I have taken to calling the Republicans the Party of Bad Faith because so much of what their leaders and members say they don't believe and will flip on a dime if the identities of the relevant actors are switched. The party of family values elected and supported a serial philanderer who lusted after his daughter while being caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. The party that says that you can't select a supreme court justice months before an election did so days before one. Anyhow, a friend said this:
I almost feel like your “party of bad faith” term is going way too easy on them. It feels like something much worse, more malignant.
— Josh (@jr_foust) December 30, 2021
And this is quite fair. The GOP is not just a party of bad faith. It is a party of autocracy, hate, and death. Just a quick bit on each:
- Democracy requires the acceptance of losing, not gaming the rules to prevent losing. Long before January 6th of 2021, the GOP had been engaged in a sustained effort not just to suppress the vote but change the powers of governors when they lost those positions. The entire big lie about Biden's victory may be motivated by cowardice--fear of their most rabid supporters and fear of Trump and fear of Fox and other far right media--but whatever the motivation, their support of the big lie is poison to American democracy. The tragedy here is that the GOP has proven it can win Latino votes, so there is not really a need to suppress the vote--they can try to win elections the democratic way--by getting more votes. But that is not the path the party and its members and its media friends have chosen. They have chosen to burn down American democracy.
- The GOP is also a party of hate. They have long used racist appeals (the Southern strategy, Willie Horton, etc), but they are now openly the party of white supremacy. Tucker Carlson spews it all the time. The discussion of "Real America" and all that crap, the embrace of replacement theory, etc is a toxic brew of hate that has been killing people. Wherever Trump rallied, hate crimes were sure to follow. In this pandemic, the GOP were not too fussed when the casualties were urban people of color. And all this has bred more violence. Trump won by ethnic outbidding--being the best white supremacist in the GOP in 2016--and he fed that for years. Remember that his least worst Attorney General was once considered to racist to be a Federal judge.
- And now the GOP is the party of death. That Trump delayed on confronting the pandemic because he didn't want the stock market to tank. That they gave Kushner the job of figuring out the tests, which was as sure a path to failure as one could possibly imagine. That they politicized mask wearing and then the vaccines even though the vaccines were developed when Trump was president. Most recently, Trump has faced much friction from his own party for talking up booster shots. The policies of governors like Abbott and DeSantis have been so reckless with so little concern for the lives of their constituents. And as I was typing this, the GOP House Judiciary account tweeted its support for covid.
I could go on, but this covers the essentials. The GOP is more than the Party of Bad Faith--they are not just without values, not just hyprocrites, but they are allies of a deadly virus, not just friends to autocrats but wannabe dictators, and they are stoking hate. The problem of our day is not polarization, which suggests that two parties are moving from the middle. The problem is that one of the two major parties does not believe in democracy and does not even care about the health of their own constituents.
Even if the Democrats can hold the Presidency in two years and maybe a house or two, the erosion of American democracy will continue as democracy requires winners and losers to treat each other as fellow citizens in the non-violent competition for office and governing for all, not just the winners. In short, the US is truly fucked.
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