Not Ready for Primetime
The blatant unfitness of elected Republicans is on display today as this new term in the House of Representatives begins in a predictable cluster fuck.
BAKERSFIELD, CA: President Trump Delivers Remarks on Water Accessibility in February 2020. Wikimedia.
Kevin McCarthy has been a self-aggrandizing mess in the Trump era and revels in his ability to surround himself with famous people rather than enact effective policy. Meanwhile, the band of ne’er-do-wells on the far right of this distorted Republican crowd is willing to push the nation to its diplomatic and financial brink in order to satisfy a deluded worldview, or worse, attempt escaping an all-encompassing and destructive cognitive dissonance reflected in many traditional Americans.
The sad part is that this is further evidence that America is reverting to a less orderly civic life reminiscent of the nation’s tumultuous years between a morbid civil war fought over chattel slavery and a global war over democracy and the spoils of colonizing the Global South.
For the longest time, the GOP has had a cynical fantasy of dismantling the administrative state no matter how many hard-working Americans are harmed in the process. For they have this privileged and warped perspective of one pioneering through life like a Superman as if large manmade and natural systems (built through years of technological and humanistic modernization) don’t exist at all. Now they are pushing this isolated Colonial Era cosplay onto the rest of us through irrational policy dressed in the fabric of racial fears.
The more the mainstream media and well-meaning former Republicans deny the dark heart of what is happening here, then the longer it takes to heal a beautiful nation.
American history is hard to decipher after 1945. It is too recent in the larger scheme of “Big History.” Still, one thing that is undeniable is that this nation has made demographic gains and transformations that at one time caused communities of Americans to huddle into tribes and contemplate killing one another. The rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s should be viewed as a crystalizing moment for President Abraham Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom.” Instead, the Reagan Republican Party views this moment as a step backward or as an unwelcome evolution resulting in the nation turning from Richard Russell to Shirley Chisholm and eventually transforming into Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jon Ossoff, and Hakeem Jefferies. It is this regressionist historical lens that makes people subscribe to the Great Replacement Theory and an implicity separatist political agenda.
The half-decade of racist mythmaking and attempts by many to segregate money and property (in a de facto manner rather than de jure) has evolved into the modern Republican Party. It is a rebel yell against a changing America and the dominating ideology is based on polling that reveals how many White Americans believe they are victims of anti-White racism or individuals.
So, the problems of Kevin are a culmination of a Republican Party that abused a historical moment of multicultural uplift to fearmonger, tribalize, and gain short-term political capital. All at the expense of the future nation our children and grandchildren will inherit.
Moreover, the world they will inherit.
Republicans ran on critical race theory, inflation, and crime. Yet, they have not come forward with a sensitive plan to remedy those things, define them, or acknowledge their global nature. Instead, it's been antisemitic, homophobic, and anti-Black and Latino stupidity, propaganda, and chicanery. This natural son of the Reagan Republican party is openly waging war against the humanity of LGBTQI+ people in a despicable and inhumane manner.
Yes, this is the Reagan Republican party and if you don’t like it, then blame MAGA for perverting your ideology. But also, reflect on how this was always a problem, and ignoring the warnings from many people facing the brunt of Reaganism (like marginalized Americans) didn’t help.
The 2022 GOP House Conference, emanating the natural outcomes of Reagan’s visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi, is entering the term with open white supremacists and a man who completely faked his resume to virtue signal (in the way GOPers always claim Democrats do).
This is a disgusting political and professional club (built on different types of supremacy and greed) and that is obvious to any true lover of America’s better angels, especially marginalized citizens.
The GOP House Conference (or any sector of it) is certainly not ready for primetime.
