What rational country would throw away the genius of their children just because of their skin color? What politician who loves their country would knowingly promote racial and religious hatred? This insanity is what the GOP has descended into.
While 82% of Biden voters thought the three murderers of Ahmaud Arbery should be convicted, fewer than a third of Trump voters shared that opinion.
For America’s entire history politics has turned on issues of race. Because craven Republican politicians have been openly promoting racial hatred and white supremacy for electoral advantage since passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, this moment in time is both the same and also far more dangerous.
There’s an abundance of analysis in the media about how many people are voting for Republicans, what that’ll mean for GOP power going forward, and how Republican politicians (and a few Democrats) will be more and more able to ignore their voters while taking bribes from corporations and billionaires because of gerrymandering and voter suppression laws.
But there’s an almost total lack of issue-based analysis of why voters — predominantly white voters, who have over-50% voted for the Republican in every presidential election since 1964 — are voting for Republicans, even as the party becomes more fringe with regard to basic science and belief in democracy.
Democrats are clear about the issues. They’ve already put into place or are working hard to pass (and, in states when they can, delivering) the following to voters:
- Medicare for all seniors with expanded coverage for dental, vision and hearing
- Medicaid for all low-income working people
- Unemployment insurance to save all families when the economy hiccups
- A cleaner environment for everybody
- Good-paying union jobs for all workers
- A $15/hour minimum wage for all working people
- Free or low-cost college and trade school for everybody
- Free universal pre-K for all children
- Paid sick and family leave for all workers
- Less expensive prescription drugs for everyone
- Rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure so all can use it
Republicans have opposed literally every single one of these things (although a handful of Republicans voted for the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill because it has hundreds of billions in corporate subsidies built into it, the price they extracted for their support).
Meanwhile, in addition to opposing all of the above, Republicans are promising their white voters they will:
- Stop teaching the history of Black and Native peoples in schools
- Build a wall on our southern border to stop Brown people from entering
- Change voting laws to cut back on hours and locations in Black neighborhoods, making for multi-hour waits to vote
- Push “School choice” so white families can send their kids to all-white schools
- Put in more tax cuts for 99% white billionaires and 90%+ white-male-run giant corporations
- Defend white supremacy militias (or at least promise to ignore their threats and crimes)
- Loosen gun laws so we’ll have more and deadlier weapons of war on our streets
- Promote hate and fear of Muslims and other mostly non-white religions and minorities
- Reduce criminal penalties for injuring or killing protesters with cars
- Eliminate criminal penalties for intimidating people with open-carry guns
- Privatizate Social Security and Medicare so bankster donors can scam and suck retirees dry
- Attack any programs that push America toward racial equality of opportunity, income, or wealth as “anti-white discrimination”
Thus, we find the answer to the question about why Republicans are choosing the path they’re on: they believe pandering to racists and inflaming racism, homophobia, and religious intolerance will win them elections.
Ever since the 1968 election when Richard Nixon mobilized racists and white supremacists across the nation with his “Southern Strategy,” the GOP has positioned itself as the party of white people. They claim to stand for the blue collar worker, the rural hunter, the country music crowd, NASCAR and wrestling fans: all are well represented in their media like Fox and their political campaigns.
All have also been largely white cultural touchstones for generations, but the GOP has embraced and clung to them since the Party rebranded itself after “wimpy” George HW Bush didn’t know how a supermarket checkout scanner worked.
But none of that should be political.
Millions of Democrats who like Country music and own guns also believe it’s possible for America to show the world that a truly multiracial democracy is both possible and stronger than a country that simply depends on DNA for its identity.
What rational country, after all, would intentionally block or throw away the talent and genius of an entire generation of young people who could change the world for the better, just because of their skin pigment?
Citibank published a report in 2020 documenting the cost of racism in America today. Just between 2000 and 2020, they show, all of America lost $16 trillion in GDP because discriminatory lending practices kneecapped entrepreneurs in Black neighborhoods ($13 trillion), discriminatory hiring and other business practices cut Black wages by $2.7 trillion, and hundreds of billions were lost to housing and education discrimination.
This is the biggest challenge America has faced since the Civil War.
The Democratic Party represents policies the majority of Americans support according to every serious poll in the past few decades. Democrats want a functioning republic where all people are respected, supported, and have due process under law.
Democrats have worked for almost a century to produce and maintain a strong middle class so people can reach their greatest potential and raise their families without constant economic anxiety.
The Republican Party, representing policies of racial and religious separation and oligarchy supported only by a minority of Americans (albeit a slight majority of white people), has worked for at least forty years to pit Americans against each other, enrich the top 1% while stripping wealth from the bottom 90%, and rig the rules for elections to continue GOP minority rule.
Republicans hide behind cultural symbols mentioned earlier to conceal their real goal, which is to turn large parts of America into whites-only apartheid regions while stripping working class people of what little wealth they have left and handing it over to the top 1%.
My colleague on SiriusXM radio, Dean Obeidallah, notes how deeply hate and racism as politics has gone systemic in the GOP: “Only 11 House Republicans of over 200 voted to condemn Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for her bigoted comments about Muslims, Jews, and Blacks as well as her embrace of political violence versus Democrats.”
As groups of armed white supremacists roam the streets this holiday season terrorizing shoppers and intimidating people of color, it’s important for America to confront the deep racial divide in our body politic before more shooting starts.
We’ve already seen a white supremacist travel to El Paso and murder 22 people after writing, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. … They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
In doing that, he was mimicking Donald Trump‘s repeated use of “invasion“ language and Tucker Carlson’s promotion of the “white replacement theory” to villianize Central American families fleeing famine and violence.
Another white supremacist murdered 9 Black people at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, SC while shouting white supremacist rhetoric. And the list of unarmed Black people killed by police in America is too long to detail here, but you can find it on Wikipedia.
Like greed, racism will never go away. But it can be weakened through integration and education, controlled by the force of law, and removed from the public square by our nation agreeing to shame racists and white supremacists.
When we have tried these tools they have been largely effective; our military is probably the best example of what’s possible, although they are still a work in progress.
But the last thing that should ever happen in America is that a political party would choose to use racial or religious hatred as a primary tool to win elections, thus inching America ever closer to more severe bloodshed.
As the recent case of Lauren Boebert attacking Ilhan Omar shows, religious and racial hatred must be called out, universally condemned, and ended if we are to be a civilized society.
The repeated failure of Republican leadership to repudiate racism in their ranks is a troubling sign about the direction they want America to head.
That social media companies are letting such messages be amplified and foreign trolls are jumping in to try to worsen the situation shows our vulnerability to this cultural poison.
Racial and religious hatred are tearing apart countries around the world, and leading to atrocities and religious violence today from Myanmar to India to the Middle East.
America has an opportunity to show the world that it is possible for people of different races and religions to live together in peace and harmony, and to work together for a better nation and world.
But it won’t happen until the Republican Party stops exploiting racial and religious hatred for political purposes.
Originally posted at The Hartmann Report