Like I said, plenty to disagree with. There was undoubtedly a bias toward the wealthy, and often racism lurked not far below the surface, but conservatives were once for something, and there were conservative politicians and thinkers who could make their case.
What happened?
Oh, conservatives still want to eliminate regulatory oversight and reduce taxes for the wealthy; they still want to eliminate, or at least severely reduce, public assistance programs (at least the kind that benefits poor people, corporate welfare is still okay), and they still loathe unions, despite claiming to be an advocate for the working class (at least the White guys among the workers). There's still a core of the Republican Party that has these goals, Senator Mitch McConnell foremost among them. But the Republican Party of the 2020s has abandoned any pretense at having a party platform (in 2020 their platform, literally, was "support Donald Trump"...seriously) or any kind of long range goals, other than destruction, obstruction, and corruption. Their reason for being is to against what they claim are the evils of liberalism. Or at least the straw man version of liberalism.
Liberalism in general elevates the individual, sometimes at the expense of the community, emphasizing individual rights and protections. This includes social programs that prevent people from starving, among others. It supports government regulation to protect workers' safety, consumers' rights and the environment. While a conservative touts the rights of an individual to do whatever they desire, a liberal wants to protect the individual from abuses from others. It sees the government as the guarantor and protector of the individual.
Neo-conservatives portray liberalism in almost cartoonishly evil terms. They see, or least talk like they see, society as a zero-sum game. Equal rights to them are perceived as a negation of their own rights. They play on people's fears that they will be pushed aside by some vaguely defined "other". A national movement to stop the killing of unarmed Black men and women by the police is portrayed as nothing but thugs. Any program that might help marginalized people is tarred as socialism, government vaccination requirements (the new ones, not the ones that have been in place for decades) are further demonized as communism. "Woke", a term that originated among Black people to encourage each other to open their eyes and be aware of what goes on in society, has been turned into a pejorative. Gay or transgender people and their supporters are painted as pedophiles.
And that's what they run on.
Sure, there's a tiny nucleus of Republicans who have convinced themselves that they're still running things and are just using the yahoos to get and keep the power to enact their agenda. That tiny nucleus hasn't been paying attention since Trump became the face of the Republican Party. They apparently haven't been paying attention as Republicans who don't know what classic conservatism stood for and don't care are elected in greater and greater numbers. They obviously haven't been paying attention as these Trump Republicans gain more of a voice and become the new core of the party. Legislators who have no interest in legislating, but are more interested in holding press conferences, tweeting and making outrageous statements. They should have been paying attention as over half the Republican House members voted in effect to overturn the results of the last election, as the losing candidate is still claiming that the election was stolen a year later.
The Republicans are, for now, locked out of accomplishing anything at the national level, but they have been very busy at the state and local level.
Government has gotten big as the nation has gotten big. In addition to size, many areas are just too complex to be directly overseen by non-experts. Every government department has career civil servants who know their field better than anyone. The executive and legislative branches depend on these experts to provide the information upon which decisions can be made. It's not common knowledge, but once a law is passed the work only just has begun. The government departments then get busy writing regulations, policies and procedures to implement and execute those laws. One of the things that Republicans have been doing at the local level is removing the experts and other non-political people from any positions of responsibility and in their place, empowering partisan institutions, often comprised of believers in wacky conspiracy theories. Hence we see local election commissions supplanted by a partisan legislature, school boards being taken over by radicals who want to censor the teaching of history, and health departments' medical decisions being overruled by non-medical city council members.
For all practical purposes what used to be conservatism has migrated to the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, personified currently in Joe Manchin. The modern Democratic Party houses a continuum of political views from Manchin's pro-business conservatism to Bernie Sanders' democratic socialism and everything in between and off to the side. There are legitimate debates taking place within the party, which makes it look like it's a chaotic mess, but it really looks more like America. The Republican Party, rather than the home of conservative politics is the residence of obstruction for the sake of obstruction, playing upon hatred and fear by sowing more hatred and fear, leavened with lies and disinformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment