America to the GOP — Clean Up Your Act!

The Republican Party has a position of outsize influence in American political life. Representing as it does the white population, it has used all the tricks in the book to perpetuate its power by winning (often by crook!) governorships, state houses, state judiciaries, and consolidating its power in all branches of the federal government. 

More than anything else, its control of the U.S. Senate has helped it to shape the ideological balance on the federal courts. We have them to thank for the Supreme Court’s lopsided 6-3 conservative majority! Don’t blame Trump alone— he was a willing tool they used to get us there!

The party is often satirized for its devotion to guns, extreme partisanship, a lazy dependence on lobbyists, and a penchant for falsehoods and demagoguery! 

It’s actually a lot worse!

Downright Chicanery!

The entire raison d'être of the GOP is to remain in power by any and all means. The only way they can do that is, first, stop minorities from voting! Why? Because (for the most part) those darn minorities, they up and vote for the other guy!  Second, stop all the votes being counted!  

With America becoming a minority white country, the GOP does not have the numbers to win in the regular way. Hence, they resort to downright chicanery and crude efforts like purging voter rolls, shutting polling stations in Black and Latino areas, and changing ID laws. 

In Georgia, the legislature cut the number of polling stations by 10 percent, dropped thousands of voters from the rolls because they hadn’t voted in a while, and suspended registrations of another 50,000 Blacks for minor inconsistencies (e.g., omitting a hyphen in a name.)

Alabama began enforcing a strict ID bill and then closed nearly all ID offices in majority Black counties. North Carolina’s legislature required the exact form of ID that Blacks were least likely to have. Texas required a certain kind of ID they knew 600,000 registered Latino voters lacked. 

You get the picture? Without court challenges mounted by Democrats, many of those sidelined voters may never have cast their ballots. 

By November 4, it was clear the presidency would be decided by votes being counted in big cities with large Blacks populations: Atlanta, Detroit, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Trump cast doubts on the votes by dint of location: “Detroit and Philadelphia are known as two of the most corrupt political places,” he said. “They cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race.”

The pattern was obvious. Trump was attempting to invalidate ballots cast for Biden in swing state cities where minorities predominate and can swing elections. He was saying that Blacks have no right to vote him out of office! Writing in The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson labelled it an “undisguised, unapologetic reassertion of the white-is-right doctrine.”

Author Gary Younge calls it a “new twist in the racial logic of the American right, which has gone from blocking Black people from voting to allowing them to vote as long as their votes don’t all get counted.” Younge has written about identity politics in Who Are We? How Identity Politics Took Over the World (Penguin). 

Demographics Are Against Them!

Although GOP clout is unlikely to diminish in the near future, demographics are against them! The country grows less white every year and, by 2045, is expected to be majority non-white with 29 percent Hispanic, 13 percent Black, 9 percent Asian, and 47 percent white. 

At present, less than half of all American children under the age of 15, are white. In five states (California, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas), white people are already a minority. 2045 is still a few years down the road, so, patience, mes amis! But, before you start counting your chickens, remember this, “there is nothing inevitable about demographics,” Younge adds! 

Whites have long been a minority in Texas and yet, despite the Dems giving Texas their best shot, the GOP has held that state for nearly 50 years! Florida is also very diverse, yet (for the most part) votes GOP, whereas two white states, Vermont and Maine, are reliably Democrat. Go figure!

Christian Right

Over the past several decades, the Republican Party has been captured by two powerful forces: the Christian right with its theocratic vision for America, and the Tea Party movement. Both are overwhelmingly white.

The Christian right (comprising Evangelicals and conservative Catholics and Protestants) unites around anti-abortion activism, opposition to LGBTQ rights, sex education, and euthanasia, and the promotion of abstinence, school prayer, religious freedom, and the teaching of creationism (as opposed to evolution). (Read NYT article on religion and right-wing politics below.)

The Tea Party (an acronym for Taxed Enough Already) was a reaction to Obama’s 2009 mortgage relief plan. A populist social and political movement, it favored an unfettered free market while opposing excessive taxation, government intervention in the private sector, and economic redistribution. (See Pew Research article on the Tea Party below.)

The two came together on economic issues (e.g.  railing against welfare checks to “lazy minorities!”) but mostly on immigration — they wanted it halted or curbed! A more diverse America (with new immigrants voting for the wrong party) was most unwelcome!

Culture Wars

These movements within the GOP converged with a realization that demographic trends were hostile to the party’s older whiter heavily Christian base. It also generated a virulent white identity politics that found its natural expression in Trump’s intensely divisive rhetoric.

Consider “Make America Great Again.” It is a promise of a return to better days, a past that never was, a halcyon time when white men ruled America, Christianity was the “official” religion, minorities were rarely seen, and women had no power. This is precisely the kind of faux 1950s world that most Republicans yearn for: a doomed exercise in nostalgia! 

Trump’s appointment of conservative judges gave the Christian right what they craved: a chance to defeat legalized abortion, same sex marriage, multiculturalism, environmentalism, secularism — they were back to fighting the “culture wars.”

Trump’s draconian immigration policies (the Muslim Ban, the Border Wall, separating children from their parents) were what the Christian Right wanted, never mind the horrific sight of toddlers in cages. It also meant a sudden lurch of the party in the opposite direction after George W. Bush had championed a more diverse future. 

Is the GOP’s embrace of voter suppression a by-product of opportunism? The party is existentially committed to restoring (or preserving) white, Christian supremacy in the face of increasing diversity. Electoral mischief, like voter suppression, is the most direct means of reaching that goal, a means to an end, not cheating, no sir! 

Political conservatism was once a principled philosophy. The current GOP has transformed it into a grievance agenda fueled by xenophobia. Propping up a declining white Christian base amid changing demographics was always bound to fail — the numbers just don’t add up! 

Beware of GOP Fear Mongering!

America needs immigrants to help maintain the country’s economic growth and provide a solid tax base to fund entitlement programs. Without younger people of color coming in, entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare would dry up. Hence, to protect and preserve the country’s social safety net, whites should be welcoming immigrants, regardless of race.

By growing the economy, immigration is likely to increase the size of the proverbial “pie” of economic resources. The claim made by some in the GOP that immigrants are a threat because they depress wages and take away jobs from American workers is blatant fear mongering.

White Identity Politics

Waves of immigration in the late 1990s and early 2000s transformed America’s demographics. This was brought into sharp relief by the election of Obama which ignited a high degree of racial unease and fear that activated identity politics. 

About 40 percent of white Americans now identify with their whiteness. Once secure in the belief that they held a disproportionate share of economic, political, and social resources, they have begun to see their privilege and status being increasingly questioned. 

They are afraid of losing, not just their majority, but also their cultural and political power. Many also feel they are being discriminated against and that the economic, political and social gains of minorities are coming at white expense.

“Dominionist” Strategy

Getting back to the Christian right, their long term agenda can be summed up essentially as promoting the idea of Christian nationalism.  They believe the U.S. once was, and should again be, “a glorious Christian nation.” They endorse a theocratic vision that Biblical law (the Ten Commandments) should be the foundation of the U.S. legal system.

To achieve their goals, the more extreme among them believe that America must adopt a “dominionist” strategy where Christians exercise power and dominate every sphere of life: religion, education, economics, politics, culture (arts, entertainment, media), and family.

Armed Struggle

The GOP’s determination to resist any hint of gun regulation, despite public opinion, is not just a matter of campaign contributions from the gun lobby. It comes from a genuine belief among grassroots conservatives that armed struggle — against “radical Democrat elites” — must remain an option if conventional politics fails! 

You may balk but that is the core belief of much of the Christian right — and now an intrinsic GOP belief, whether articulated or not! They are convinced that a civil war may be necessary to impose Red America’s will on Blue America! To this end, they will call on militias, the Boogaloo Boys, anyone, who will rally to their cause!  

Sounds insane? Maybe, but if it’s how a section (perhaps, not the mainstream, yet) of a major political party thinks, we should pay attention!

Trump, with his authoritarian contempt for democratic norms, was the perfect vessel to achieve their agenda! He was never the evil genius! Far smarter and loonier right wingers were deciding on how to reach their objectives! 

The Once Proud Party of Lincoln... 

The party that ended slavery and fought to maintain the Union — the once proud party of Abraham Lincoln — is dead and quite gone! It now houses the ideological heirs to the very Confederacy that it defeated! 

By being a willing accomplice to Trump and pandering to his every whim, the GOP has set back racial progress and damaged democracy. It can continue to use bigotry and race baiting for now but, sooner or later, must face reality. 

Check out some of its worst transgressions of just the past four years:

The party has transferred wealth from working Americans to billionaires: by giving tax breaks to the wealthy while shifting taxes onto the middle class and working poor, weakening unions, removing workplace protections, and trying repeatedly to strip citizens of health insurance. 

It has permitted Big Business to poison our air, water, soil, and food — all in the name of profit!  

It is not just ignoring the climate change catastrophe; it is accelerating it by expanding fossil fuel extraction. 

It has gravely mishandled the global pandemic resulting in nearly 300,000 Americans dead and counting.

Many principled Republicans, such as the creators of the Lincoln Project, have left the party. They canvassed and voted for Biden. Will they return or is the party too damaged and toxic? Will there be a split with the ethically-challenged truth-deniers on one side and the group that acknowledges reality on the other?  

The GOP might yet be salvaged by Republicans who believe in democracy. But first, to become a governing party again, soul searching is on the menu: it must clean up its act!

Ludi Joseph

Washington, D.C.

December 10, 2020

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