Republicans in states like Tennessee, North Carolina, Utah, Texas and Florida have been making national news by railroading lopsided measures through legislatures. This whole idea of using overwhelming muscle to subvert America’s long-standing commitment to bipartisanship is a pattern observable in democracies making the transition to aristocracy and even monarchy.
What are Republicans up to in America? On the surface they are dealing with issues such as ending abortion, discouraging transgender medical care and stifling gun control. Utah lately has demonstrated a fondness for regressive income tax cuts, a voucher program weakening public schools and shoring up the homebuilding industry by offering down-payment loans to working families who likely cannot afford expensive mortgages.
However, the long-term agenda of Republicans is to divide the nation into two classes, the super-wealthy aristocracy or nobility, and the remaining middle class plus working poor.
Republicans are attempting to do this by depriving minorities and even city majorities of effective political representation in legislatures and by depriving workers of economic representation in unions. They want the super-minority wealthy class to have special political, social, legal and economic privileges not accessible to ordinary folks.
They essentially want to go back to a feudal system where a landed aristocracy lords it over politically powerless tenants who pay rent to live on their properties and can be evicted at will.
To this end, they are participating in long-term gerrymandering strategies, politicization of the judiciary in order to overturn democratically enacted laws of the legislature, tilting toward landlord hegemony and manufacturing election hoaxes so as to justify rolling back progress in voter rights and civil rights.
Republicans want to stifle dissent wherever it pops up, like at public speeches given by Republicans, or in dissent expressed on the floor of state legislatures.
They are stonewalling any attempt to break up monopolies or raise taxes on corporations or the absurdly rich. With their silence and their lobbying money, they are defending against any return to the Judeo-Christian world’s strict disapproval of high interest rates charged on consumers in general and on the working poor.
Together with evangelical churches, they are promoting the libertarian philosophy that government is bad and only conservative churches and Republicans are good. They are promoting eminent domain projects to take over private homes and farms for pipelines. They are pushing for vastly expanded prerogatives for executive branches of government. They are flamboyantly exercising their social priority of leisure, luxury and libido — the life of “ease” characteristic of European nobility and royalty.
They are asserting monarchist-style immunities against prosecution of national senators and the president. They are shielding evangelical religious denominations supportive of Republicans from accountability for financial and sexual abuses.
They are beginning to fool around with England’s thoroughly monarchist tradition of expelling duly elected “lower class” Democrats from state legislative chambers.
Republicans, amazingly, are finding their way down this path like blind mice without reading any history of democracies like Athens, Rome, ancient Israel and medieval England. Roughhousing comes naturally to the super greedy. Greed makes them unafraid of hypocrisy and mindful of nothing but their own interests. Money overcomes all and teaches everything.
But true Republicans and true Democrats are going to have to read some of that history to understand what is happening in America today. Democracy does not come all that naturally to folks. We need to study it and then fight for it like our ancestors did in this country.
Kimball Shinkoskey
Kimball Shinkoskey, Woods Cross, is the author of “The American Kings: Growth in Presidential Power from George Washington to Barack Obama,” 2014 and “Democracy and the Ten Commandments,” 2016.
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