It really is fascinating watching every Republican office holder ignore the fact that they personally and their party have uttelry failed their biggest test: 220,000 Americans and counting have died on their watch--and their actions have steadily made that toll worse.
1/
1/
2/ Most important; it's not just individuals who bear the blame, though FSM knows they do, from @realDonaldTrump on down. Republicanism itself has failed. Its core, default ideas have been tried and found wanting. No. Private enterprise didn't get PPE to hospitals in time...
3/ No: individual choice in the face of a collective emergency won't keep people safe. No: crony capitalism really does impede the response to a crisis. No: public health--socialized medical response--is vital to the security of the US. No: viruses don't care about your racism...
4/ and maybe first: No: your "opinion" is not better than science--which is, again, a socialized endeavor, performed in collaborations, funded by the taxpayer. No vaccines without government bio-medical funding. No new drugs. No research to see what actually works. etc...
5/ Some GOP articles of faith could once (though emphatically no longer can) form coherent, principled political philosophical framework: small, decentralized government etc. But society--and our habitat--in the 21st c. are not what they were in Lincoln's day...
6/ and the scope for such ideas/shibboleths has shrunk. And the malign barnacles that now encrust Lincoln's formerly great party--the racism, the metastasized "what's good for mega rich/megacorp is good enough for America" schtick etc. leave it wholly unfit for power now...
7/ So much so that the only reason someone like McConnell can offer as a reason to vote for him or the GOP is power itself. The GOP will hurt the people its voters want hurt, and divert public money and agency to its patrons; that's the role it now embraces.
So...
So...
8/ When we echo Cato (or at least, when I do) to say that The GOP must be destroyed and its fields salted this is why. We need an opposition party; but for such 2 party systems to work certain assumptions about governance and the governed need to be shared...
9/ The GOP does not see those who do not vote for it or bribe (excuse me, donate to) it as Americans. It does not, collectively, see many of them as fully human....
10/ And that means the simply cannot exercise power, ultimately, even on behalf of their supporters: the virus spreading from Sturgis and Trump rallies doesn't care that those it touches thought it would/should only target Democrats...
11. So, yeah...a center-right opposition party that actually thought about what it means to constrain government power in an irreducibly interconnected world would be a good thing...
12/ It cannot come to be until the existing GOP is stabbed through the heart, its corpse sundered into quarters, each buried at a crossroads where gallows once stood, and then dug up, burned, with the ashes scattered, N, E, S, and W at a location never to be revealed.
/fin
/fin
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