Do Republicans Like People?

The long march toward conservatism that arguably started in 1968 and exploded in 1981 appears to go on undaunted by the financial crisis of 2008, the worsening social, economic and political conditions in America and the potentially imminent collapse of our status at the top of the global economic order. And while the election of Obama in 2008 certainly offered a glimmer of hope for fundamental and philosophical change, the past three years have demonstrated the stubbornness of entrenched power and hegemonic ideas. I have often written about the GOP's lack of fondness for democracy, but I have been thinking recently that they seem to have lost interest in something even more profound than freedom, popular sovereignty and social justice ... adding humanity itself. Is this a radical claim? Well it certainly will be to conservative supporters, who think they somehow hold the monopoly on realism and authenticity, but if we actually step  back and consider their positions, there does seem to be a general contempt for those creatures that they tend to argue god created to reign over the natural world. Some examples to start the conversation (with myself, I suppose):

1.  The 2000 election was interesting in that Republicans consistently used the argument that machines can be trusted more than people in any potential recount of the ballots in Florida. This argument seemed to provide a fundamental perspective of the party -- which is that the people really can't be trusted to make impartial or fair decisions; or at least ones that serve their interests.

2.  The only reasonable explanation for their continued disregard for environmental degradation and the real peril we are putting the planet and all its living creature in is a disregard for the long term fate of the planet and humanity. How else can we explain continuing to support carbon-friendly policies? To continually chose corporations over the environment or concerns about social health and well-being? The Bush administration was the apogee of this "environment last" policy, but it is a long-standing problem that can only be explained by belief of the end of days.

3.  Republicans like to fight wars and seem uninterested in the human cost of those wars. This was most obvious with Iraq, where not only thousands of soldiers but 100s of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed. War, of course, always has human costs, but fighting a war for no good reason but Real Politiks certainly begs questions about the, well, "humanity" of those making them.

4.  Attacks on social programs over the past several years, known collectively as the "welfare state," show a distinct and strident disregard for the poor, elderly and really anyone who doesn't have a golden parachute awaiting them upon exit from their cushy jobs. This near hatred of the poor, old and disfortunate has obviously paid huge dividends as it plays to a white working class (and even middle class) that need someone to blame for the collapse of their fortunes. But in the process of scapegoating this group and providing huge tax cuts to their rich patrons, they have recreated the American ghetto in a form that has not been seen since the heydays of the Great Depression.

5.  While this list could go on endlessly, I will conclude with the most obvious example of their general distaste for those who use up oxygen without contributing to the bottom line -- their policy of proffering increased power and freedom to corporations while taking it from everyone else. This troubling trend started in the Supreme Court soon after the turn of the last century when freedom of speech expanded to institutions whose sole purpose is maximizing profits, but since then a series of GOP and Supreme Court decisions have made this the law of the land -- corporations are just like individuals except with a lot more money and substantially less liability. And while I fully understand the importance of these organizations having limited liability, this is also the fundamental problem. We charge these entities with driving the global economy while claiming that they are only criminally negligent for the most obvious of intransigence (and even then, global and even national legal systems often make it hard to prosecute, with that becoming increasingly true after a number of supreme court decisions last year (see my old post)) and the actors behind the scenes from CEOs to accountants are largely immune from  prosecution altogether. Republicans have consistently chosen the interests of corporations over people in even the most egregious of cases (life and death, education of our children, economic fairness, safety, health, etc.) showing a lack of interest even in their own children or grandchildren or that most inconvenient of decision-making facets -- the future. 

So one wonders how a party that consistently seems to side against the people continues to reign over them. Well, much of history certainly followed this pattern, though often with the power of brunt force and violence to sustain it. With democracy and a relatively free press this travesty goes on largely through the power of ideas and rhetoric and the ability to get people to vote against their interests or at least the long term interests of their families, communities, nations and, maybe, humanity itself. Is unsustainability a sustainable platform? It could be for the short term, but in the end it appears to just end in the end of us all.