Recent Republican History, Part 3 of 3

The Tide Turns

Progress cannot be stopped. And no matter how much the religious Christian base wants to dictate American cultural norms to reflect their golden visions of the past, time marches onward. Technology has allowed society to obtain information, share it, use it to grow and raise their voices and move forward.

Older commentators are repeatedly awed by the rapid pace at which societal changes are happening. That only in 2004, the majority of Americans opposed the marriage equality and now most support it. That a recent survey indicated a greater percentage of singles did not want to date virgins than in even the recent past. Nor did survey takers find it a requirement that a partner be of the same race or religious background. A sea change, they call it.

But if we are defined by our immediate environment, than new media has redefined our immediate environment and access to information has changed our idea of normal and appropriate at light speed. Our ability to absorb data and events no matter how large or small, far or near has created a new, more educated and faster-changing generation that is empowered to make good decisions, appreciate differences and demand positive economic and social change.

With our new technologies, it has become apparent that the boogie men of the Republican electoral victories – gay people, illegal immigrants, muslims – aren’t so scary after all. People now see that the Republicans did get their precious tax cuts in 2000 and the economy LOST jobs. That the Republican leadership sold the country on an unnecessary war costing thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. They see that the Republicans didn’t want to pay for the policies they enacted.

The public sees that Republicans have. No. Solutions.
They want to ignore inner-city violence because the majority only affects minorities.
They want to ignore women facing economic inequality and domestic violence and unwanted pregnancy.
They want to ignore the hardship and pain faced by those who would dare seek the lifelong dream of almost any human to share their life with the one they love.
They want to ignore the sick children and poor elderly to whom the health care industry has closed its doors.
They want to turn their backs on those who would risk life and limb to cross our borders only to care for their families.
They want to laugh in the face of proven diplomatic efforts and force foreign nations to bend to the will of our bombs.
The decrease of middle class wages, the growing poverty class, the expanding wealth gap have done nothing to change Republican economic policy.
They want to keep their corporate tax subsidies while using the deficit they created to attack successful Democratic policies.
They want to oppose any responsible gun control legislation despite U.S. murder rates overtaking deaths in war. Despite young children being gunned down in their classrooms.

Republicans can no longer ignore the necessity for good governance and then dupe Americans into believing that it is the government that is broken. They are broken. Their party is broken. Their ideology is broken. Gone are the days when Americans could only rely on a few newspapers and half hour news programs to understand what they are doing to our country.

Our ready access to information means people can easily choose to throw off the chains of their know-nothing origins. The right wing hermetically-sealed bubble is growing so small, it may soon burst. Corporate titans and their paid-for Washington lackeys are finding their reliable religious bases no longer large enough to dictate political outcomes.

Karl Rove, a big business scalawag, was probably so smug in 2004 as his little plan to put anti-marriage equality amendments on all the state ballots got all the religioners out to vote and drove up the numbers for Bush. His banter about “the permanent majority” revealing his delusions of grandeur and self-assuredness.

Now, after unleashing the beast, the know-nothings are taking over. Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Joe Walsh, Todd Akin, Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell and a whole slew of others aren’t content with simply supporting the establishment Republican Party – they want to run it. They’re no longer willing to let the big money hosses run the show as long as they can chew on the pro-life, pro-discrimination scraps.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

It would be a laugh-a-minute riot if these know-nothings weren’t wreaking havoc with the national government.

The know-nothing candidates are so distasteful, so repugnant to the regular, independent, moderate voter, they’re actually helping Democrats across the land seize victory and repel the self-serving policies of the economic elite.

The dependable vote of the know-nothings is now smaller in number and undependable, and has ceased to benefit the establishment – mature, but greedy – Republicans who will, on occasion, make the right choice if it is to their benefit to help the little people.

And so, the Republican Party, the party of tradition, is returning to its 60’s roots with a division between the know-nothings and the free-market, profit-margin hound dogs. Republicans always talk about how they want to return to the country to the good ole days. Funny that they always forget to mention what the tax rate was during the good ole days.

I can’t speak for all the liberals or atheists or political junkies out there, but after the torture (literally) of 8 years of George Walker Bush, we deserve this. This is fun. It tastes good. It feels good. Pour me another because I could watch this shit all day long.

Recent Republican History, Part 1

Recent Republican History, Part 2

Recent Republican History, Part 2 of 3

Christians Become the Epitome of Know-Nothing Political Pawns

Now that Republican political leaders learned they can conquer the evangelical Christian vote by catering to their social whims, they set about using those votes to benefit their corporate sugar daddies. The Republicans were now fully onboard with a right wing strategy rooted in evangelical churches to systematically limit civil liberties of others.

With this electoral power, Republicans were now free to push policies supported by big business. Clean environmental regulations became anathema to the Right. While the threat to the ozone layer by aerosol cans was accepted as fact in the 1990’s, Republican policy and message-makers, like Fox News, began to dismantle the importance of reliance on fact and evidence as a requirement to decision-making.

From the mid-1990’s on, the mostly-white, strongly Christian Republican voter hitched their wagon to the right-wing media and the successful meme that “mainstream media” was a tool of the liberal left an not to be trusted. All of the sudden, global warming was a dubious concept cooked up by ambitious scientists and their liberal supporters. That former Vice President Al Gore chose to use the fight against global warming as his platform after his 2000 electoral college loss, was the perfect repellant right wing politicians could serve up to their voters as reason to oppose any significant efforts to curb carbon emissions and impose improved environmental standards. Republican donors’ bottom dollar was at stake, after all.

The current position among Republicans is to accept global warming exists, as the weather and wrath of Mother Nature wreak greater havoc more rapidly than the Right assumed would happen, but not that it is man-made. Meaning corporate interests are still safe among Republican politicians.

The global warming argument is only one example of many in which the Republican Christian base now find it not only acceptable, but popular to disregard information and data as a tool for the creation and imposition of solutions by government. The teaching of abstinence has no positive effect on the prevention of teenage pregnancy – yet it is required for many programs if they wish to receive government funds. Trickle-down economics has been proved a failed policy again and again, yet the Republican base will always mimic the false argument that tax cuts create jobs.

In this Age of Information, as the numbers of non-religious grow, the rest of us have watched as the right wing creates a tighter and tighter seal around their hermetic bubble. It is not surprising that the vast majority of Republicans are strongly Christian and fearful of change and progress.

It takes a grand amount of suspension of disbelief for the developing mind to continually accept the stories in the Bible, as not only fact, but as guidelines for behavior. It is scientifically impossible for the Earth to be 6,000 years old, for the Earth to have been completely covered in a great flood, etc., etc. Yet, most Christians are inculcated from birth to believe these stories. To disregard their common sense.

It is no great leap, then, to ask these minds who are unappreciative of intelligence – who, in fact, refer to the left as the “intellectual elites” – to then disregard well-researched, credible data upon which to make reasonable, rational, sound conclusions. The religious Republican base is more than happy to ignore reality if this leads to the achievement of their social policy aspirations.

As the baby boom generation entered their fifties sixties, and became the demographic most likely to vote, the Republican stronghold on the electorate held fast. The older generation was also much less likely to use new technologies to obtain information. Their access to information was limited to television – i.e. Fox News – and their peer group.

This group is much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories much like the latest that President Obama covered up the killings in Benghazi to win the 2012 election. This group is much more willing to believe any false narrative that shores up their belief that their way of life is the right way and only way to live. That undocumented workers and gay marriage are a threat to the fabric of American society. That minorities vote democrat merely because they want to mooch on the responsible members of society. This group is told repeatedly by right wing media that they are good and everyone else is evil and if they vote Republican, their values will be upheld and everyone else will be responsible for themselves just like they are.

The fervent Christian base became the know-nothings that were easy prey for big business. These sitting ducks were easily manipulated into supporting economic policies that were harmful to them. They were so ready to swallow this ideology which soothed their egos, that the only acceptable policies became that ones that reinforced their judgements of others and a potential solution outside their line of thought was completely unacceptable.

In the end, these upper class white male politicians and business leaders repeated whatever script they had to regarding social and civil policy to get all these know-nothings on board as they pilfered and plundered the U.S. (and world) economy.

Up next:
The Tide Turns

Recent Republican History, Part 1

Recent Republican History, Part 3

Recent Republican History, Part 1 of 3

I don’t know about everyone else, but this political junkie, a.k.a. government major, is having spectacular time watching Republicans in the throws of an identity crisis. Republican history over the last ~50 years is incredibly interesting to me and now, in the Age of Information (this cannot be understated), we basically have a front row seat to a huge transition that will affect U.S. government small and large for years to come.

The cliche “history repeats itself” and philosopher George Santayana’s quotation, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” are playing out in real time on our national theater of the absurd.

Mass Exodus of Conservative Democrats to the Republican Party

The Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s led to a great purging in the Democrat Party. Those who opposed integration, including large swathes of the South, changed their voter card to Republican. In rural areas, this transition has been slow – which is why areas of Texas countryside might still have a majority of voters registered Democrat while voting overwhelmingly for Republican candidates. This is also why Oklahoma, perhaps the slowest progressing state in the country, is also the only state in the country that had more counties go red in 2008 than in the previous election.

This is why I cringe when people say the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln. Not so, really. The demographic that populates the Republican Party today would have in no way supported Lincoln or his efforts. The current Democrat Party is the true standard bearer of Lincoln’s policies.

The make-up of the Republican Party during its massive transition in the 60’s had quite a similar representation to the current one: the know-nothing, conspiracy theorists, as personified by the John Birch Society and the “fiscal conservative,” low-tax, laissez-faire, plutocracy, corporatocracy supporters. Of course, I’m simplifying because this. Is. A. Blog.

Role of Christianity in Republican Victory

In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the presidency, solidified a marriage between these two parties by A., catering to the religious right and B., enforcing extreme messaging discipline. The Moral Majority movement illuminated the reality that low-tax, profit-worshipping Republicans can attain greater levels of victory if they also appear fervently Christian and support legislation catering to strongly-Christian voters. Wealthy white men who previously couldn’t have cared less about a poor teenager’s pregnancy termination now had the strongest of principles opposed to the medical procedure.

The rise of Prosperity-Christianity and the mega-churches during this time-period is no coincidence. No longer were Republican voters chained to the main legacy of Jesus Christ of caring the poor and the sick. Religious leaders across the land began indoctrinating their legions with the idea that God and his son want their followers to be prosperous, even rich.

The right wing leadership, including church leaders, created a culture in which it was through the church that people should care for the poor, not the government. Church donations were the method by which one helped their fellow man, while government was called the false idol and the paying of taxes an insupportable exercise in all but the most minimum of circumstances. Instead of supporting Planned Parenthood, a health provider for millions without health insurance, most highly-religious Christians endorse adoption programs run through churches, especially in the event a gay couple would choose to adopt an orphaned child. The Catholic Church, who runs a large amount of adoption agencies across the countries, would prefer an infant remain in a foster home rather than have two loving parents of the same gender.

Over the years, the Republican party became consumed by an un-Christlike, yet highly religious ideology. This would eventually help herald the undoing of the Republican Party on a national scale. The state scale is still a story untold.

Next up:

Christians Become the Epitome of Know-Nothing Political Pawns

Recent Republican History, Part 2

Recent Republican History, Part 3