In May I wrote a blog post called the Radicalization of the Republican Party giving a historical overview of how the Republican Party came to be well, so radicalized. This picks up where that one left off, but if you missed that one, no worries. This one should stand alone.
This week, religious-right commentator Eric Metaxas said this about why people shouldn’t get the vaccine: “The bottom line is, questions come up about the vaccine. I’ve watched this pandemic roll out and I’m not afraid of getting it. My kids are not afraid of getting it. This is not a big deal for us. I’m not going to put some experimental thing in my system . . . If the government or everybody is telling you you have to do something … that’s not the American way, folks, and if only to be a rebel, you need to say, ‘I’m not going to do that.”
Chris Christie echoed these ideas. While talking about the many focus groups he’s been in with unvaccinated Republicans, he said, “What they don’t want is to be ‘indoctrinated’. . . these folks do not respond to being ordered to do things.” He then quoted one unvaccinated Republican who said, “I don’t want the government telling me what I have to do.”
Well, that’s ridiculous, right? The government is always telling us what we have to do. We live by rules and laws.
On Wednesday, Phil Berger, a Republican in the North Carolina Senate sent out an email urging people to ignore the latest CDC mask guidelines. He wrote this:
This clip shows St. Louis County voters cheering as the St. Louis County Council votes to end the mask mandates.
It’s obvious where the anti-vaccine, anti-mask policies lead. As if on cue, this week we learned that Arkansas children’s hospitals are seeing record high numbers of children hospitalized with COVID-19.
The Republicans are literally cultivating a lawless, rule-breaking base bent on undermining the government.
Wayne Lance on Twitter, obviously feeling somewhat exasperated, wrote:
In my last two blog posts, I suggested that “normal” is intolerable to them. Since 1954, “normal” is a nation moving steadily toward a multi-racial secular democracy.
Sociologists Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan explain what’s happening in an article entitled, “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy.”
A “crisis of legitimacy,” (which is when a group no longer believes the government is legitimate) happens under two conditions. First, when one or more social groups are experiencing what we call a “representation crisis” because the political establishment does not appear to govern on its behalf. Second, when an “incumbent” group is experiencing a “power-devaluation crisis” because the political establishment is [or I guess appears to be] favoring new social groups over established groups.
That’s fancy language for “they don’t like the fact that women, Blacks, and other minorities are moving into positions of power.”
Here you go. Jesse Kelly, host of the nationally syndicated ‘I’m Right,” came right out and said it:
When people don’t believe the political establishment has legitimacy, they seek to destroy it.
These anti-government sentiments are really no surprise when you consider that the Republicans have assembled a coalition of groups that dislike and want to dismantle the federal government.
Each group has its own reasons.
White Evangelicals—an important part of the Republican coalition—believe the United States is (or should be) a Christian nation. They reject the authority of the government insofar as it takes power from the church.
They call it Christian nationalism. This definition comes from Christianity Today. Christian nationalism is the belief that “the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. America is defined by its ‘Anglo-Protestant’ past and that we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural identity.
Anglo, of course, means White.
You can see that White evangelicals have much in common with White supremacists and Confederate sympathizers. Both believe that White heritage should be preserved, and that without it, they lose their “freedom.”
Like White evangelicals, Confederate sympathizers also reject much of the authority of the federal government. They did so at the time of the Civil War when they understood that the federal government—if given enough power—would end slavery. They’ve done so since the modern Civil Rights movement because the federal government ended racial segregation and passed legislation designed to give equal rights to Blacks and other minorities. To borrow language from the sociologists I quoted earlier, they feel they are “devalued” and that new groups are “favored” by the political establishment.
That brings me to corporate conservatives, who also reject the authority of the federal government, particularly the regulatory agencies and regulations put in place since the New Deal because they don’t think–for example–that they should have to pay taxes to support public services. They also don’t think the government should regulate them.
Since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when Roosevelt tried to bring electricity to rural areas, they have derided such services as “communism.”
Corporate conservatives have been trying for decades to dismantle the New Deal, weaken regulatory agencies, and roll back regulations that limit corporate power. When people like Steve Bannon talk about destroying the “deep state,” they mean the regulatory agencies and regulations that get in the way of [White] men doing whatever they please and getting rich by any means available to them.
The New Deal included worker protections as well as regulations preventing corporate America from fixing prices, manipulating markets, and other forms of what we now call white-collar crimes, but what didn’t used to be illegal. Corporate conservatives dislike all of that and call it federal government overreach.
As the Republican Party hardens into an anti-government coalition, we can expect the messages spouted by the leaders to become more outlandish because rejecting the Biden administration means rejecting science and rejecting regulations that protect people.
A YouGov poll from January found that 30 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon conspiracy theories. That percentage has probably increased because, since the insurrection, moderates have been fleeing the Republican Party. Major media outlets reported that voters fled the Republican Party after the Capitol riots. Remaining in the Republican Party are the people who are okay with insurrections and who reject the authority of the federal government for one reason or another. Some of them hate all government. The people left in the Republican Party are also those who are comfortable sharing their party with White supremacists who openly declare their sympathy for the former Confederacy.
Authors Hahl, Kim, and Sivan explain that when people want to destroy the political establishment, they’re willing to accept lies and liars and outlandish explanations because they know these lies destroy the political establishment.
We can therefore expect more and more absurdities, like what we’ve heard lately from people like Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York.
On Tuesday, as the House began its investigation into the January 6th insurrection, she blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the January 6th attack, saying, “Capitol police raised concerns. Rather than provide them with the support and resources they need, Nancy Pelosi prioritized her partisan political needs over their safety. The American people deserve to know the truth, that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility, as speaker of the House, for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6.”
The absurdities in that should be obvious, particularly because the Republicans can’t seem to get their stories straight. Was the Capitol riot no big deal, as many of them assert? Or was it a tragedy that’s all Nancy Pelosi’s fault?
Let’s face it. How hard is it to figure out which candidate the insurrectionists supported and why they attacked on that day?
It makes sense that a party consisting of key coalitions that reject the authority of the federal government for one reason or another would go to great lengths to shield and defend insurrectionists—and do all they can to obscure the truth about what happened on January 6th.
