The Republican Party

Elections loom, and even in a non-Presidential year like this, even for a man who does not have TV service, the hype is omnipresent. I’ve long thought that a moral person could not vote Republican. The irony of this is that Republican candidates so often picture themselves taking the moral high ground, when in fact they are but riding those tireless steads Fear and Prejudice. I do need to moderate that a little and say now that a conscious moral person cannot vote Republican. If asked to name the signal difference between parties, I would say that the Democratic Party–though it has its share of deceivers and spinners– pays homage in its policies to truth and reason. Democrats are embarrassed to be caught in a lie, and, in general, attest publically that some things are true and other things are false. Republicans–those the knowledge of whom comes to me, anyway– are not interested in truth or fact at all. Facts are a sort bludgeon wielded by elitists against red-blooded Americans who want to hear that their red-bloodedness is proof against error. They will boldly declare what they know to be untrue, as if saying X with enough vehemence, or enough repetition, makes X the truth. As if they were little gods, spinning worlds out of malice and wishful thinking. They create a fellowship of people who believe a ludicrous thing, and then interpret the critique of that ludicrous thing as an elitist counter-attack against saints and crusaders.

The Republican Party does not serve those who wish to identify problems in the real world and solve them; it is the party of mystic identity, the party of people who do not respond to data or reason, but rather to catch-phrases and which seem to place them in a group to which they long to belong– red-blooded Americans, patriots, Christians. salt-of-the-earth. Republican stump speeches contain few references to any real issue. If they do, the qualities of the issue are not discussed, but rather the supposed character of those who support or oppose it. Their entire substance is demagoguery centered on threats which do not exist, opinions attributed to people who do not have them, invisible warfare between the saints and the damned.

That Sarah Palin has not said a true thing once in her public life does not seem to diminish her popularity. That she does not have one recognizable conviction is less of the moment than her ability to create a momentary tribe for her listeners to belong to, beleaguered and at war with other tribes which also do not really exist. People who tell the truth in correction to her lies are called liars, and people who do not fall for her phantasmagoric rhetoric “just don’t get it.” If I walked up to her and said “You ignorant hick,” she would not even take it as an insult, for she is the empress of ignorant hicks, and cunning enough to glory in it. She is the goddess Dullness evoked at the end of Pope’s “Dunciad,” snuffing out the world not in violence but in inanition. Having devoted my life (successfully or not) to the getting of wisdom, I am baffled by people who run from truth as though it were a kind of temptation, who vote neither with their hearts nor their minds, but with the raw, mindless fury of dogs fighting in a pit for the last bone.