Dear Democracy: Hate to break it to ya, but the Republican Party just isn’t “in to” you. It’s a stone cold fact. Republicans don’t like democracy. In their defense, democracy doesn’t like them either.
Some people never graduate from the schoolyard. Turns out, that’s a lot of Republicans. Whatever they were on the schoolyard, that’s who they still are today. Gotta love the consistency. And yet, not. Republicans ache to live in the past. On the one hand, it’s their own. They’re good at bullying. On the other, they want to drag America and American culture back into the past – to the 1850’s when white, male, Christian culture called all the shots. Alas, only they want to live in that version of America. The rest of us – the E Pluribus Unum crowd? We’re voting for something else – the as-yet-unfulfilled promise of America.
Unenlightened By The Enlightenment
America remains a great idea poorly executed. Our white, male, Christian founders, filled with Enlightenment thinking wrote “All men are created equal”. The problem – they weren’t as enlightened as they needed to be. They thought their whiteness, their maleness and their Christian-ness made them superior. That’s why when they wrote “All men are created equal”, they only meant themselves. White, Christian men.
That poor thinking has caused America a lot of heartache, blood and treasure. It convinced us to cut a deal with slavery that haunts us still.
Right Wing Money
As the Reagan “Revolution” waned, the Right Wing Money (the Kochs, the Mercers) saw demographic oblivion coming at them. America was diversifying more rapidly than expected. And that diversifying America threatened to vote for what it wanted. That scared the crap out of the Right Wing Money because diverse America wasn’t going to vote for what the Right Wing Money wanted.
Did the Right Wing Money re-think what it wanted? No. it rethought our democracy instead. It imagined and financed and then executed a plan that would twist American democracy into an authoritarian shithole. And then it went to work making it happen.
If Republicans could sell their plan for America to the majority of Americans, they’d do it. They know they can’t. We’d never buy. That means Republicans have to “win” elections without the majority voting for them. The ONLY way to do that is to cheat.
Cheating To Win Is Not “Winning”
Quick side note (talking to YOU, American news media): cheating to win is not the same as actually winning.
Gerrymandering – all of it – is a form of cheating to win. It’s stacking the deck for one side against the other. If not for gerrymandering, Republicans would lose their hold on states like Wisconsin. Then there’s outright voter suppression. Every single time a person acts in any way to prevent an American voter from voting, they are committing a giant crime. That is how we’d approach it if we treated voting like the treasure it is.
Take away an American’s vote in any way, you have screwed with their very American-ness.
The GOP has declared open war on American democracy. This is not a political act. It’s a criminal act but, the motive – that’s political!
Our news media has compounded this problem by falsely equating Democrats defending democracy and Republicans trying to destroy it as two sides of a political argument. It is not that and never has been that. Both sides do not do “it”.
If the majority of Americans still regularly voted for Republicans, Republicans would still pretend they loved democracy. Like a spurned lover, the GOP wants to hurt America any and every way it can. It really is the case: Republicans don’t like democracy because, clearly, democracy doesn’t like them.
Photo credit: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/republicans_are_vile_creeps