The Neville Chamberlain Moment

The name Neville Chamberlain is associated with the word appeasement.  Chamberlain was the Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1937-40.  The appeasement refers to Britain's and France's reaction to the German annexation of the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia.  This was allowed to happen without resistance, in an effort to maintain peace.  World War I was a distinct memory and avoiding war was the motivation for appeasement.

Yet Chamberlain was still Prime Minister in 1939, when Germany annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia.  That move made Chamberlain change his tact.  Britain declared war on Germany, a necessary reaction to this uncontained aggression.  This escalated what was a regional conflict into World War II.  Clearly Chamberlain didn't want war.  But there was no viable alternative.

With the very odd casting of Jeff Flake in a leadership role, Republicans as a whole in Congress are now having their Neville Chamberlain moment.  This is not just their embrace of Donald Trump.  It is a longer trajectory thing where the Republicans have practiced a scorched earth approach to legislation - there wasn't a single Republican vote for Obamacare, even though it was modeled on a Republican approach to health care.  The ultimate scorched earth tactic was not taking up the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

As I write this, I don't know what will happen to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, but I suspect that Republicans in Congress have been surprised how difficult the process has been.  It should be a wake up call to them that they need to change their ways. How many other Republicans in Congress share Flake's view that the tribalism needs to end, I don't know.  Those that do share the view need to be much more forthcoming about it.

At present, there is a sense that the outcome of the November election still hangs in the balance.  Remaining silent on both Trump and tribalism thus is a kind of hedge.  As a very large number of Republicans are not running for reelection, notably Speaker Paul Ryan, it seems clear that the hedge approach takes its emotional toll, just as appeasement must have done for Neville Chamberlain.

While previously I had thought that some of these Republicans might speak out during the lame duck session of Congress, I now believe that the various events surrounding the Kavanaugh nomination have triggered an urgent need for Republicans to push back against their own scorched earth approach.  That needs to happen now.

In all likelihood, if that did happen, the Democrats would make large electoral gains this November and the Republicans would return to minority party status, but we would avoid the Civil War that seems increasingly inevitable.  The Democrats offer their own sort of resistance, of course.  But the Democrats can't prevent that Civil War on their own.