Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Is America Witnessing the Collapse of the GOP?
August 12, 2020
President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, Cabinet members, Republican legislative leaders (Joyce N. Boghosian)
By Thom Hartmann
Around the same time Donald Trump issued an executive order to slash the revenue to Social Security, a Republican sheriff in Florida required police and people who come to the police station to take off their masks.
This is the face of the Republican Party: greedy, petty, angry, and stupid.
Republicans have fought Social Security ever since it was created in 1935. They have fought Medicare ever since it was created in the 1960s. They oppose voting rights for minorities, want to insert themselves between women and their doctors, and are trying to destroy American families by cutting education, food support and access to good housing. They even oppose the right of working people to unionize so they can have decent pay and good benefits, and the right of average Americans to send their kids to good public schools.
Trump is bragging about all this, tweeting out to white “suburban housewives“ that he’s going to make sure none of the low income housing that made Jared Kushner rich will ever be built in their neighborhoods.
In many ways, Trump is the embodiment of the modern Republican Party: a bigoted, angry, sexist, stupid white man who pretends to be a billionaire.
As if to emphasize this, he has called Kamala Harris, the first African-American and South Asian woman to ever be on a presidential ticket, “nasty,“ a word he typically reserves to describe women.
History and the intrinsic goodness of human nature have moved beyond the Republican Party’s century-long opposition to working people, voting rights and a strong social safety net.
On the one hand, if the Republican Party doesn’t reinvent itself it will go the way of the Whigs. On the other hand, it appears the best the party has to offer for the future are billionaire Mitt Romney or fascist Tom Cotton.
America, broadly, is rejecting the poisons of racism, sexism, selfishness and greed. So long as the Republican Party continues to cling to these fundamentally anti-American values, it will continue to collapse.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy 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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