Anyone watching the news this past week saw drama unfold as the two faces of the Republican Party did battle over who would become the next Speaker of the House. The situation sparked a conversation with my husband over what the Republican Party stans for. In my mind, there are two agendas and neither of them suit my taste. This week, I’ll share my take on the moderate Republicans
What I’ve observed about the moderate or traditional Republican Party is that they are primarily rugged individualists who believe that everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps without government intervention and low taxes. They point to the “American Dream” as though every American has the capacity, pathway, and opportunity to achieve it if they go to school, get a job, get married before having babies, and work hard enough. With that mindset, they view the poor as failures.
The reality is that Republicans choose to ignore the reality that some people cannot follow their prescribed path for a variety of economic, physical, social, and emotional reasons. Few children born in poverty have the extraordinary talent, courage, and drive to overcome the trauma and lack of resources associated with growing up in poverty. In my opinion, Republicans are far too quick to demonize the poor as lazy “welfare queens” looking for a handout instead of looking for a job. To them, poverty is a character flaw to be punished, not mitigated. As rugged individualists, I watch as they continuously vote to withhold the funding needed to address both the immediate and underlying problems of the poor. Instead, they are willing to allow children to go hungry, be under-educated, and to become desperate enough to view crime as an opportunity if they aren’t especially talented in some way. Their answer to the crime their individualism inspires is to invest in greater numbers of police and prisons. They simply lock up the criminals and the mentally ill, the majority of whom are black and brown people as a direct result of this country’s history of systematic discrimination that perpetuated poverty.
Moderate Republicans have a staunch belief in limited government, free enterprise, a strong military, and fickle immigration. They assert that people should be trusted to make decisions for themselves as individuals regarding gun ownership and mask wearing, despite the obvious risks to public health. Like poverty, they believe that people are fully responsible for their own outcomes, whether positive or negative. Their repeated answer to innocent lives taken by Covid-19 and victims of mass shootings is the offering of “thoughts and prayers”. They expect individuals to take precautions like arming themselves as though the good guy with a gun can always stop a bad guy with a gun. They seem to prefer a self-imposed isolation for Covid-19, not mask-wearing or vaccine regulations. I’m disheartened, but not surprised by their policy of going out in public at your own risk. This explains their opposition to universal healthcare. They believe an individual’s health and related expenses are personal and should be handled on a personal level.
This rugged individualism extends beyond public health. They allow for blatant discrimination against women, LGBTQ people, and people of color, while also allowing for the exploitation of illegal immigrants by employers as “free market strategies”. Employers in labor intensive industries like agriculture, meat packing, and construction desire cheap labor and so Republicans refuse attempts to increase legal guest-worker programs and to increase governmental capacity to process more immigrants. Their strategy has been to score political talking points by demonizing migrants as drug dealers, murderers and rapists while forcing desperate migrants into an illegal status that provides industry with cheap slave labor.
I don’t find the moderate Republicans to be overtly racists. In fact, they hate even the idea of it. Instead, they approve of a false “meritocracy” that gives obvious advantages to the children of wealthy people in education, business, and housing while crippling the historically less fortunate, who just happen to be primarily black and brown people. They genuinely claim to be “color blind” and they truly believe that they are adhering to Martin Luther King, Jr. speech about character being more important than color. This is why they so easily demonize the poor as deficient in character and so happily praise the few people of color who have risen out of poverty to join their ranks. So, of course, they cry, “reverse discrimination” should any special access to opportunities be given to those who have been historically disadvantaged through discrimination. This is why they are quick to highlight the extraordinary accomplishments of the few minorities who are successful as though they are living proof of the righteousness of rugged individualism.
Moderate Republicans chose to ignore history, science, and sociology in favor of advancing “opportunities” for personal and corporate economic gain. If a vaccine, clean energy, or technological advances makes money and creates jobs, then they are all it. However, I think they approach history and science and social change as threats to the status quo and so they inject the fear of losing what they have into every argument. This is how they earned the title, “conservatives”. For example, they continue to adhere to a disproven theory of trickle-down economics in order to continue to support policies that favor the wealthy “job creators” who are in reality labor exploiters, not much different from slave owners. Their policies have only increased wealth inequality because nothing really trickles down.
In the seventies, Republicans needed more Americans to join their ranks and so they added issues to their agenda that appealed to white evangelical Christians. They put forward the protection of the unborn and the notion that the U.S. was a “Christian” nation in danger of being taken over by secularism. They boosted their numbers among white evangelical Christians.
But it was the election of the first black president that ignited the racism and white supremacy that has become the Trump “MAGA” faction of the Republican Party. Next week, I’ll talk about what they stan for and why they must be defeated.