Successful democracy and successful capitalism have the same requirements — full participation by as many people as possible who are provided with as accurate and complete information as possible to make choices and decisions. The Republican Party is and has been dedicated to limited participation in the political and economic process by people provided incomplete and inaccurate information. Republicans have no plans for a “Shining City on a Hill” for most Americans, but rather plans for a dystopian Elysium for the few who comfort each other with the words “we are winning.”
So no, the Democratic Party and President Obama are completely wrong to have focused on Donald Trump as an aberration, rather than the logical face of the Republican Party, a party that has not been in loyal opposition since it took in Dixiecrats and married their grievances to the predatory interests of inherited wealth and crony capitalism.
A legitimate political party should have ideas, not just grievances. The Republican Party is full of grievances, but no ideas. Trump is assembling a collection of whiners and grievants who universally want to tear things down that actually work and provide a better future and quality of life for most people in the United States and abroad.
These deplorables all come from the Republican Party and have infected the public discourse with their bitterness, conspiracies and prejudice. In reality they are the pawns and agents of evil men, and a few women, who are powerful and wealthy, some self made, most not. The Kochs, DeVoses, Murdochs, the Walton children, Coors, Princes, Greens, Ahmansons, Friess, Uihleins, Singers and a number of other oligarchs have funded a machinery of lies and manipulation and coopted historic religious currents in the United States into the service of their own wealth and egos. That is it. And to increase their firepower they have roped in a large number of America’s overcompensated and underperforming corporate leadership.
There are no plans or ideas on the Republican side to move the Republic forward. There are no concepts of public service. None can be named. It is all about extending the scale of the tax strike the rich have engaged in successfully since the Reagan Administration, giving them access to public resources, and allowing them to devise increasingly devious legal mechanisms to fleece the rest of the population.
Republicans are allegedly pro defense. The funding of America’s Defense establishment at a scale exceeding the next ten biggest defense spending countries has resulted in bloated defense spending on goods and services which contribute little to our national defense. When we fought wars, we had to shanghai national guardsmen who were given substandard equipment (how many were maimed by IEDs that a quick fix of military vehicles could have addressed) to serve as martyrs in conflicts our military leaders did not have the balls to critique. Shinkesi spoke out and he was removed and the rest of our trained seals in the military went along with an undermanned, not to say illegal war, in Iraq. Given the national resources they consume, our military is a failure, a gigantic welfare system for the officer corps and their corporate patrons. It has been a long time since a small group of special forces with air support overthrew the Taliban with elan. What successful outcomes have we had in the world of late, despite this huge spending? None. Of course, the military gets to hide behind the “civilian” control of the military which they did in the Bush years. Then many whined about the sanity of the Obama years, including the temporary arrest of defense spending caused by Republican shutdown politics. Now with Trump, the corruption, mendacity, incompetence and irresponsibility of much of our military elite, tied to fantastical world views of “Republican defense intellectuals,” will be let loose once again. And the oligarchs profits will go up directly and indirectly when conflict causes the prices of commodities, particularly oil, to go up.
Education. I live in a city where new immigrants funded amazingly grand schools at the turn of the 20th century; where a large proportion of local wealth went into public education. Now that spending is the target of the grifters who have already taken students and the government to the cleaners via their for profit “universities.” Now they grift in the name of charters and public choice off the sources of primary and secondary education funding. So not only do they want to cut down the taxes that pay for public education, but they want to steal as much of the remaining funds as possible. The Republican policy on education echoes Trevor Noah’s observation that under apartheid the purpose of education for black citizens was to make blacks functional at the basic end of the economy and give them no opportunity for aspiring higher.
Environment. The Bundy family is a perfect example of Republican thievery and mendacity. BLM management of public lands has been uneven at best because of the constant pressure by logging, oil, mining and ranching interests on the Congress to cut them special and under market deals. But the concept of public lands, championed by Teddy Roosevelt no less, has remained alive until now. Why should ranchers even pay for grazing rights? Why should overgrazing be deterred? Why should the government protect the rights of native Americans to the land? The biggest issue though is unwillingness of Republican oligarchs to accept the concept of externalities — that pollution and environmental destruction are not priced into their business activities because of the inherent failure of the market to include these costs. These are the types of folks who would build a resort and dump all the waste produced by that resort into the ocean because, why not? So if market failure caused by externalities are ignored as a matter of living in the Republican alternative reality, then global warming and its effects are irrelevent to public policy and governance.
Coercion. Coercion is bad when it comes to regulating markets but coercion is good when used by the state to enforce property rights, the ideologies of certain religious groups, and to minimize the constitutional and inherent rights of the non-propertied, not oligarch classes. This is not rule of law by any stretch of the imagination. It is the use of the law to steal, intimidate and control. The use of the law in this manner has been well practiced during the drug wars and in controlling minority populations all over the country. Now the law promises to be used to keep all citizens in line for the benefit of the oligarchs.
Lynching. Isn’t the Republican supported concept of stand by your ground, combined with no liability for the use or misuse of firearms, really a return to lynching? If fear of an African American or other minority, whether reasonable or not, is a sure defense for killing a person of color, isn’t that lynching? And whereas fear of people of color is considered rational by most whites, a person of color’s fear of a caucasian person is almost never deemed rational, despite the historical record. Has there been any successful stand by your ground defense used by a person of color against a caucasian?
Tax policy. As Leona Hemsley said only the little people pay taxes. That is Republican policy in a nutshell. Because the little people’s payment into social security and medicare has allowed the government to fund its huge deficits, much of whose payments go directly or indirectly to wealthy government contractors and bond holders. Republicans love to focus on income tax and how high income earners pay a large percentage of it. However, it has become increasingly a smaller burden on the rich, compared to their incomes in absolute terms, and income tax has become a smaller proportion of government receipts. The Republican Party’s policy is to continue and extend the tax strike the rich launched in the 1970s.
Truth and facts. There is much discussions on the air waves of how radically different Trump is from any predecessor in terms of press access and providing information on the activities of government. Balderdash. We are just reentering the Bush-Cheney age where for the most part, to paraphrase a country song, if the president or vice president’s lips were moving they were lying. The media was all in on this lying from the get go. After all they sold the American public on the idea that Bush — a reformed alcoholic and drug user - was the better guy to have a beer with. And that hagiography continued through 9/11 and two wars and so on until Steve Colbert showed up at the White House Correspondents Dinner to explain to these media idiots that the President and his Administration had no clothes when it came to truth telling or credibility. So we have been there before. It is a Republican thing. After all we were told in the 2000s that American was so powerful it could create its own facts. Now we need Russia’s help in this area apparently.
Healthcare. The rich and middle class receive tax subsidized health care and the tax subsidized results of medical and pharmaceutical research. Their employers get to expense the employers’ share of the medical premiums and the employees get to pay their proportion of those premiums in pre tax dollars. And the insurers, using this huge pool of tax advantaged money, provide them much better rates because they are able to squeeze discounts out of the health care industry from top to bottom. Not so for the uninsured who have to pay with post tax dollars and can only hope that medical providers will give them discounts off the rack rates for reasons of convenience (cash versus dealing with insurance repayments), charity or market share (those pharmaceutical discount cards you know). In short, the Republicans are all about gaming tax dollars and benefits for themselves. They have no interest in making the playing field even by treating everyone equally or allowing market forces to work for everyone’s benefit. No wonder they want to abolish ACA and chip away at Medicare and Medicaid.
The Republican Party has a static zero sum world view behind its supply side hokum. Any program or advantage to the non rich takes from the rich and so must be opposed. And the rich, because of their wealth and influence, should not be restrained from taking more of the pile because of some abstract notion of justice or the social contract.
For most Americans the Republican Party is not a legitimate political party. Rather it is the face and vehicle for selfish and narcissistic elites. The good thing about the Trump presidency is many of their agents, and even their principals (think of those billionaire governors and soon to be cabinet secretaries), are now coming out of the wood work and proudly showing themselves. We are in the middle of a real life version of a fantasy concocted by JJ Rowling.
Time to do our part to assemble people of good faith to shine light on this chicanery and take our country back.