REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

THE GOP SEEMS TO BE HEADING IN THE DIRECTION OF HITLER’S GERMANY

 

…House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, says he agrees with the results of the 2020 election...?

 

The Polls suggest that the “Party of Lincoln” is heading toward authoritarianism

 

This is probably the closest that this nation has come to losing its small “d” democracy.

And the reason is due to the current Donald Trump “Big Lie” about his "stolen 2020 election," and how the polls say the Republicans are reacting to him and the “Big Lie”.

The poll results are that almost ½ of the Republicans are now saying that they would prefer to ditch this whole “democracy thing”.

The CBS News-YouGov poll conducted this month is very disturbing. The survey asked only Republicans a series of questions about their level of support for the former president Donald Trump.  They were asked about their views of the 2020 election and priorities for the party going forward.  The results were very bleak.

Two-thirds said it was “important for Republicans to be loyal to Donald Trump now.”  The same share of the Republicans said they did not believe President Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. They obviously missed or don’t agree with the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) recent statement that “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.”

The most troubling results came from a question about the party’s best strategy for winning in 2022 and 2024.  They were asked that: "If you were consulting for the party, would you focus on developing a message and popular policies and ideas to win over more voters? Or would you prioritize recent changes to the voting rules in U.S. states and districts?”

A whopping 47% chose the latter to “prioritize the new voting rules being adopted in many states and districts”.  In other words, nearly half of those who still identify as Republicans appear to have given up on the key basis of a democracy: “That you earn the right to govern by proposing ideas that appeal to a majority of the public.  They would prefer to short-circuit that process and, instead, make it harder for their opponents to legally vote.

So much for what was formally called “the party of ideas,” as the GOP once called itself.

In truth, the Republican Party mostly stopped coming up with new ideas about three decades ago, when it declared Reaganomics gospel and rarely looked back.  No matter what evidence has since become available, GOP officials falsely insist that tax cuts pay for themselves and that less regulation is always better.   However, the GOP has been two-faced about that statement when it comes to immigrants or trade deals or the personal enemies of a Republican president.  To this day, some Republican politicians claim that it’s really Trump’s policy ideas, incoherent though they may be, that energize their base. 

But GOP party leaders let it slip last summer that they no longer stood for any fixed principles whatsoever except their loyalty to Trump.  This was made clear when the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that it would not adopt a platform for the presidential election.  This was the first time they did so since the party’s founding more than 160 years earlier.  Instead, the RNC released a groveling resolution that it would “continue to enthusiastically support” Donald Trump and his “America-first agenda,” whatever America First’s requirements might be.

Since that announcement, party officials have prized allegiance to Trump above all else.  That is shown by, among other things, the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her party leadership role. (This occurred mainly because Cheney agreed that Joe Biden was the legitimate president.) They have likewise abandoned the pursuit of the policies that voters actually want, or that could otherwise improve their constituents’ lives.  In fact, GOP’s political rhetoric is today consumed by rants about Biden having “fake burger restrictions”, or “Mr. Potato Head”.  Meanwhile, their actual policymaking apparatus has been laser-focused on voter suppression.  So far this year, Republican legislators in at least 47 states have introduced bills that would restrict ballot access; at least 12 states have already made it harder to vote.  They understand that when more people vote, the Republicans lose.

One faction of the party favors measures pushing crazy election lawsuits or supporting the bogus ballot “audit” in Arizona.  Then there’s supposedly the more respectable contingent, who prefer to pass laws that make it harder to cast ballots in the first place.  Yes, some of the state’s local Republican officials, once treated as (small-d) democratic heroes for resisting Trumpian pressures to overturn the 2020 election.  They have also been on the vanguard of anti-voter-suppression measures.  But those Republican individuals are few and far between.

There has been much hand-wringing over the past few years about “democratic backsliding."  That’s a phrase that conjures up images of a populace, perhaps unknowingly, heading toward authoritarianism.  What this poll and other polls, what they suggest is that many Republican Americans are instead running headlong into the arms of authoritarianism.

What is perplexing, and disturbing, is that so many constituents apparently demand nothing more from their politicians.  Half of the Republicans apparently ask only that the people wearing their same jerseys, that they salute the boss and stay in office, by whatever anti-democratic means is necessary.

If one looks back in history to what happened to Germany, just before WWII, turning it into Hitler’s Germany, it was very similar to what is currently happening to Donald Trump’s Republican party.

Think about it!

Copyright G. Ater 2021