I hate to say this, because President-Elect Obama is setting the example for us to be nice and dignified and stop all the political/cultural warfare that divides, but it’s clear, the Republican Party is a cult of lies and destruction, as scary and in need of being stopped as the “Church” of Scientology.
Republicans, at least the ones I know personally and met during the Republican National Convention, are good people like you and me. I enjoy discourse with Republicans, I have family that I love who are Republican, but at the same time, we need to lock them all up and read, and re-read over loud speakers George Packer’s article in this week’s New Yorker, especially this passage here:
“According to David Axelrod, among the books that Obama has read recently, is ‘Unequal Democracy,’ by the Princeton political scientist Larry M. Bartels. It attributes the steep economic inequality of our time not to blind technological and market forces but to specific Republican policies. Bartels writes, ‘On average, the real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans.’
For decades, rising inequality coincided with conservative electoral success, because voters were largely ignorant of the effects of tax-code changes and other economic policies, those in power were unresponsive to the concerns of working-class citizens, and broader income growth occurred in election years. In other words, the causes of inequality are essentially political.”
Basically, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer when Republicans are in power. So how do poor Republicans even exist if they too, like poor liberals, are getting screwed? Things that make you go hmm.
In the last nearly three decades, with the Reagan Revolution, the GOP has stood for the rich, deregulation, tax breaks for outsourcing American jobs overseas, and look where they’ve got us–on the brink of another Great Depression. So why do good folks continue to see the Republican party as the party of the working poor, the working class, the job-creation party when reality proves otherwise.
The Republican Party as we know it today and as it will be remembered when people look back at this tumultuous time, is the party of greed. It’s a greed machine, as most cults are. That’s why Republicans, the individuals, not the party, are doing some serious soul searching right now and probably going through the uncomfortable steps of cognitive dissonance, to come to terms that the GOP actually makes things worse. And their patron saint Rush Limbaugh, he’s just a businessman who’s gotten incredibly rich distracting from and covering up the truth about one of the most destructive organizations in the world, right up there with Scientology.
Packer’s article also had this to say:
“Obama, in order to break through the inherent constraints of Washington, will need, above all, a mobilized public beyond Washington. Transformative Presidents–those who changed the country’s sense of itself in some fundamental way–have usually had great social movements supporting and pushing them. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders, Reagan the conservative movement.”
So our movement will be helping the conservatives pick up the pieces of their party and put it together into something recognizable, something that actually does what it promises its supporters–rich and poor. You want to be the party of lower taxes, job creation, fiscal responsibility? Fine, then act on it.