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After Death [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-02
Many Democrats are angered by the outcome of the 2024 elections, which left the right wing in charge of all meaningful levers of power in Washington, D.C. It’s easy to point fingers at various people or groups and blame them for the results.
I think this kind of post mortem (after death) analysis is typically silly and fruitless. It isn’t helpful to blame the outcome on our elected officials, the way they met the challenge, or the way they campaigned. This outcome came out of forces beyond the control of any group, although one group was determinative, not of this election alone, but the drift of politics in the world.
That group is an ad hoc collection (since we’re using Latin) of mostly very rich and very entrenched individuals who fund right wing activities: think tanks, propaganda leagues, right-wing politicians. This multi-billion-dollar multi-generational effort set the stage for what we saw last year.
While that’s a gargantuan problem, it will require a multi-generational response, not a simple article on an obscure (sorry to say) blog site.
We could, however, profit from a pertinent post mortem. I do think the party should be put under a microscope to see if we could fix its flaws.
Post Party
The party to which I refer is the Republican Party. The Republican Party utterly failed in 2024. Why? Why did they nominate a hardened, dangerous criminal to lead them and promote that person to be President of the United States? There’s clearly something wrong with that party, and we need to do a post mortem to figure out the causes and root them out.
Criminal Trump is not some kind of super candidate with innate political skills and unusual abilities. He’s just the symptom of the problems in the Republican Party. He perfectly fits the values and beliefs of the contemporary Republicans. Democrats didn’t lose national power because of this particular person. We were defeated by a machine that has long targeted our federal government to be taken and used for personal purposes.
From that point of view, it doesn’t matter what policies Democrats put forward, what people we ran, or how they ran. This was not an election about the country. It was about taking over the government and exploiting the American people. The right wing worked hard and spent a lot of money to get to this place, and when they had the opportunity, they exploited it.
But why did the Republican Party go along? What’s in it for them?
After all, this gutted the Republican Party, if by that we mean a party that promotes conservative, pro-business, and pro-American policies. It’s now a zombie party, completely controlled by very rich and very entrenched individuals.
Party Particulars
As Thom Hartmann points out in his recent excellent piece about the conspiracy to kill democracy,
We have an open fascist and apparent friend of authoritarian Russia as president after being convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 felony charges, having previously been adjudicated as responsible for sexual abuse (the judge called it “rape”) and fraud. He’s putting into place people and policies that could turn America into an authoritarian nation like Russia or Hungary, and apparently wants to re-align the United States away from NATO and the EU and toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
He adds:
And it all tracks back to wealthy conservatives funding a project in the 1960s to scare Americans about socialism and communism so they could stop the union-fueled growth of wages that were cutting into their profits. Perhaps none dare call it treason. But I do.
Well, I have called it treason many times. (He’s referring to the plot to take over America, and I’m referring to the guy who manifests treason at every turn, but they are, as you all know, connected.)
Republicans have talked about “treason” for years, but they don’t really mean actual, technical acts of treason. I do. I’m not talking rhetorically when speak of treason. I mean real, chargeable criminal acts.
And we need the public to take that seriously.
Sunt In Culpa
So, who is culpa?
It was a big mistake by the Democratic establishment not to start in the first impeachment with a charge of treason. It should have been treason all the way down. They blew it.
But the secondary culpability of the Democrats pales in comparison with the primary responsibility of the Republicans. They knew they were snake handling. Certainly in the second impeachment trial, Senate Republicans could have made the simple calculation that it was better to get rid of the snake before it bit anyone. A party of about seven or eight could have tossed the snake back into the swamp.
They didn’t. And it’s clear why. The Republican Party has no morals. It’s patently okay with them for their leader to be a snake. It’s perfectly in line with their values. So, the snake charmed them.
It was perfect for a party that hasn’t had morals for a good generation or more. For a party that promotes business, it is all too easy to slip over into favoring money over people. It takes human values to resist the temptation to do anything for money. Once enough Republicans decided to abandon any code of conduct, the entire party went over to the dark side.
Ethics are inconvenient if you are craven.
Moral Decline
This is why the Republican Party is moralistic. It’s to cover for their immorality. All the piety of the Republican Party, their religiosity, their scolding, their purity, is entirely performative. They captured far-right Christian churches because it allowed them to wrap themselves in the cloak of religious sanctity. They corrupted those churches, throwing out the separation of church and state. And then, they used the religious right as a funding source and a captive vote source. They exploited their captive churchgoers.
The Republican Party long ago abandoned morals. Any “morality” you see is illusory.
Take sex. None of the right wing sexual strictures are honest. The rules are all there to increase population, thereby increasing the wealth of the wealthy. Think of anything they’ve ever told you about sex. For example, homosexuality is bad. Why? After all their tap dancing about it, what it comes down to is that that the right wing fears the gay won’t reproduce. It’s about reproduction, which is about population, which is about wealth.
A typical Republican politician is moralistic. They talk a big game about sex, but they don’t believe a single word. While they are attacking Democrats for our morals, they are repeatedly breaking their own rules. The typical Republican politician is cheating with the next wife while still married to the current one.
This is the point of the abortion debate. Anyone can have any opinion about abortion. If you’ve gone to the Lord in prayer and sincerely asked what you should do about abortion and the answer you got is that you should do everything in your power to shut it down, I respect that. That’s your personal religious spiritual experience.
But that’s not why it is a political issue. It is a political issue for money and power. The right wing cares not one twit about abortion.
Death
It’s just that the entire Republican platform without the abortion plank is about killing people. All Republican policy is about killing people for profit. Take their deregulation plank. Regulation keeps people safe. Who do they want to die so that they and cronies have more money?
Republicans are pro-war. Until Russia attacked Ukraine and Criminal Trump wanted to aid and comfort Russia, they were all in on increasing military spending. In fact, their leader demands Europe spend more on their military might. More war means more deaths. That’s the Republican way.
It’s the same with the entire Republican platform. They don’t want to address climate change, so that everyone will die. They oppose any economic fairness, so that poor people will die. They oppose fixing the healthcare system, so that anyone with a medical problem will more likely die. They are literally in favor of the death penalty.
The reason they decided to be “anti-abortion” is likely because someone took a look at their platform from a distance and thought, “Every one of these things kills people. We need something here so we can claim we aren’t just in favor of people dying for money. What can we do? Hmmm.”
So, they added anti-abortion and called it “pro life”.
I think they are such cynics they added a plank on abortion so they could claim they weren’t uniformly in favor of death. That there was one bright spot in their platform, a platform which could be justifiably categorized otherwise as murderous.
Whither the Party?
The Republican Party has been moribund for years. Without respect for humanity, no party can live, certainly not as a positive influence for the country. All we see with Trump is that the moral rot finally worked its way to the core. The nomination of Trump was the moment of death for the Republican Party. What was is no more.
That’s my root cause analysis.
The Republican Party gave us a fascist dictator, a total failure for the country. And it did that because it abandoned any principles we’d even vaguely recognize as American. No sense of pride. No sense of humanity. No commitment to democracy and the rule of law. No commitment to civil or human rights.
All good has been forced out of the Republican Party.
Resuscitation
And I suspect they are so far gone that they don’t even realize they need a post mortem. They aren’t aware they need to reform. They are clueless how destructive they’ve become.
They just reached the China Syndrome phase of their existence. They pulled the control rods out and the chain reaction is melting down our federal government.
Is that all there is?
Many people have bailed on what was the party. They collect in places like the Lincoln Project or The Bulwark. It is possible that enough ex-Republicans will coalesce that they could field actual conservative candidates in “Republican” primaries, or run them in the general elections in districts where Democrats have been shut out of power. That could eventually force the hulk of the Republican Party to reform. Or replace it.
This is distinctly a long-term prospect.
No Country Left Behind
The real issue isn’t for the erstwhile Republican Party, though. It’s for the country.
Our country needs a good root cause analysis of the failure of 2024. How did our political system, which was founded as a democracy in reaction to a monarchy and has steadily moved toward a more democratic form for over two centuries, stumble into what looks like a fascist dictatorship?
Anyone want to hazard a guess?
If you ask me, I think it is at least partly the result of technology. Advanced computer and computer network technology allows large private organizations (and governments, too) to control vast resources and herds of people in ways never before possible. That promotes one-man rule. (And when I say, “one-man rule”, I mean one man, even though on a very limited basis it can be one-woman, but really for the profit of a lot of men.)
This is why I plan to focus on democracy. I think the critical issue is whether we end the slide into dictatorship or not.
With me?
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