The GOP strategy: If voters won’t choose you, then choose your voters
“I often reflected on the unprovided condition that the whole body of the people were in at the first of coming of this calamity upon them, and how it was for want timely entering into measures and managements, as well public as private, that all the confusions that followed were brought upon us, and that such a prodigious number of people sank in that disaster…” – Jonathan Swift, A Journal of the Plague Year
It takes gall for the people who at every point acted as if the worst disaster to befall the United States in a century was no big deal to now claim that the sky is falling because a few thousand brown kids are coming into the country to apply for asylum.
Nearly 550,000 Americans have died of Coronavirus. That is not a crisis, that is a catastrophe. With the handwriting on the wall, with the experts clear on what would befall us if we failed to act decisively, the Republicans, and their leader in the White House, did more to create “all the confusions that followed” and impede prevention “measures and managements” than they did to beat back the virus and save lives. The end seems nearer than ever before, and still over 700 people died yesterday [Wednesday, March 23] in the United States of Covid-19. J’accuse.
Now they are treating the latest wave of immigrants and asylum seekers from Central America as a cause for great alarm and blaming the Biden administration for encouraging it. Yes, Biden caused it—by restoring the rule of law regarding the right of asylum which Trump brazenly violated at every turn.
Principle carries a price. By doing the right thing, by abiding by U.S. and international law, Biden has created a tough logistical and administrative challenge for himself, but it is not insoluble, and it is not the mortal problem the last administration encountered and refused to confront except to make it worse. After all, those pouring across the border are not deadly viruses or Nazi Panzer divisions heading for Paris; they are children.
The United States, behind the European curve on so many things, from access to medical care to infant mortality, has now caught up on one measure. American women are not bearing enough children to replace the population. Last year, 300,000 fewer children were born than the year before.
The U.S. population has been aging for some time; fewer births will accelerate a trend that has some serious adverse implications. Rather than seeing the current wave of young immigrants through alarmist lenses, we should consider it a gift from the poor to the rich.
Now, that’s not going to happen with Republicans. The GOP would do anything to avoid dealing with real problems like what seems like an infinite series of mass shootings and instead stir up racial fears and concoct false crises. The Republicans are so addicted to trafficking in distortion that any day now I expect them to come up with another of their fallacious slogans, perhaps something like “guns don’t kill people, immigrant kids kill people.”
Republicans spread fear because they are afraid. What are they afraid of? Mostly, that the demographic they have long demonized, the Blacks and the Browns, finally has achieved the power to tilt the balance between the two parties. That would be fatal for the GOP because after all Republicans have done against them, the Blacks and the Browns are not going to save the skin of the Ghastly Old Party (GOP).
The Republicans would have to do a triple somersault to give not just minorities but this country what it needs. It needs more economic stimulus to recover jobs lost to the pandemic, but Republicans just voted against that. It needs a massive infrastructure program to bring the nation to the standards of the twenty-first century, but Senate Republicans will try to block that.
Even more urgently, this country needs a surge of solidarity, an epidemic of empathy, a pandemic of racial peace based on justice.
None of this has been evidenced in the words or actions of Republicans for decades. Arguably, the last decent Republican president was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who left office in 1960. (Still, he engineered a coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala and got the ball rolling on what in the Kennedy administration would evolve to become the illegal Bay of Pigs invasion, otherwise known as “the perfect disaster.” The bar is very low when deciding who was the last “good” Republican president.)
Most of all, this country needs more democracy, not less like what the GOP is trying to achieve through voter suppression. Democracy is how civilized societies settle disagreements and avoid debacles like the violent January 6 assault on the Capitol.
Instead, what the Republicans are trying to do reminds me of a poem the German anti-fascist poet Bertolt Brecht wrote after the 1953 workers’ rebellion in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic, a workers’ state ruled by the Communist Party:
Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government’s confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?
In a democracy the people choose their leaders, not the other way around, a small fact the East German CP forgot, and that the GOP is now ignoring.
Jeremy W. Peters recently wrote in The New York Times that after Republicans lost the White House and both houses of Congress, a prominent GOP fundraiser, Frank Cannon, was confronted by party donors asking why they should continue giving. “‘Before I give you any money for anything at all, tell me how this is going to be solved,’” Mr. Cannon said he was asked, summarizing his conversations. The answer the fundraiser came up with on the spot is voter suppression.
Perhaps you can cling on to power for a while that way. But, as the East Germans found out, such a strategy has a limited half-life even for the most authoritarian of political parties.
