It’s hard to get people to act appropriately when the discussion is warped.
It’s a little like when slavery was hard to fix when the two sides were those who treated their slaves less badly and those who treated them worse but no one was yelling “atrocity”.
What makes it hard to accurately describe the Republican Party as what it is, organized crime, are several factors, including:
- Projection. People tend to project, and the fact they aren’t soulless slaves to evil makes them assume Republican politicians must not be, either.
- History. We are a country that has always since Washington had ‘two major parties’, and we’re used to that as the frame and normalized view, there are two major, respectable parties.
- Inertia. The media always will communicate within that framing of two respectable parties, reinforcing the view that they are both respectable parties.
This makes the truth — that the Republican Party is organized crime — sound ‘radical’.
- Us. Because when their opponents — us — treat them as ‘the other party’ and not as ‘organized crime’, that strongly reinforces that’s the case. We’re complicit in the myth.
- Propaganda. The Republican Party doesn’t ADMIT it’s organized crime. They pretend to be ‘for the people’, and that makes it a lot harder for many to understand they’re lying.
Sure, organized crime bosses sometimes had pretenses. Carlos Marcello ran an empire as large as the biggest company in America and said he was ‘just a tomato salesman’.
But Republicans having looking populist — an utterly perverse lie — down to an art. Literally, the art of performance acting.
But that’s what they are.
The core concept of America was to replace the human society history of plutocracy — including a millenia of monarchs and nobility in Europe taking everything — with the people being in power.
There is always an opposition to that. The wealthy class who aren’t in support of the people out of principle - there are some, to a degree — are at war with democracy.
Louis Brandeis said, ‘we can have democracy, or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both’.
That’s because you either have huge inequality or you don’t, and the few at the top always benefit from having great inequality and the many always benefit from not having it.
So while they won’t admit it, they are fighting democracy — which is designed to let the people decide how much inequality there is and redistribute wealth — and the public good.
Our political system has been massively warped by a handful of radical extremely wealthy learning to use their wealth to influence and dominate our political system.
They have created permanent institutions — Heritage, Cato, AEI, Hoover and others — designed for the specific purpose of furthering the plutocratic agenda.
They’re at war. They do raw research to try to counter legitimate research. They supply talking heads to the media to offer counter views to the legitimate views and create ‘anther side’. They buy influence in academic institutions to try to create ‘other views’ in the academic world. They buy huge influence in media, now controlling the top cable news show and 90% of talk radio. They have an institutional war to take over the legal profession through the federalist society.
Money and career advancement are far smoother for people who join their side, where the great wealth expended greases the wheels and backs are never itchy, always scratched.
Is it any surprise the Republican politicians have no interest in the voters’ interest when only 1% of their donations come from small donors?
On issue after issue, what is their agenda?
The real agenda is plutocracy — but the specific policies include:
- Siding with the insurance industry — which means everything from diverting money out of healthcare into profits, resulting in far less care for the people, killing thousands annually; and removing the legal protections for people wronged and entitled to compensation by insurance, called ‘tort reform’.
- Siding with ‘big pharma’, resulting in shifts away from the drugs most beneficial to the people and safer to more profitable drugs with many unable to afford them.
- Siding with the military industry, on which we already waste the wealth of the nation so much we spend almost the total of all adversaries and allies in the world combined.
- Always as a top priority fighting for more redistribution of wealth from the people to the top — the definition of plutocracy, always wanting more tax cuts for the rich.
- Siding with polluters for profit — to the point of threatening the very climate.
- The violation of democracy in order to rig elections, to seize power for themselves — from unlimited money in politics, to gerrymandering, to voter suppression and more.
Their policies literally kill thousands of Americans per year when enacted. More harmful than organized crime has ever been. They don’t care. They’re not about serving the American people.
It’s hard to have a reasonable political discussion when one side is unwittingly backing organized crime but has to be referred to as ‘just good people who have different opinions on the best things for the country’. They’re not. A century ago it was patriotism is said the last refuge of the scoundrel, but the scoundrels are still enjoying undeserved presumption of patriotism — as they clumsily call themselves things like the ‘Freedom caucus’ (thou dost protest too loudly).
Republicans are literally organized crime — but worse in many ways.
What did organized crime every want? To profit from things harmful to people.
Drugs, prostitution, loan sharks, gambling, extortion and more.
How is that any worse than backing polluters, reducing healthcare, making drugs far more expensive and unavailable, destroying our climate and environment for profits?
Yet we’ll keep referring the Republican Party and the voters they have fooled as ‘the other major respectable party, who we have reasonable disagreements with’.
if a Republican politician had the qualities their voters assume they do — any decency or public interest — they’d be driven from the party by the rest as fast as a mobster who suggested to the others they should stop hurting people, the money just isn’t worth it. It really does function as an organized crime family.
And I think that’s how it should be referred to in political discussion.
Ya, at first people react with the normal shock, ‘but that sounds radical’.
The truth does that when lies are accepted.
Let’s attack the Republican Party for being anti-America as it is, not only incorrect on policies.
When Democrats don’t treat them as what they are, it sends a message they must not be.
