The De(con)struction of the Republican Party

When I was a kid growing up in rural East Texas, the thugs running around wearing sheets and burning crosses were all Democrats. Back then, for the most part, the Republican Party was still the Party of Lincoln—at least as far as the south was concerned.

 

Things were happening, though, that turned that situation on its ear, one of which was the Civil Rights Movement, when African Americans in the south finally said ‘enough is enough, it’s time that this country delivered on the promises made in its founding documents.

 

About the time of this movement, many Republicans began to notice that Democrats outside the south were siding with labor, women, immigrants, and (heaven forbid) minorities, and were becoming dominant in urban areas where most of the minorities and immigrants resided. So, some Republicans began changing their focus to angry White men and rural dwellers, and a lot of those southern Democrats jumped ship and joined them, especially after Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat from Texas supported the Civil Rights Act.

 

Today, I watch the not-so-slow devolution of the Grand Old Party into an assemblage of misanthropes, misogynists, and white supremacists, and I can’t help but wonder—how long, how much longer can it survive before it implodes.

 

I was actually a Republican once. Like I said, where I grew up it was the Democrats who wore sheets and burned crosses. I changed over to the Democratic Party when I realized that it was no longer them doing these things. Those Democrats were now Republicans.

 

Those are the people who give their loyalty to a man who thinks that Al Capone was a ‘great’ man, and who admires dictators like Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. They cheer him when he says that if he’s elected president, he’ll be a dictator for a day, and will sic the Justice Department and IRS on the media, his political opponents, and any Republicans who were ‘disloyal’ to him.

 

You have some Republicans who try to say that he’s only ‘joking,’ as if joking about such things is the appropriate thing to do, while others (with a few notable exceptions) keep quiet for fear that they’ll anger his fans.

 

It’s not just one person, or one place that’s showing frays at the seams either. Republicans in Congress object to the U.S. Army removing a Confederate monument from Arlington National Cemetery, a place where those who have fought and died to defend the Constitution are laid to rest. The monument, on the other hand, honors those who took up arms against that same Constitution and who try to paint the enslavement of others as ‘not such a bad thing.’ These people want to rewrite history to take out the parts they don’t like, as in Florida when the governor supported a change in the African American history curriculum that said that those enslaved learn skills that benefited them. I’m still laughing over that one to keep from screaming and pulling my hair.

 

In Texas, the governor, the Republican-controlled legislature, and the Republican State Supreme Court have decided to replace doctors when it comes to decisions about a pregnant woman’s health, putting women—especially poor women who can’t afford to leave the damn state to get proper treatment—and then the state attorney general had the gall to say that women should sue their doctors over the inability to get the proper treatment, not the jackasses who put legal barriers in place.

 

Hypocrisy seems to be the new motto of this once noble party. They call for prosecution of a woman who gets an abortion, but want clemency for the thugs who invaded and desecrated the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They are against same-sex marriage, but the chair of one state party was recently accused of rape and of engaging in orgies with his wife and other women—the wife, by the way, is a member of school boards and is part of a group that wants to ban books that they consider offensive.

 

I could go on and on ad infinitum, but I think the point is made. Politics is truly the last refuge of scoundrels, but one of America’s two main parties has elevated that phrase to new heights. It has become a haven for scam artists, serial liars, and wannabe autocrats who make accusations about bad behavior while trying to keep their own bad behavior from view. Well, some of them do. Others act as bad as they please in full view, and when caught, deny, deflect, and distract.

 

They are dancing with the devil. But what will they do when he music stops?