Sabotage: The GOP’s go-to political strategy

The anti-vaccine push began as a politically motivated act of sabotage… A successful vaccination campaign that ended the pandemic would have been good political news for Joe Biden…The sabotage has paid off. The persistence of Covid has been a drag on the economy…dragging down Biden’s approval ratings. –Paul Krugman, New York Times, October 29, 2021

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Krugman’s analysis is supported by Tuesday’s elections for Governor of Virginia and New Jersey, in which Republicans did better than expected, winning in Virginia and coming so close in New Jersey that a recount will be required to determine a winner.

The Democratic candidate in Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, did make a serious political mistake in the weeks leading to the election when he seemed to dismiss the idea that parents should have a say in the school curriculum. Republicans seized on this slip and exploited white anxieties over critical race theory, which is not part of the Virginia school curriculum, and blamed the Loudon County (Virginia) School Board’s effort to accommodate transgender students for a rape that took place two months before the board established its policy.

Glenn Youngkin, the GOP winner in Virginia, used to some effect the classical Republican formula of scaring white suburban voters through distortion and demagoguery. But the data suggests that Virginia voters were more worried about other issues. On election night, AP’s explanation for the results mirrored Krugman’s analysis written days before the contest:

McAuliffe, elected Virginia governor in 2013, was unable to excite voters amid significant headwinds facing Democrats, including Biden’s dropping poll numbers, the congressional stalemate over the president’s economic agenda and the persistence of the pandemic.

Sabotage has been the default strategy of Republicans at least since Barack Obama because it works for them. After Obama was elected but not yet inaugurated Republican leaders met privately to discuss how to wreck his presidency. At the beginning of Obama’s first term, then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnel said his top priority was to make Obama a one-term president. That didn’t work but the GOP used every tool to destroy Obama’s agenda.

They didn’t manage to repeal Obamacare, their main target, but they hurt the program and the administration in countless ways, especially by blocking stimulus funds designed to fight the Great Recession and by rejecting the president’s judicial appointments. The sabotage did not prevent Obama’s reelection, but it hurt the unemployed and limited the number of people that acquired health insurance under Obamacare.

Republicans have won the popular vote just once in the presidential elections in this century. As a response, they have increasingly adopted scorched earth political strategies. Sabotaging economic growth and increased access to health insurance as they did under Obama is a bad thing. Sabotaging a vaccine campaign to stop a deadly virus to damage the economy and the president as they are doing currently is much worse. It is a crime against humanity.

The United States leads the world in Covid-19 deaths because of its ultra-capitalist policies and its deficit of social solidarity. GOP efforts to torpedo vaccination mandates and other public health measures will add substantially to the toll. Even former Trump apologists like Dr. Deborah Birx have admitted that different, science-based policies by Donald Trump would have saved 130,000 lives, likely an underestimate. Republican policies under Trump and GOP governors across the South and parts of the Midwest have resulted in an appalling and avoidable loss of life.

In Brazil, with the second highest death toll in the world after the United States, some senators are advocating that President Jair Bolsonaro be put on trial for “crimes against humanity and charlatanism.” The accusations fit Bolsonaro like a well-cut suit, but they would fit Trump even better. Bolsonaro is a charlatan, but he cannot top Trump, who once suggested that bleach could be used as a treatment for Covid-19.

These two scoundrel heads of state are unlikely to ever face justice. Just as some enterprises are deemed “too big to fail” amid an economic crisis because in failing they could bring down an entire economy, Brazil and the United States think of themselves as too big to allow their citizens to be judged by an impartial international tribunal. Nonetheless, a citizen’s tribunal could be empaneled to look objectively at the evidence of crimes, including not just policies on Covid but Trump’s family separation policy and Bolsonaro’s role in the destruction of the Amazon. The findings should be widely disseminated in the entire world, with a focus on Brazil and the United States.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the Biden administration needs to aggressively look for ways of negating Republican obstructionist practices and the betrayal of the party by a handful of Democrats like Joe Manchin, who are inaccurately identified in the media as “moderates” but are really DINOS, Democrats in Name Only, the Jurassic Park of the Democratic Party.

To begin to win the narrative and acquire the power to transform this society toward fairness and equality, we must start by calling things by their name and not by polite euphemisms. Joe Manchin is not a moderate but a right-wing Democrat, a person who declines to assist the poor and the middle class but is loath to increase by one penny the taxes of billionaires. Donald Trump is a habitual criminal and liar, not just a former U.S. president.

The language that even the mainstream media uses, including liberal ones like CNN and MSNBC, conforms to what George Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language.” Manchin’s mantra about a “culture of entitlement,” for instance, really means lazy Blacks and Latinos who don’t want to work for a living. The reality is that many no longer want to exhaust their lives ‘Working for the Man’ for peanuts. Manchin’s language and that of the corporate media is, as Orwell wrote, “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind…vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth rather than express it.”