Republicans have increasingly revealed what they really believe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite claiming for decades that they are the pro-life and opportunity party, in reality their party is dominated by those who believe people are made for the economy. If people have no value to the economy—they are takers and not makers as Romney put it in 2012—then they are dispensible.
Life only has value to a Republican if that life somehow contributes wealth to the owning class. That is the real Republican value. COVID-19 has ripped the mask off of their pretensions to freedom, life and opportunity as their claimed values.
Consider the evidence: The willingness of Republican governors to put property over life itself stands in stark contrast with Democratic governors who are trying with every means to protect life. Those who are poor, old, ill, homeless or disabled have lost all or most of their value, and hence, “culling the herd” as one Republican put it, is just letting nature take its course. Might be regretable, but there’s no call on government to pull out all the stops to protect life.
Grannys must be willing to die for the economy, as the second highest Republican official in Texas put it. What other value do they have at their age and decrepitude except as a sacrifice now to the almighty dollar. Hence the FL Republican governor literally hiding the number of deaths in retirement and elderly care centers as he prys open a state facing a tidal wave of death and illness. Florida’s Republicans made it nearly impossible to get unemployment, no matter how deserved or how desperate the situation. Death, homelessness, starvation, illness-let nothing stand in the way of the means of survival owning, property developing class making its almighty dollar.
Work or die. Work and die. Work until you collapse. Work or starve. That is the Republican ethos.
Trump is not an aberration. He’s a culmination of tendencies and inclinations long stirring among Republicans. Forcing people back to work despite scientific data and health professional advice that this imposes death or illness on millions of workers and death or illness on their families is the logical result of Republican’s real values. However, their belief that people are valued only as long as they make an economic return does not make them free market capitalists. Trump’s repudiation of free markets and free international trade went down with the vast majority of Republicans with not a squeek of protest.
Demanding, at the point of guns, that democratically elected governors put economic gain over human lives is not an assertion of freedom, nor an assertion of capitalism. It’s the old trick of the slave masters using willing dupes to enforce work at the point of a gun while they keep their hands free of blood. The idiots with guns in Michigan and N. Carolina are just the slave supervisors of pre-civil war America cracking the whip to get slaves back on the job. Those democratically elected representatives beneath their guns? Get back to work—for the real owners of the state, the owners of wealth. That is what they really demanded.
Flying the Confederate flag honestly reveals who they are, slave enforcers.
Opportunity, another favorite value claimed by Republicans going all the way back to Reagan, is not a word that permits fraud and oppression as the culmination of capitalist competition—it means government’s job is to make certain that everyone has the education and access to markets that they need to compete. Republicans claim to value this, but their actual legislation belies their real aim. Nothing is more monopolistic than confining the vast majority of wealth to a tiny group of families. Yet that is increasingly the case in the US, with social mobility declining to the point of making those born in the bottom half extremely unlikely to break out of those ranks. Income averages show the great middle class is starting to shrink as wealth increasingly shifts upward. Breaking the power of hereditary wealth manifested itself in inheritance taxes—what Republicans call death taxes because it means the death of their power to pass on the means of making everyone else serve their families.
It is no accident that Trump, an inheritor of wealth, wants government to serve his family and families like his. The Koch brothers, inheritors of wealth, seek the same objective. Inherited wealth and extremes of wealth are the objectives of today’s Republican Party, not opportunity for all. Extreme inequality is not a problem for government to address; it is an achievement government must protect.
This is what the present crisis reveals they really believe.
Genuine capitalists believe a free market makes for free people, that competition is good for everyone and therefore monopolies must be prevented, and, as Adam Smith, the father of free market economics put it, the economy is made for people, not people made for the economy. The Republicans demanding “freedom” from democratic, majority supported cooperation to value and save all lives are in reality merely enforcers for the master class. Republicans are pro-forced birth because a growing population ensures a ready supply of labor and demand for the goods produced almost exclusively for the enrichment of the already wealthy. A large, poor population ensures a ready supply of people desperate to work for the crumbs the rich are willing to let fall from their tables groaning from the weight of all the wealth they command.
Smith lived in an age of slavery, inherited nobility, and government awarding cronies with monopolies. The nobility that dominated the world truly believed everyone else existed for their uses, whether as slaves, serfs, or servants—everyone was a subject. Smith’s age was dominated by nobility taxing all but themselves while controlling all offices of government, church and the military.
It’s why Americans launched their Revolution and the French followed in America’s footsteps with their own Revolution: to break the power of a tiny, privileged hereditary elite and let the majority control government, set taxes fairly on all, and ensure freedom for all to compete by establishing voting, education and public services (transport, bridges, schools, etc) as public goods. Slavery crippled the clear intent of the American Revolution, and though it took barely a lifetime (4 score and 7 years as Lincoln noted) to end slavery enforced by law and the state, its legacy lingers on in today’s neo-Confederacy masquerading as the Republican Party.
Slavery did not mask the belief people existed for and only as long as they served an economic purpose. Slavery did not mask the belief there is a servant/slave class and a master class. Slavery was, by definition, a government imposed monopoly, indeed that government existed to enforce slavery, to serve the master class and protect their interest over all others, even to the point of launching an aggressive war bent on destroying the nation if that nation insisted on destroying slavery and the master class. That is why Republicans are willing, literally, to kill anyone standing in the way of profit.
They believe they have a natural right to compel work from those who must work to live, and you have no right to live if you cannot or will not work at whatever menial job they make available, whatever the reason.
The nation, Confederates believe, existed for slavery because that created wealth for property owners. Tell me how today’s Republican Party believes any differently. Trump tossed out all pretensions to national security without a whisper of opposition from Republican Senators. Conspiracy with Russian oligarchs to subvert American democratic elections is a proven case. That Republicans in the Senate closed ranks around him despite the evidence proves they are part of the conspiracy and cover-up—to protect their own interests and that of their patrons. Trump refuses to act to protect the lives of ordinary American citizens because that is not the objective of government as far as he is concerned, and Republican Senators go along. There is no American nation, there are only his cronies, allies and fellow rich exploiters. Mar -A- Lago is where he holds court with those like him. Everyone else are dupes and slaves whose lives have no value separated from their contribution to the economy.
Now, with Republican governors and officials virtually in lock-step, with few exceptions, backing Trump’s call to open the US back up despite the advice of healthcare experts, forced work whatever the hazards joins forced birth as the real Republican party value.
Pro-life? Don’t make me horselaugh.
His call to make America Great Again is a demand to reinstate slavery, to restore the Confederacy, to return the state not to the people, but to rich people, from whom it should never have been taken and who are its “natural” and rightful owners.
The mask is off.
Pretensions have been discarded. Make no mistake, the election of 2020 is a choice like that of 1860, between slavery or freedom. And even if Biden wins and Democrats take a majority of the Senate and House, it will not be the end of domination by and for the wealthy but merely another phase of an ongoing war with those who believe you and the state--the “democratically elected” government—exist to serve them, and serve them you must, whatever the cost to you. This is why they are doing everything possible to subvert the right to vote, even if they have to kill people by making them stand in line during a pandemic—any and all ploys to discourage voting must be used because this is not the people’s government.
It is theirs. They bought it. They own it. Now they are using government to loot the people’s treasure accumulated over centuries and enforce labor on everyone else, whatever the circumstances. The crowned virus has merely revealed what Republicans covet, value and seek: a return to kingly rule by those who have the wealth of kings. We are to be obedient servants not citizens with rights and freedoms. We are meant to bend the knee and bow the head before our betters. They have repudiated the Revolution against a king and do not deserve the name of patriots or any claims to revolutionary slogans. Trump’s gold plated apartment with his name emblazoned in gold on the tower it is in, and his followers call to have the Trump children run and win the presidency for term after term forever just reveals their true desire to end the Republic and establish an inhereted monarchy of the wealthy.
Make America Great Again? No, it’s really Make American Slavery Great again. Make America one Great Plantation Again. Make Americans kneel to their betters, and serve them.
They have no right to fly the American flag. Let them fly their true flag, that of the Confederacy.
We defeated these people once. We must defeat them again. The real American Dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness under a government by and for the people is at stake.
We must resist.