In this (ridiculously early) run-up to the 2016 presidential election, many of the declared candidates in the GOP are either (a) saying things that are scarcely believable to most citizens, or (b) trying to wiggle out of publicly disagreeing with said scarcely believable things, because your "base" agrees with them. Even though what they are saying is highly offensive. Even though what they say is factually challenged. Even though their comments play directly to the basest of human instincts, including fear, hatred, and anti-intellectualism.
Do you find yourselves wondering why this is happening? Why the Republican presidential candidates are starting to look less like a clown car and more like a clown convention? When you have to think long and hard about whether you dare to speak out against the worst statements by candidates? Follow me below the orange tin foil hat to read more.
Well, I can tell you why it's happening. You did this. This is your responsibility. You own this mess. And you have to live with it.
Certainly the pandering to the most extreme elements on the right has been going on for some time. And there have long been extremists who were embraced by some, but ignored by the mainstream candidates. There was at the very least some recognition that a candidate doesn't get elected to the Oval Office by being at the far, extreme fringe of one's party's positions. I am, I'm afraid, old enough to remember the John Birch Society (now risen again as the Tea Party--same show, same funders, different generation). While the JBS made some inroads in their heyday, they were never seriously seen as the real grown-ups in the room: most people recognized that they were too extreme for the mainstream and thus they were dismissed.
Today the Tea Party is discussed as though they were one of the major parties, capable of fielding and nominating a viable candidate for the White House. Whole industries have grown up around this extreme wing of the GOP (Fox "News," anyone?) and plenty of white men have gotten rich exploiting this tolerance of fringe ideas (Rush Limbaugh, for one). Primary candidates pander as hard as they can, trotting out offensive comparisons between our sitting President and slavery, the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, etc.
Why is this happening? Because you, the GOP leadership, made a deal when the U.S. elected a black man to be President. You made a decision that you would do anything at all to keep that President from enacting anything that resembled progress on his promises. You pledged to block, obstruct, overturn, talk trash about, and in every way possible do your best to demonize President Obama and pretty soon, all other Democrats as well.
Along the way, over the past seven or so years, you have managed to:
~ Ignore science, thereby allowing you to declare that climate change is not real, and not coincidentally dissing all scientists;
~ Compare the acquisition of healthcare to the Holocaust and to slavery, convincing many Americans that they are better off without it;
~ Persuade the Supreme Court that racism is dead and therefore the Voting Rights Act is unnecessary;
~ Persuade various state legislatures that their elected representatives know more about women's healthcare needs than their own physicians, and coming close to defunding the primary women's healthcare organization for poor women;
~ Frighten evangelical Christians into believing they are about to be locked up for their beliefs;
~ Allow ordinary citizens to believe that routine military maneuvers are a plot to march them off to some mythical FEMA camps;
~ Persuade the Supreme Court (yes, them again) that an employer has the right to force their employees to live under their religious rules, or at least their religion's health insurance rules;
And I'm sure I'm missing a lot of your "accomplishments." Taken overall, they amount to a wholesale "dumbing down" of the citizenry, the country, and political discourse. You've made people stupid, poor, and miserable.
Unfortunately, you can't see what's actually happening in our country because you are so blinded by your absolute belief in American "exceptionalism." You don't get that we are far behind every other civilized country in so many ways: in healthcare, in life expectancy, in maternal health, in high-speed rail (YES, we want it!), in economic justice, in education, in career opportunity. You don't get that we are becoming the laughingstock of other civilized countries: they just don't laugh out loud because we have too many guns. And we lock up far too many of our citizens.
You don't know what's happening outside your own echo chamber. You don't see that you have become the party of willful ignorance: ignoring science, ignoring economic facts, ignoring ANY facts, ignoring the reality of life for most of us in this country.
And that, frankly, is pitiful. You should be ashamed. And you should grow up.