DearCharlie,
I agree emphatically with your argument in “Burn ItAll Down.” But my immediate reaction is that the question is whether current Republican office-holders should be voted out because of their cooperation with Trump. As you say, the debate is necessary, but I believe it should be done on a broader basis. There is a widespread attitude of “win at all costs” and “the end justifies the means” within the conservative movement. Or perhaps that should be within movement conservatives since it appears this group has come to dominate the Republican Party. There are a number of examples which undergird this assessment.
The American Legislative Exchange Council provides State legislators model laws and supporting materials. This in itself is not a bad concept even in support of partisan goals. But it becomes harmful when the proposed laws work to favor corporate or moneyed interests rather than the public good.There have been a number of articles on the group’s membership,methodology and advocacy strongly suggesting it is a tool of private interests.
Republicans have turned the principle of small government into anti-government. There is a straight line between Ronald Reagan’s “government is the problem”to Mitch McConnell’s total opposition nihilism. The clearest illustration of the result is the Republican refusal to participate in the development of Obamacare, their continuing readiness to repeal it with no replacement in sight, and, tellingly, their insistence that the law was passed “in the dead of night” with no opportunity for their input.
Since Watergate, “follow the money” has become a catchphrase because it is so revealing. Applied to the Republican Party, look to where most of their candidate’s campaign cash comes from. Look also to where a great many of their policy positions are developed. Then connect to the kind of legislative actions taken. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 is one of the more recent examples of an egregious give-away to the wealthy.
Gerrymanders are not the exclusive property of one party; Democrats have finagled distric tlines for their own benefit. But I invite you to consider the relative number of gerrymanders carried out by either party in the last forty years.
Without getting into whether any given Republican is or is not racist, the Party as a whole seems to have a racist tinge. Starting with Reagan’s “welfare queens”and into Trump’s explicitly anti-muslim immigration orders, there is a pattern of Republican rhetoric intended to divide whites from non-whites
The recent kerfuffle around census questions arises from the perception that if certain groups,specifically latinos, can be discourages from being counted, they will be less well represented in the ensuing reallocation of congressional seats.
The crosscheck program,onerous requirements for absentee voting, restrictive voter ID requirements are impediments to voting, and they disproportionately affect lower-income (and supposedly Democratic) voters.
The points above could be expanded and extended by better minds than I, but I think they suffice to show why it is important to “burn it all down.” The evidence supports a conclusion that many Republicans are simply operating in bad faith.(By many, I mean a number such that their actions create the picture of the Party as a whole.) Had it not been for the groundwork they laid, Trump could not have been nominated, much less elected.Defeating them en masse would deliver a smack-down that would force a major recalibration of the Republican Party’s agenda, and, one hopes, their modus operandi.
Keep up the good work!
Harry Lane