The Republicans have become a fascist party. On Jan. 6, they crossed the Rubicon
The Republicans are trying the same game on Joe Biden they successfully pulled off against Obama. It involves pretending to negotiate in good faith to reach a compromise. The reality is that the GOP has the same plan for Biden that they had for Obama. Make him a one-term president.
Amid all the suffering the American people are enduring because of the twin economic and health crises, they cannot afford to look as intransigent as they really are. So, they put an offer on the table they know Biden must refuse and try to make the Democrats the intransigent ones. Biden asked for $1.9 trillion to fight the coronavirus through a competent and comprehensive vaccine rollout, for spending on school infrastructure to make a safe reopening of the schools possible, to help people in danger of losing homes, to prevent hunger and destitution for millions of people in the collapsed sectors of the economy, and forestall financial disaster for thousands of cities, town, and school districts, the tax base of which has collapsed due to the crisis.
The GOP countered with a $600 billion proposal, less than a third the Biden ask which is not even enough for what is needed. The Republicans and their apologists cite the GOP “fiscal conservatism.” Baloney.
Republicans exulted when Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump passed gargantuan tax cuts aimed straight at the ‘neediest’ class in America, billionaires. They routinely approve huge budgets for offense. I refuse to use the conventional word defense because the military budget is many times larger than would be needed for authentic defense seeing it is larger than that of most all other countries together. The size of the military budget affords the United States to commit actions unlawful under international law—an illegal invasion here, a targeted extra-judicial execution there—and get away with it.
Given that the goal of the Republicans is to undo the Biden presidency, giving the administration a third of what is needed makes Machiavellian sense. With $600 billion, much too little to ensure a robust recovery, a good vaccine rollout, a rescue of state and local finances, or enough resources to help people feed and house their families, it is a fig leaf the Republicans hope to hide behind and enable them to blame Biden for all the inadequacies they themselves assured by not giving enough money to do the job.
That’s politics, many people will say. But it is a particularly perverse politics, even by Republican standards. The last thing the Republicans want to do is to give Biden the tools to succeed in a way that would contrast sharply with the calamitous failures of Donald Trump. They don’t want the Democrats to hit the 2022 midterms or the 2024 presidential year with a string of accomplishments behind them. That scenario would be great for the American people but really bad for the GOP. Like Trump, who did not care that thousands died of Covid-19 so he could reopen everything and brag about a great economy to get reelected, the GOP would rather sink millions of Americans deeper into poverty to torpedo Joe Biden and the Democrats.
The Republicans have become more of a fifth column than a loyal opposition. The evidence is everywhere: from the violent attack on the Capitol, to the violence against democracy by Republicans in the Congress who tried an unprecedented unconstitutional maneuver to throw out the votes of the Electoral College and defy the will of the American people.
Is the GOP a democratic party? The party of a Marjorie Taylor Greene, who talks about putting bullets in the brains of Democrats, denies that the bloody school shootings at New Town and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas really happened, and that the fires in California were set by lasers fired from space by Jews. Party leaders did nothing. Republican voters elected her, as they elected Donald Trump in 2016, a president whose final act against the Republic was to sic a mob with murder in their hearts against the elected representatives of the American people.
This is the stuff of fascism, plain and simple: big, dangerous lies; racism; anti-Semitism; and achieving power through bully boy tactics rather than by voting. A study by the New York Times a year ago reported that the Republican Party has moved far to the right of all the conservative powers in Europe. The GOP has been trending toward fascism for a long time. Trump was the Caesar who took the party and Magamaniacs on a long trek toward lunacy. On 6 January, they crossed the Rubicon. Unlike Caesar’s forces, they were pushed back, Trump didn’t become Emperor, and the Republic survived.
The January 6 frontal attack on government is an escalation of what the Party had been doing for years. Republicans have spent decades brainwashing the public in the dogma that government is the source of all problems. What to do when a problem like a pandemic emerges that requires an all-government response?
Deny the problem, minimize its magnitude, do as little as possible, anything except mounting a competent government response to crush the virus and fix the economy. That would belie the Republican ideology which amounts to dog-eat-dog capitalism with minimal regulation and a social safety net you could drive a whole tank column through.
The Democrats must reckon with the Republican Party that really exists, not the one they wish existed. Overwhelmingly, it is a collection of (a) barely economically secure but hardly wealthy whites aggrieved by what they see as uppity blacks and browns and anxious about the prospect of losing their status as the default racial top dogs; and (b) plutocrats who combine extreme wealth and an extreme self-righteous selfishness. It is a toxic formation of those (a), who have some but want much more and think they would have it if not for taxes, immigrants, and affirmative action beneficiaries; and (b), those who have it all but want more because greed is an addiction that can never be sated.
There is no way to build a fair, healthy, democratic nation in partnership with what the GOP has become: a fascist party by another name.
