Here is a fact. The Republican Party, at the state and local level, is engaged in a purge. With a few exceptions, the apparatus is ousting members who do not support Trump. Anyone who has spoken against him, who will not support the Big Lie, who wish to move the Party away from him, are being removed from offices, barred from positions of responsibility, and pushed out the door. They’re welcome to call themselves Republicans but if they will not throw their lot in with the Trump cult, they are being treated as unreliable and untrustworthy and being removed. This goes all the way up to congress, where Liz Cheney is engaged in defending herself from exactly this.
One might say this is delusional on the part of those rallying to the former president, but we see people who publicly denounced Trump’s allegations about a fraudulent election now joining in on the big purge. Delusion is one thing. This is something else.
The comparisons to the Nazi Party have been going on for a long time, to the point that it has become almost a cliché. But it is valid to look at how such organizations operate historically and compare. This is is very much how such things go. In order to guarantee lock-step conformity, any independent voice, anyone who might hold conscience above program, has to go. The organization cannot afford the muddying effect of actual diversity of opinion in its effort to achieve its goals. In this sense, the GOP is becoming an antidemocratic organization. Along with the systematic attempt to enact voter suppression laws in state after sate, no one should doubt that this is a party bent on achieving unquestioned dominance of our civic institutions.
To what end?
That’s been the question for me: just what is it they wish to see?
I don’t think it’s subtle at all. They want this all to be Theirs. Even conservative supporters of such things as Social Security and Medicare seem to be joining the effort to undo those things. Every time someone talks about privatizing one of these programs it is entirely an effort to exclude. Even as some talk about expanding the GOP, making it more inclusive, the policy agenda the party pursues is one of stripping the government of the power to represent all the people. When you privatize something, you basically say that anyone can have these services if they can afford them. Pay for play. What about those who can’t afford them?
Too bad.
The twisted logic on display suggests that those who can’t afford to play are not Americans.
While no one has actually said those words, it is fairly obvious from four decades of programmatic reduction of common service that this is the ethos. No money? Gee.
But they have been thwarted often enough that what we see now is a last-ditch attempt to shore up Party Purity and make it impossible to mitigate the worst effects of what seems to be an attempt to destroy all safety nets and render all movements toward a more egalitarian society impotent. Basically, if certain people cannot choose who to exclude from services they feel they rightly deserve, they will dismantle it all so no one can have them. Then, afterward, when they have control, they will rebuild them with exclusions already in place.
We’ve seen this before, most clearly in school systems. We’re seeing it now in voting restrictions. Party spokespeople have stated clearly that if voting rights are made more accessible, more egalitarian, the GOP will be at a disadvantage.
There is a deep admission of elitism at the heart of this that goes beyond simple competitiveness. These are people who believe they are chosen to be the only true Americans, and all these other…people…are the unwashed, vulgar, below-the-salt commoners who need to be shown their Place.
Pointing out what they’re doing to them does no good. They know exactly what they’re doing and see nothing wrong with it.
Trump is meaningless, even to them, as anything other than a point of focus.
This is more dangerous than anything we’ve seen since the Depression. It is dangerous because the message has appeal to people who can’t fathom why they have to share something with strangers who don’t look like them, talk like them, think like them. It has appeal to people who think being an American entitles them to being superior. It has appeal to people who think taking care of everyone only means there will be less for them. It appeals to people who harbor resentments and think if only they could do something about those people over there then life would get better. It appeals to people who think if they hand their conscience over to the self-appointed vanguard of a New Order, that order will make sure they can keep their property. It appeals to people who, while perhaps being circumspect about their sentiments, actually feel a little bit safer every time a black man is killed by a cop.
The GOP is currently dominated by people who seem to believe that they alone know what being American means and in order to see that vision into dominance are willing to destroy everything that mitigates the damage elitism does in a country they feel is rightfully theirs and only theirs.
Right now, the various philosophies that have sustained them since the Seventies are being held up to review and seen wanting. The economic program known as trickle-down is being openly criticized and more people see it as a failure. Their record of gerrymandering and voter suppression is a public disgrace. It’s unraveling on them. But. It would not take much for them to simply regroup, abandon any attempt at soft-selling themselves, and just taking the forum. We cannot rest on the limited success of the last election, not while it’s still being challenged by the lies. It will take a few more elections to return our institutions to sanity.
In the short term, it may well be that Liz Cheney and a few others could form the basis of a new party that may well finish the destruction of the GOP as it now stands. I’m not sure that would be any kind of a fix in the long run, but it might give us all the breathing space to find the common ground we’ve had yanked from beneath our feet and exorcize these demons of disunity.
I don’t know. Have a care. As Wellington said once, “it was the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.” That, I think, is what we’re facing.