Democrats have facetiously said that Republicans think that the rich don’t have enough money and the poor have too much. But the more I think I about modern Republicanism, the more I think that the statement it is literally true. Republicans believe that the poor are too well off. The modern Republican Party honestly yearns for a cleansing fire of misery and pain to sweep the land. They believe that the nation’s problems are largely due to the fact that the poor are living in relative comfort as a result of the overall affluence of our society. America is the victim of its own success and has become a weak and lazy country slouching toward calamity.
It is clear to me that Republican want a more severe poverty in this country to clear off the tables, to burn down what they regard as the cheap, the tawdry, the transitory and false. They desire a wildfire that would consume everything not built out of stone. As the Walton family persevered throughout he great depression dug in on Walton Mountain, the Republicans believe that Americans need a trial by fire to reveal their spirit. They believe that America is built of honest bricks that are long overdue for a sandblasting. This isn’t about race. The Republican inferno is not racist. Although let’s face it, only god fearing, hetero, and mostly white families would have the endurance to walk out of the other side of the Republican inferno of righteousness. They would emerge unscathed to rebuilt America with a bible in one hand and a musket in the other. Father, mother, children, dog. All complications unwound and all things re-ordered and repaired in the eyes of God.
This notion that misery and suffering needs to be ramped up in order to get to the cleansing befits of misery and suffering explains a great deal about conservativism that most American find perplexing. It obviously explains policies and things like the deeply unpopular Ryan budget. It explains the GOP’s eagerness to burn down the social safety net that has allowed a generation of the nation’s elderly, widows and impaired to live with a semblance of dignity. But it also explains their choices of candidates.
If Ronald Reagan believed in the biblical end times, George W. Bush believed in hastening them. There is a progression from Reagan to Bush to Gingrich or Palin. The dial only moves in one direction, toward more vocal and strident craziness. That’s why they don’t like Rommey. He doesn’t appear wild-eyed and unsteady enough. His craziness, like his empathy, comes off as insincere.
The Republican worldview also explains the ham handed belligerence of Republican foreign policy. Bombs are not simply tools of diplomacy, they are tools of renewal. Wonton death in lesser countries, or even here, isn’t a tragedy, it is a step in the right direction. It is a deeply sick and twisted ideology that has taken hold in the right. To be sure, it has always been with us. The “end is nigh” has been the fervent hope of many deranged lunatics throughout this country’s history. However, we’ve never before contended with an entire political party composed of people who are so invested in bringing about the end.
The modern GOP advocates social engineering on a grand scale. But like the Iraq war, they envision a deus ex machana of misery that would cleanse the earth and will work perfectly. There is no thought given to the possibility that they might be wrong. No conservatives pause to wonder if the positive effects of misery might be overstated.
Simple solutions are naturally attractive to the simple minded. But there it is; to be Republican means being cruel in order to be kind. If you think of what is at the very heart of the cruelty, it is in a perverse way, a very hopeful and optimistic philosophy. They envision a renewed and reborn nation. Yes. It sounds absolutely nuts to you and I, but it is powerfully motivating to a large number of your neighbors.