From the title, you probably think that I am referring to Donald Trump, but I believe that the selling of the collective soul of the Conservative Republican party started decades ago.
In the sixties conservatism was not very popular. Conservatism took hold with the advent of Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, aided by conservative activist Phyllis McAlpin, who opposed everything civil rights. The banner was later carried by Ronald Reagan. I believe that these great Republican leaders were true statesmen who were working for what they truly believed was the best for the country. Like all of us, they were formed by their limited experiences. Television was just becoming a common media for spreading political and social ideas. They did not have internet and videos on every corner. In that period of time people and politicians only knew what they had been directly exposed to, and exposure to the world was limited.
Somewhere between Reagan and Trump, the entire Conservative experiment went wrong. Trump is not an enigma that was imposed onto the Republican Party. He is a product of it. I do not believe that Reagan would have endorsed the outrageous excesses and the gross civil rights violations that have unwittingly been supported by the current Republican Party.
Goldwater proposed that taking care of people from the cradle to the grave would create a population of weaklings. That is often the case. It is true, whether you are referring to providing total financial support, as in chronic welfare recipients, or whether you are referring to wealthy people who cripple their offspring like the Affluenza teen, and the spoiled Donald Trump, who was coddled by his wealthy father so much that he turned out to be a power-hungry, narcissistic, repulsive adolescent, even at the age of seventy.
What Goldwater, and ultimately Reagan’s policy did not address was the fact that deliberately denying the underdog a chance to succeed, simply because of their color, religion, socio-economic status or any other arbitrary prejudice, creates a much greater chance of creating helpless, emotionally scarred, and ineffectual individuals. When prejudice is condoned or allowed by the governing body, it results in millions of lives damaged by poverty, discrimination, and often life-threatening violence. The misery and damage of these policies is self-perpetuating. It is passed down from generation to generation, making the offspring of the emotionally damaged, discouraged, and helpless victims, grow up surrounded by that hopeless message and lack of opportunities. Yes, some do succeed in spite of the policies that oppress. We love to celebrate those stories. But the chance of such success coming from the jaws of discrimination and repression grows less possible in America with each decade.
I grew up in the fifties and sixties when we actually believed that every child could experience the American dream. My father had to quit school in the eighth grade, during the depression, to support his siblings. After decades of hard work, he and his Anglo brothers were able to own their own mom-and-pop mattress business. Back then, middle class families and even laborers like my dad could survive on one income. Now, on minimum wage, families cannot even survive on two incomes. Yes discrimination against minorities, women and anything not Anglo-male was rampant back then, but when America was presented with TV images of black protesters being beaten and hosed down, enough of us rose up to pass civil rights laws. Thousands of people died for freedom and justice, but we were taking steps toward making the American dream available to more citizens.
What happened to that American dream? Now our courts have even turned back the laws that shaped freedom for so many Americans. Now the American dream is even eluding millions of hard-working Anglo males. Students are mired by mountains of student debt that they may never be able to pay. Somehow institutionalized discrimination and the governmental policies that supported it kept gobbling up more and more people. The only people who escaped seemed to be those who had already made their fortunes and/or were not impacted by something like overwhelming medical trauma, or victims of the 2007 Bush recession that foreclosed on millions of homes and fortunes and gave the proceeds to the 1%.
Goldwater and ultimately the Republicans- were FOR limiting government - and AGAINST labor unions, including any regulations of business practices. There is some merit to these concerns. Labor unions (like every institution known to mankind) are not without corruption, and like many institutions, the bigger they get the more likelihood of corruption. (Absolute power corrupts absolutely.) And we have all experienced how ridiculous government regulation and endless paperwork can bog down any endeavor. We all hate it and fight against it.
But lack of oversight has led to over half of the wealth in our country going into the hands of one percent of the wealthiest people >>who have paid for politicians >>who have passed ridiculous tax policies so they can live in luxury, tax free, like Donald Trump, on the backs of the working class. The 1% who has successfully purchased our democracy, has been able to make policy that not only allows bankers and Wall Street to take advantage of the people, but they have allowed businesses, insurance companies and drug companies to run rampant over the citizens who now have to pay for our country’s basic services. People yell when the Mylan drug company charges $600 for an essential life-saving EpiPen that costs $8 to manufacture, but our Republican, hands-off-business –“let’s see who we can take advantage of next” policies, foster such greed and place the burden on the backs of people who need the product to literally survive. The small businesses that the Republicans say they want to protect are being gobbled up by the conglomerates that can steal their inventions and destroy their opportunities.
Some of the more corrupt of the 1%, as well as wealthy special interest groups like the NRA, spend millions of dollars to spread rumors and destroy the reputation of honest politicians and leaders who have the interest of the entire country at heart.
These same freeloaders who set up policies that have crippled America, belly ache about budget deficits; budget deficits that their policies created by letting many big businesses and the 1% live relatively tax free. Most people forget that Republicans were so concerned about retaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, that they agreed to pass ObamaCare. Then they spent billions of tax dollars trying to defeat it. They wasted $24 billion shutting down the government. They spend untold amounts of money trying to make sure that Obama could not succeed, even if it cost millions of lives in the process, so they could then blame Obama for not succeeding and pretend to rescue America from the mess that they themselves created.
The result of all this Conservative Republican effort is Donald Trump. Trump champions all of the corruption that has become the Republican Party.
As public coffers dwindle because of tax cuts for the wealthy, and the common person is so burdened that he resorts to unhealthy and destructive coping methods, like drugs and crime, the Republican answer was to throw everyone in prison. But those tax-dodging freeloaders who created the crisis didn’t consider that jailing everyone would cost a lot of money-- money that they increasingly controlled and were not willing to turn loose of. That put even more burden on the now-more-traumatized and burdened middle class. These wealthy and out-of-touch politicians did not consider that throwing the breadwinner in prison for smoking marijuana, would mean that the pot smoker’s children became homeless and traumatized and that they were creating a new generation of helpless, traumatized people. And the saga goes on.
Wealthy people seem to think that they can build bigger fortresses around themselves to protect themselves and their often-ill-gotten fortunes from the crime that they created by making people so desperate and powerless to achieve the basic necessities, much less the American dream. Unfortunately building such fortresses, managing them, and hiring guards to protect them gets increasingly more complicated since they have to draw from the traumatized, oppressed public for labor. And, like Trump has experienced, the public has more ways to expose corruption than ever before.
Greed leads to despair, not only for its victims but for the greedy people themselves. Trump is a shining example of that.
There is one more victim to this Conservative saga, the image that Conservatives have painted of Christianity. The faith that was founded on charity, honesty, integrity, inclusion, love, hope, and all other virtues, has been painted by Conservatives as one of hate, greed, discrimination, misogyny, bigotry, and everything vile.
I am not sure when and how the unholy marriage happened between Christianity and Republican Conservatives, but it largely responsible for a trend of people leaving the faith because the Public face of Conservative Christianity is that of hate and bigotry. Jesus only condemned one group of people-- the religious bigots of his day. He called them white-washed tombs full of dead men’s bones, Matthew 23:27. In fact, the entire chapter of Matthew 23 describes many of the policies that can be associated with Conservative political policies.
I don’t know if the marriage to Republicans actually started in 1979 with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority which touted an anti-gay, anti-Equal Rights, and anti-abortion agenda, or whether it was influenced by the conservative 700 Club, or James Dobson’s Focus on The Family. I don’t know if these Conservative Christian groups found a champion for their cause in some Republican politicians, or whether Republican politicians realized that they could take advantage of religious bigotry to tap into a huge group of organized voters. My guess is that you could find evidence of all of these possibilities.
The church has never been innocent in promoting hate and bigotry. Religious leaders donned hoods and joined, and even led the Ku Klux Klan, using distorted Biblical references to support their prejudice. Religious leaders fought against women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony, accusing her of trying to destroy the institution of marriage. At that time women were ridiculed or prevented from speaking in public, had no legal right to protect themselves from drunken or abusive husbands, had no say in financial matters of the family, had to turn over any female earnings to their husbands; and married women could not own separate property, enter into contracts, or be joint guardians of their children. When Anthony presented petitions to the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee, its members told her that men were actually the oppressed sex because they did such things as giving women the best seats in carriages.
In 1896 Susan B. Anthony said, “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” I think she was absolutely right. And today we see it at every turn.
I am a dedicated progressive Christian who goes to the Bible, rather than the politicians for my answers, and every time I hear Conservative rhetoric, it feels like someone has just cursed my mother. It is time that Christians throw out the money changers, those who would use the church of Jesus to promote their own un-Christian prejudices. Trump may have paved the way to do just that.