It’s the fall of 2012. Election season. Presidential elections always seem to bring out the crazy in American politics (or maybe the crazy is always there, and it just gets louder this time of year?).
Though mudslinging, gaffes and dirty tactics have always been a staple of American politics since this nation’s inception, we’ve always managed to make up for the quadrennial spectacle of the presidential election cycle in a few ways: America has long claimed a dogged and independent press and an American public that was not only willing to engage in the national discourse, but reveled in their participation.
These are the ingredients to a vibrant democracy–and yet, today’s America suffers from a lack of both these things. The American press has long since succumbed to corporatism, and the American people are not only less engaged in politics, they have become progressively more naïve and misinformed with each election cycle, becoming fertile ground for increasingly more extreme (and idiotic) political ideologies.
America’s political landscape is as fractious as it was in the years leading up to the Civil War, and far more ridiculous: Who would’ve thought four years ago that the Tea Party, a spurious “grassroots” movement of conspiracy theorists and right-wing nutcases constrained to the fringes, would completely hijack the Republican Party by 2012?
The GOP party platform reads like a laundry list of the Tea Party’s wildest ambitions: the platform, drafted in Florida, includes constitutional ban on abortion, even in cases of rape or incest; a constitutional amendment requiring a supermajority in Congress to approve any new taxes, with an exception for taxes used to fund war efforts; an immigration plank that opposes, “any forms of amnesty” for illegal immigrants, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
It’s the most conservative platform in American history, and the Republican Party’s official declaration of surrender to its most extremist fringes. The Tea Party and the Grand Old Party are now, for all intents and purposes, one and the same.
In fact, the Republican Party’s platform is derived, almost word for word, from the Tea Party’s own, “Freedom Platform”–a twelve-point plan put forward by FreedomWorks, a “grassroots” organization that is actually a reincarnated offshoot of the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation (a conservative activism organization largely funded by the oil baron billionaire Koch brothers–the antithesis of grassroots in every sense of the word).
In other words, a major political party has copy-pasted its own political platform.
A party platform affirms the spirit of the party and its politics; it is a declaration of character to the American electorate and the world at large. What the Republican Party platform tells us is that the GOP has become a party governed by its most extreme–the gung-ho, downsize-government-by-any-means (save tax increases for the wealthiest–God forbid!), fundamentalist culture warriors–backed by wealthy private donors whose corporate interests are often at odds with the interests of the American public.
The Republican National Convention begins on Tuesday in Tampa, Fl., and already the super PACs and major corporate backers have descended as guests of honor. All of them have donated the requisite millions in exchange for access and political clout, exchanging money for influence on the issues that impact their bottom line. The word for this sort of politics isn’t democracy; it is plutocracy–government by the wealthy few.
And if you think it’s just the spirit of the season that’s bringing out the worst in conservatism, that this will pass once the election is over (no matter which way it swings), I must beg to differ: Consider the party’s presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, and his running mate, Paul Ryan. Now there’s a pair that exemplifies everything gone wrong in modern Republicanism: Romney is a wooden, flip-flopping plutocrat who pretends at centrism–the “mainstream” of the Republican Party today–while Ryan is an Ayn Rand acolyte with a draconian voting record, a Tea Party posterboy.
The Republican Party has a long history with radicalism: It was founded in the 19th century by anti-slavery activists and modernizers, the “crazy liberals” of their day–it wasn’t until the early 20th century that the party went through an ideological inversion and became the home of American conservatism.
But now Republicanism has transmogrified into something beyond traditional American conservatism, into something ridiculous and contemptible: it has become a party that serves the interests its biggest donors, instead of the American people, a party that lionizes ignorance and antagonizes science (58% of Republicans now believe that planet Earth is 10,000 or younger).
The Republican Party has become a demented caricature of itself, and when I watch the convention in Tampa this week, what I’ll really be seeing is the death of a once proud political party–consumed by extremity.
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