Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: The Republican Party Is an Organized Gang of Sociopaths
October 28, 2020
Donald J. Trump is the zenith of a long-standing sociopathy in the Republican Party (Mike Licht)
By Thom Hartmann
Trump doesn’t care how many people in Omaha are stuck for hours in the freezing cold, over 3 miles from the nearest road or parking lot, after he’s left his rally, putting some in the hospital. And he clearly doesn’t care how many people die of Covid.
One of the defining characteristics of a sociopath is that they view themselves as the only “real“ humans on the planet, and everybody else is basically a prop in the amazing story of their lives.
Other people, they think, don’t feel emotions or pain or anything else with the intensity that they do. They believe they’re the only ones who matter, because they’re the only ones who truly exist.
The Republican Party, starting in 1980, has brought that sociopathic worldview to politics, and made it a cornerstone of policy as well as a criteria for elective office.
Reagan didn’t care how many people were harmed or died because of his “government is the cause of your problems“ or “starve the beast“ policies.
George W. Bush didn’t care how many Americans or other human beings may die because of his lies about Iraq and WMD: if it helped him politically, it was all good.
But Trump and the GOP’s sociopathy isn’t limited to using supporters as props and letting the people he thinks of as suckers suffer from hypothermia.
The Republican-controlled EPA just authorized five years of a deadly pesticide being poured onto our food, so giant corporations and their shareholders could enjoy more profits.
The Republican-controlled Interior department is destroying our national parks and selling off public land to GOP-donor mining and drilling companies.
The Republican-controlled Agriculture Department is cutting people off food stamps during the Trump Depression, while the Republican-controlled Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to throw poor people out into the cold during a pandemic.
The Republican-controlled Justice Department is openly giving a pass to criminal Republican operatives, supporters and donors, while prosecuting critics of their racist, police-state tactics.
The Republican controlled CDC and FDA are cutting corners for Big Pharma to help Trump win the election, while putting the lives of millions of Americans at risk.
The Republican-directed Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is promoting privatized so-called “Medicare Advantage“ plans that often wipe out seniors who get sick, while they devastate Medicare itself and will make it difficult to pass Medicare for All legislation.
Republican-dominated media organizations and radio and TV stations daily traffic in easily-disproven lies and are constantly trying to gin up racial hatred, all to benefit the oligarch class.
Republican-aligned billionaires financed a multi-million-dollar campaign to put right-wing judges on the Supreme Court, and those judges are preparing to repeat their 2000 scam of handing the White House to a man who lost the popular vote and only seized the Electoral College through voter suppression.
There is not a single elected Republican with any consequential profile in America who acknowledges the dangers of climate change and the straightforward solution of ending our dependence on fossil fuels, simply because fossil fuel billionaires own them all.
Republicans celebrate the Citizens United Supreme Court decision because it nakedly allows billionaires and giant corporations to own politicians and political parties.
Republicans embrace white racist gangs that pretend they’re “militias“ because they’ll intimidate people of color who tend to vote Democratic.
Sociopathy cannot be “cured“; it can only be controlled. Sociopaths need to be identified, isolated from society, and restrained in ways that limit the damage they can do to others.
This is a central tenant of psychotherapy, and America must apply it to politics as well, before these Republican sociopaths totally destroy our nation and gut democracy around the world.
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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