The Republican Party, 2012

Have given some thought to Ryan as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate. The thing to praise is the openness, the clarity of the choice. It leaves no ambiguity about the aims of that party. It is also represents wondrous ideological purity. No effort at reconciliation or finding some middle path. It is as if the party, accused of radical selfishness and a too-hard shift to the right, responded by redoubling their self-delight and their extremism, a sort of Republican counter-Reformation. One continues to be amazed by the kinds of support the Republicans receive. Millionaires, yes, I can understand that. That it is the party of privilege it doesn’t even try very hard to disguise. What it does is manage to make everyone feel that they are millionaires fallen temporarily on hard times, to lure that masses into identifying with the upper class, as if their own lot in life would be improved by the enhanced fortunes of the fortunate. It’s a screwy version of a mythical reading of the American experience, that we all got where we are by pluck and hard work, and nobody helped us, and if somebody takes from us to help others it is a violation and an outrage. Nobody, especially the rich, got where they got purely by their own efforts. What excellent voodoo to make the masses believe the myths the rich tell of themselves, and to place themselves in that story, however sad, however ludicrous that placement actually is. No old person, no student, no woman, no minority, no working man, no gay, no artist can intelligently support the Republican party, unless somehow they are madly antipathetic to their own interests. And yet, some do, so one must conclude that the support is an unintelligent reaction to–something. My understanding staggers here. The Republicans in one gesture blind their supporters to crises which do exist– poverty, environmental catastrophe, education in shambles, rampant bigotry– and instill terror of ones which do not– gay and immigrant conspiracies against the American way, immediate military threat against our sacred nation, Big Brother invading our pulpits and our gun cabinets. The Republican platform is like those TV shows where ghost hunters, purporting to examine a haunted house, point and shriek and get all excited at manifestations and apparitions, where a disinterested observer will have seen nothing at all.

This can’t be brought up in casual conversation, but what disturbs me most is that the rhetoric of the Republican party differs only–and not that much–in intensity from the rhetoric of Fascism in the 1930's. We are a noble and lordly race, kept from our true heritage by inferior peoples, welfare cheats and single mothers and faggots and whores and Mexicans and Liberals and elitists, and if we could somehow sweep those people away, things would be as they were in the mythical American golden age that nobody, somehow, can quite locate. The enshrinement of social Darwinism by the Republican Party is a perversion that the future will laugh at (or, God, forbid, weep over) and yet so many–invariably those who would be annihilated if survival of the fittest were really a factor– nod and shout “amen” without giving one minute’s thought to the full implication. People shouting “Get the government off our backs!” don’t realize that the government is all that stands between them and their consumption by their supposed friends the super-rich, who, given money to make jobs do not make jobs, but make themselves richer, and then laugh in their penthouses at their success in convincing the rubes that all was for the higher good. Ignorance is made to seem wisdom, information is condemned as elitism, truth as a kind of bias no better than hysterical prevarication. There is a wizard in there somewhere, an evil enchanter whose spells blind. Or let’s say there is a gigantic angler fish, his lure waving in the deep, convincing us it’s food, ready to gobble us up.
The Republican Party in 2012 is about insuring that resources are concentrated permanently in the hands of the rich. All resources– culture, access to justice, voting rights, health care, not just simply money. That is the beginning and the end. I hope those who intend to vote for this ticket realize that is what they’re voting for, and only that.