Robert Emmett Curran
November 4, 2022
While exploring the Millstone Festival in Richmond earlier this month, my wife and I came upon the Republican Party headquarters in the historic Glyndon Hotel. I thought back to 2016 when the Glyndon had been the Democratic Party’s quarters. I had gone there looking for Clinton bumper stickers and was taken aback to discover that they had none. The Madison County Democrats had abandoned the Democratic nominee for president. Eight years of a Black Democrat in the White House had put Kentucky too deeply in the column of Red America. Donald Trump was the perfect candidate to enable the Republican Party to gain near-total hegemony, as its takeover of the Glyndon announced to all passersby.
Prominent in the Glyndon’s front window display was a “Save America” sign. If anyone had any doubts about who controls
the Republican Party, she need look no further than that sign. “Save America” being the latest call-to-arms by the twice impeached former president currently under multiple civil and criminal investigations. But what, I wondered, are Republicans saving the country from? From teachers who dare lay out to their white students the racism which has permeated our history or to widen their horizons about the boundaries of gender? Are they saving it from asylum-seeking immigrants demonized as criminal invaders? From those labeled socialists for seeking to empower government to promote social and economic justice? From those dismissed as job wreckers for recognizing and calling for critical action to address the climate crisis? From an inflationary cycle largely brought on by nonpolitical forces? From “tax-and-spenders” who dare to insist that a progressive tax system is the only way for government to fulfill its constitutional obligation to promote the general welfare?
Does a party “save America” by packing the courts with judges pledged to combat labor, public education, women, voting rights, gun regulation, and campaign financing reform, as well as the administrative state in general? Does a party save it by protecting the hedge fund vultures who are systematically destroying a vital prerequisite for an informed citizenry, an independent, well-staffed press? Or by nominating to the highest offices in the land persons blatantly unqualified? Or by running on a platform of retribution against opponents it deems enemies? First to feel the Republican wrath will surely be the January 6 committee, which has revealed to all the world the dishonorable complicity of a majority of Congressional Republicans in Donald Trump’s failed coup.
In the main, Republicans, particularly since Trump hijacked the party, have increasingly focused on cultural issues, both to sustain the dark grievances and fears cultivated by the vast right-wing media-sphere, as well as to distract from the worsening economic, ecological, and political threats to the well-being of this republic. And the threat that Republicans want most to distract from is the war which the vast majority of them is waging against the infrastructure of our democracy. At the center of this war is the “Big Lie,” the fiction that rampant fraud prevented Donald Trump from being re-elected. That bogus claim led to multiple efforts by Trump and his circle, including congressional allies, to overturn the election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. And the war continues, in the passing of voting restrictions and changes in the certification of elections in Republican-controlled states. It continues in the candidacy of election deniers across the country for key offices, including governor and secretary of state. It all represents a massive effort not only to undermine trust in our elections, but to ensure permanent Republican rule, even though they very much constitute a political minority.
If all this resonates with you as appropriate means toward the noble goal of saving America, the Republican Party is counting on your vote. Indeed, your vote will help confirm the decision of Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Hal Rogers to choose survival and power over constitutional duty. If, however, you see such behavior leading, not to America’s salvation, but its further destruction as a democracy; if you think it crucial for the seditionists, both active and passive, to be held accountable, your civic duty this November could not be plainer. VOTE.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exactly-gop-saving-america-days-1446433204.html
