The GOP’s closing of ranks around Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, following reports that the former football player paid for a girlfriend to abort their child and threatened violence against his family, deserves as much attention and explication as the media and the public at large can muster. As others have pointed out, this is not just a case of weapons-grade hypocrisy, coming as it does mere months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the Republican Party dead-set on banning abortion not just in states under its control, but across the entire nation. For a party that claims abortion is murder, the fact that basically every elected Republican official who’s weighed in still supports Walker should hit the voting public with the force of revelation: the GOP’s opposition to abortion is the ultimate long con, rooted not on its supposed claims about the preciousness of microscopic life, but in a determined and repugnant endgame of bringing women’s bodies completely under the control of men.
Indeed, as The Editorial Board’s John Stoehr points out, Republican voters appear to actually welcome and thrill at the fact that Walker has engaged in the very behavior the party supposedly condemned. Stoehr writes, “The scandal tells them that he’s just like them, to wit: standing for a political, legal and moral order that protects us but punishes them. There may be no better way to show group loyalty than by attacking abortion while brushing off one’s history with it.” In other words, far more important than Walker’s hypocrisy is his willingness to engage in behavior for which he simultaneously seeks to punish others. It is an expression of pure power and domination by males, who when it serves their interest are free to encourage behavior (abortion) which they’d otherwise claim is immoral and illegal when chosen independently by a female. And it is equally an expression of GOP power to assert that the law does not apply to upstanding members of the Republican Party.
The way that the GOP has seamlessly absorbed the Walker scandals, and has even strengthened its bonds with the candidate in their wake, should be a wake-up call to the American majority that this far-right party has in its crosshairs. Walker may be a senate candidate for Georgia, but the repercussions of the Republican bad faith that’s on such glaring display should be nationalized. There is no true morality on the right, no capacity to concede disqualifying behavior by candidates so long as they’ve been anointed by Donald Trump. As columnist Will Bunch observes, there is only an obsessive vision with keeping white males at the top of a fundamentally immoral and increasingly discredited racial and gender hierarchy. The Republican Party’s lockstep support of a candidate who defies the party’s most sacred policy positions, but reveals the party’s true nature and intentions, should be seized by Democrats and other defenders of democracy to advance a public discussion of the sordid, misogynistic, and undemocratic nature of the contemporary GOP.