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The Four Freedoms - of Republicans [1]

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Date: 2023-05-19

Jamelle Bouie at The NY Times has been looking at what Republicans have been doing out in the states. As the party is post-policy, post-governing, and post-reality, it can be hard to figure out exactly what it is they want, what they stand for as they roll from one outraged hissy fit to the next. Bouie has nailed it IMHO with:

..All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the party’s powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court. You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build.

emphasis added

Bouie has taken a look at what seems to have their knickers in a twist, documenting the atrocities being enacted from red state to red state. He cites FDR who gave us the Four Freedoms as guiding lights of the New Deal and in the struggle against Fascism in World War II.

..In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.

emphasis added

After studying what passes for core beliefs in the Republican Party, Bouie has elucidated what are the Four Freedoms the GOP is fighting for:

There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program. There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles. There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit. There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class. And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people. Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.

emphasis added

Any questions? Read the whole thing.

Keep in this in mind: Republicans treat freedom like a zero-sum game. They can only have more of it by taking it from others. As they carry out their agenda, they can never be satisfied. They will always seek to keep pushing the boundaries of their ‘freedom’ until there is no room left for anyone else to have any. Dominate or be dominated, as Bouie concludes.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/19/2170352/-The-Four-Freedoms-of-Republicans

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