter Stormare, in a still frame from the Joel and Ethan Coen film The Big Lebowski (Lebowski Wiki)

“They weren’t Nazis, Walter,” said The Dude in a memorable scene from the Coen Brothers cult film The Big Lebowski. “They said they were nihilists.”

“Fuck me,” Walter answered after a sobering moment. “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.”

In the runup to the 2016 Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign approached the party’s Platform Committee to strike draft foreign policy language regarding Vladimir Putin’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and subsequent occupation of eastern Ukraine. Platform Committee member Diana Denman had originally included language for supporting Ukraine with “lethal defensive weapons” but was compelled by the Trump camp to soften the language to “appropriate assistance.”

Four years later, the incumbent Trump White House showed much less interest in the party platform during the runup to the 2020 Republican National Convention. The Republican National Committee’s (RNC) Executive Committee had canceled its Platform Committee meeting altogether and initially voted to simply adopt the 2016 party platform. Ultimately, the RNC adopted a resolution stating that the party would not adopt a new platform because “it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the…