Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: The GOP Is No Longer a Legitimate Political Party, It’s a Cult
November 23, 2020
“The GOP is no longer a legitimate political party” (Gage Skidmore)
By Thom Hartmann
It’s becoming increasingly clear to Americans that the Republican Party only stands for one thing: the privilege and power of wealthy white men.
Over the last 40 years they have devised increasingly byzantine rules to prevent low income whites and people of color from voting and are now trying to outright throw out ballots in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.
They’ve worked for decades, at both the state and federal level, to make it harder for women, particularly low income women, to get access to birth control, women’s health services, and abortion.
When the coronavirus hit, most developed countries made direct payments to unemployed workers; Republicans only tolerated that here for a few months, and the price was trillions, which continue to flow, to fat cats and big corporations.
They’ve worked for years to gut workers rights and destroy labor unions, while holding the minimum wage below starvation levels.
They put the profits of polluting corporations above the rights of average Americans to have clean air and water and a safe food supply.
They fight to help monopolies and giant corporations control market share, while wiping out small and medium sized businesses across dozens of sectors.
They’re working as hard as possible right now to destroy America‘s national parks and wild areas so their fossil fuel donors can extract more profits from land that was wisely put in trust for all Americans decades and centuries ago.
They openly promote lies about global warming to help those same fossil fuel donors, at the expense of a possibly civilization-ending environmental catastrophe.
They have supported a president who lied about masks and other simple public health measures, while the wealthy and billionaire class live safely cocooned on their palatial estates and travel on their private jets.
Their “Law and Order,“ “Save Our Confederate Statues and Military Base Names,” and “Jobs Not Mobs“ campaigns and slogans have openly targeted people of color for more than a half century. From Nixon’s Southern Strategy to Birtherism, hating on Black people has been their polestar.
While the majority of people in this country illegally came in as tourists and overstayed their visas, they have supported an ineffective wall on our southern border as a proud symbol of their racism.
It’s become impossible, for over 40 years, to name even a single major initiative or piece of legislation promoted and put into law by Republicans that benefits average Americans.
To the contrary, they have worked tirelessly to privatize Social Security and Medicare, and eliminate food stamps, school lunches and other programs the support people trapped in poverty.
Now, to hang on to enough suckers to keep them in power, the GOP has resorted to embracing Nazis, religious fanatics and conspiracy theorists.
The GOP is no longer a legitimate political party; it has become a race and wealth-based cult that pathetically hangs onto slogans like “small government“ and “fiscal responsibility” that they completely ignore when actually governing.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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