The Daily Escape:
Yachats, OR – November 2020 photo by Roberta Johnson
Did you realize that the Republicans have made it a long-term strategy to delegitimize the last four Democratic presidents? That includes Carter, Clinton, Obama and now, Biden.
What tactics the GOP will use against Biden probably haven’t been fully fleshed out yet, but it’s still seven days until the Electoral College’s “Safe Harbor” date; 13 days until Electoral College votes are cast; and 50 days until Joe Biden is inaugurated.
There’s plenty of time for their plan to come together, but you can be sure that it will be déjà vu all over again. What we already know is that many Republicans are already coming out of the woodwork to criticize Biden or his nominees to various key positions. From the WaPo:
“In near-identical tweets this week, GOP senators Tom Cotton (AK), Josh Hawley (MO) and Marco Rubio (FL) all came out pretty aggressively against Biden’s Cabinet picks.”
The common thread of their tweets is a resistance to the educated, steeped-in-government expertise that Biden wants to shape his government with. Imagine the anti-elitists making that argument: Cotton graduated from Harvard undergraduate, and Harvard Law. Hawley graduated from Stanford, and Yale Law School. All three Senators voted for Trump’s Cabinet, which was filled with people who also went to Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League schools. Trump also bragged about going to an Ivy League school.
Even Larry Hogan, Republican governor of Maryland, who told Trump to concede, saw fit on Monday to endorse the two Georgia Republican Senate candidates, Loeffler and Perdue. So even the better ones aren’t changing their spots.
And we still have the twin Republican stains on the country: Eleven months into the Covid mess, sourcing sufficient testing is still a struggle, and we’re still short on PPE. As Robert Reich said:
“Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.”
The cost of the Republicans’ misplaced attention is clear: While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for sourcing PPE or tests. There’s no national standard for stay-at-home orders, or mask mandates. There’s no funding for additional Covid relief.
Instead, the Republicans have led millions of Trump voters to believe the election was stolen. They will be a hostile force for years, supporting Trump’s presidency-in-exile at least until the 2024 elections. Delegitimizing Biden will pull lots of money into Trump’s newly formed PAC. It also allows Trump to keep himself at the center of media attention.
One thing this delegitimizing of Biden will do is keep the political gridlock going for another four years.
That will continue to enable the 40-year old Republican heist. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades after WWII, the bottom 90% of Americans would now be $47 trillion richer. More from Reich:
“The upward redistribution of $47tn wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.”
Today, we live in the richest third world country on the planet. Since Covid hit, the rich got richer. The Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared while most of America has become poorer.
By the end of this pandemic, Trump’s legacy will have entered Pol Pot territory. He’s been ever-present, even while being a terrible president. There were no checks or balances. The GOP gave him everything he wanted, up to and including a theocratic SCOTUS.
Now we need to make sure we’ll never have another authoritarian President. We’ll do that by cleaning out the political rot. It will be hard work, it means that we need to be citizens, not merely consumers. With the Conservatives trying to combine Church and State with big business, what must be done will be hugely difficult to accomplish.
Ruminate on the return of the darkness by listening to Disturbed’s cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence”. Perhaps the best cover song ever:
Listen carefully to the words, and you will understand the story of the decline of our values and our country.
