Republicans demonstrate their distaste for democracy in varying ways and degrees. They range from the most violent to the everyday Chipaways of democracy, the latter discovering that their future requires actually governing for the multi-ethnic majority, something they find repugnant. The whole party has plans for democracy’s dissolution at some future date. For the more violent, that date is now.
To that end, the most ruthless in the party took part in the attempt to violently overthrow our representative democracy on January 6th of 2021. Their names are becoming more familiar with the January 6th commission investigation.
Some of the top advocates among them are Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Jim Jordan, Rep. Mo Brooks, Sen. Josh Hawley, Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, Rep Lauren Boebert, Rep Matt Gaetz, Rep. Paul Gosar, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, and Rep Louie Gohmert. Then there were the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn Election Results, too many to list here but referenced and pictured in the New York Times.
The most malignant criminal among Republicans is the inciter of the violent coup, Donald Joseph Trump, who with a several-million popular vote minority, became president, served a twice-impeached term, until rejected by a large voting majority in November of 2020.
Minority governing is made possible by failures to reform democracy over many years but that’s another story not oft-told.
The Republican Chipaways are at it every day, doing and saying things that chip away our democracy until they’ve made it lifeless and sterile. Currently, the whole Republican Party, save a very few, is working for democracy’s end, either through treachery, fabrication or outright lies, and with the aid of malicious right-wing talking-head conspirators like those at Fox Spews.
You might say that many Republican leaders do whatever is necessary to attain their goal of power and control: forgetting their oath of office and/or the principles behind representative government.
The GOP has control of 30 state legislatures and use that control to restrict any Democrat-friendly, mostly non-white, voting. Legislative provisions often couple voter restrictions with intimidating policing of elections with GOP thugs. If that’s not enough, most Republican states also give legislators the power to oversee the validity of votes, of course, with a Republican bias.
Why isn’t this power restricted by federal legislation? Republicans, financed by corporate chieftains, have that covered. Even with a razor-thin Democrat majority in the Senate, there are so-called moderate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Krystal Sinema, seemingly GOP compatriots, who reject changing the filibuster, which now blocks legislation to restore voting rights in the GOP-controlled states.
The filibuster also blocks legislation that invests in the people and fosters democratic features like getting rid of the electoral college, providing a minimum wage, rebuffing a Pharma free to charge obscene prices for essential drugs like insulin, help us all through the pandemic, lessen corporate power against labor unions, give needy families child aid, helping them to hold jobs and get training.
But if all this happened, Republicans couldn’t blame Democrats for all the people investment things that Republicans obstruct, or actually sabotage, either through the filibuster or through majorities in either House of Congress. And the latter becomes easier with suppressed non-white voting in some 30 Republican states and intense gerrymandering.
Poverty, the bankrupting absence of healthcare, or not enough health care, low-paying jobs, inequality – all these things help to elect Republicans who don’t give a damn about the people, Republicans who stay in office with culture wars, propaganda, conspiracy theories, 24/7 lies and attacks of Democrats.
And for the most part, dark (hidden) big money pays for the Republican agenda of tax cuts for the rich, GOP SCOTUS judges, de-regulation that enhances corporate profits, fossil fuel support, not to speak of an agenda that has no solutions for America’s people problems.
The real solution for Republicans is an authoritarian government. If they can’t or don’t need to overthrow our democracy, they can continue to chip away at it, and feed us the propaganda that a Putin-style dictatorship will work better.
JD Vance in Ohio, his candidacy recently spurred by a Trump endorsement, represents the vanguard of the chip-away type of attitude. When interviewed in a podcast, one view of America’s possible future imagined by his “New Right” compatriots was cited in a Pogue Vanity Fair article:
“Our system will either fall apart naturally or a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers“
That, of course, is the Republican Party goal that is increasingly buoyed by corporate money, a democracy becoming void of checks and balances, and a media infused with corporate for-profit values.
Big money still finances them even after Republican attempt to overthrow our government. Their last three presidents were elected with a minority of popular votes. Fox Spews daily tells lies in their favor and, with the GOP, coordinates attacks against Republican opponents each day. Such propaganda, repeated daily by Trump and the GOP, has about 22 million Republican voters believing in Trump’s Big Lie, that he won in 2020.
For the whole party, a dictator must be next, one that won’t need the vote of the non-white majority. Their leader, Donald Trump, wants to see a government like that of Vladimir Putin with him, twice-impeached, a seditionist, a cheat and a liar, as the leader.
Shall we stand and watch or put the lawless, twice-impeached, multiple felon in prison where he belongs, and banish the worst elements in the Republican Party?
