Republicans suffering from affluenza
I have long wondered how one could best characterize the pathological and moral mess that reigns in the contemporary Republican Party. Now at last I have an answer.
In the past I have attributed the GOP’s almost limitless capacity to carry out ruthless policies producing vast suffering among the most vulnerable people in our society to a high pain threshold – for other people’s pain that is, especially if these people are not white, not affluent, and/or not born in the United States.
I still think that is a big piece of it, a mindset and way of life wholly unable to empathize or identify with people that are different in almost every way one can think of from the core Republican base, including – and especially –from Tea Party supporters who for several years held virtual veto power over the GOP’s political actions.
The people Romney derided as the 47 percent of irredeemable freeloaders who will never get the Republican message are darker, poorer, culturally different, and younger compared with Republicans at all levels of the party. They are prototype of the “Other.”
There is a consensus among experts who study conflict that psychologically it is much easier to hurt people if you first dehumanize them. The whole history of the racism that rationalized European colonial conquest in Africa and Asia testifies to this. So does the story of American territorial expansion, including the near-annihilation of Native Americans, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the subjugation and expropriation of Mexicans that was an integral component of Manifest Destiny.
In modern times, the Spanish were the first to practice genocide against aboriginal people considered less than human, first on a relative small scale in the Canary Islands, where they wiped out the native guanches, and then on an enormous scale in the islands and mainland of the “New World.”
But they were not alone and not even the worst of the lot. Brazil had more enslaved Africans than any country in the world and freed them last. The Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, and even the Italians in their colonial adventures slaughtered Africans with gusto. Stalin dehumanized as counterrevolutionary class enemies the kulaks, the prosperous farmers who had emerged as a result of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, then exterminated millions of them. Finally, the techniques and barbarity of the sequence dehumanization-destruction reached the zenith of perverse perfection with the Nazis, who for years carried out a relentless and vicious campaign to dehumanize Jews, including visual depictions of them as rats, then gassed six million of them along with millions of other sub-humans, like gypsies and gays.
These are a few extreme examples, and nothing the Republicans are or have been doing even remotely approaches such levels of cruelty and moral depravity. Yet there is a significant if much lesser degree of cruelty and callousness in Republican policies that seek to deny health care to millions of Americans as reflected in their obsessive if failed attempts to destroy Obamacare. It’s also there in their often successful attempts to defund or dismantle any and every program that helps the unfortunate, from cutting food stamps during a time of increasing hunger to the stubborn insistence on conditioning their recent approval of a stop-gap budget deal to prevent a government shutdown on denial of unemployment checks to two million of the most desperate among the jobless, those who have been unemployed for more than six months.
Short of the historical atrocities described earlier, is there anything more morally repugnant than the refusal of Republican-led states to accept free federal dollars merely in order to deny health insurance to millions of the near poor, an action that will have real life or death consequences? Then there is the fierce Republican opposition to confer a minimum of dignity and security to twelve million undocumented “aliens” who have for years performed some the lowest-paid, most dangerous, and hardest jobs and who have benefitted the U.S. economy by freeing millions of women to join the labor force, by easing the financial burden of elder care for a rapidly aging population, and by providing food for the U.S. population at the lowest cost in the industrialized world.
The top-down class war that the Republicans have been waging for more than three decades may not rank anywhere near Stalin’s annihilation of the kulaks. But an unequal class war of the powerful against the powerless it still is. It does not include slaughter, but hunger and lack of medical care stunts and sometimes kills. And this is a war enabled and justified by decades of prior demonization of its eventual victims, from Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of the mythical “welfare queens” to Mitt Romney’s disparagement of almost half of the population during the most recent presidential campaign.
Emboldened by their success, the GOP recently has escalated their class war to include a vast sector of the shrinking and struggling middle class, especially the elderly. Before Social Security, Supplementary Security Assistance, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, older Americans had the highest poverty rate in the country. Now the Republicans, under the euphemistic concepts of “entitlement reform” and “deficit reduction,” want to destroy or cripple the very programs that enabled millions of elders to rise from poverty. Cruel and callous? Yes.
The Republican’s blueprint for a capitalism free of constraints or compassion is the harshest variety of a phenomenon – the scandalous increase in economic inequality taking place on a global scale and inside almost every country. Pope Francis has denounced it as “the new tyranny.” And he has been blunt about its consequences. “Such an economy kills,” he said.
The party of moral, family and “Christian” values has rejected the Pontiff’s message. The far right has even accused him of being a Marxist. Totally unfazed and in sharp contrast to words that could ever come from the mouth of an American politician, Francis has said he is not a Marxist but he knows many Marxists who are good people.
The analysis I just presented I believe explains much of the Republican condition, which I view as a sickness, among other things. Yet until last week I felt there was at least a small piece of the puzzle missing. Insight on these lacunae was provided by, of all things, a traffic accident.
Recently, Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old from a very, very wealthy family, was driving with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit for adults and almost five times the legal level for minors. He was going at seventy miles an hour in a 40 MPH road. He crashed into several cars leaving four people dead and one seriously injured.
At trial the defense argued that Couch was not responsible for his actions because he suffers from “affluenza.” The condition, his lawyer argued, is caused by being raised by very rich parents who shield their children from the consequences of their actions, which prevents them from knowing right from wrong. Unimpressed by this novel defense, prosecutors called for a 20-year sentence for Couch. But the judge was influenced by the defense argument or, more likely, by the wealth of the family. He sentenced Couch to probation and no jail time. The families of the victims were dismayed, shocked and outraged.
Psychiatrists say affluenza is a bogus diagnosis based on junk science and therefore is not recognized as a psychological or psychiatric condition in the canonical manual of mental illness, the DSM. Yet it is an apt metaphor for the pathological lack of empathy and moral compass that characterizes a party of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.
