Mike
Lofgren left the GOP after years of working on the Hill for Republicans. Here,
he writes about why he left the party. Click through to read the
entire piece, but here are some excerpts.
The debt
ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism.
Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors
work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related
travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting
provisions into the FAA reauthorization.
.....
Everyone
knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the
negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the
latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former
does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused
confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in
the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation.
.....
It should
have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming
less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy
and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological
authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.
A couple
of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and
proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should
Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would
further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people.
By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is
programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
This
constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of
the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters,
means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our
democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has
nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again,
is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if
government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the
uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a
minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of
Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the
2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of
the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.
.......
Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously
lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy
(albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of
the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.
You can probably guess who those people are.
Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply,
the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims.
Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like
the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their
extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past
that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's
policy of being black.
…..
if the American
people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on
questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence
of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the
religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party
and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also
around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is
this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps,
"misinformation voter."
No comments:
Post a Comment