The Republican dystopia

It's hard to fight against people whose only value is winning.

I hate to be depressing, but it really feels like we are entering a dystopia created by the Republican Party and a cast of bad actors looking to profit from the chaos. Donald Trump is spewing so much bullshit it’s hard to know what is serious and what is distraction. Elon Musk is using his platform as a firehose of disinformation to spread division and remake a world order preferable to billionaires and their lackeys. The NCGOP and one of its losing candidates is trying hard to steal an election by retroactively disenfranchising thousands of voters who have already cast a ballot. They are creating a country that I don’t recognize.

I no longer see Republicans as people with whom I disagree. I see them as enemies of the liberal order, people who have lost their moral bearings, enabling authoritarians and grifters to take control of our state and nation. They have little respect for anything but power. They are the illiberal opportunists who have compromised their democratic values for smaller victories like lower taxes, less regulation, or pro-life policies. They rationalize that protecting these victories justifies diminishing democracy.

I see elements of them throughout our history. They are the architects of Jim Crow. They are the robber barons of the Gilded Age. They are the yellow journalists of the Hearst empire. Greed is their North Star. They will tolerate hate, oppression, and injustice in pursuit of wealth and power. They achieve it by manipulating the working class through fear and sensationalism.

I have lost respect for them because I knew them in the time before Trump. I knew them when they so believed in the power of democracy that they supported wars to impose it on Middle Eastern dictatorships. I knew them when they insisted competition was the panacea for all of our ills. I knew them when they argued that morality was essential to responsible governance. I knew them when offering big donors a night in the Lincoln Bedroom was so scandalous, it warranted calls for a special investigator. I knew them when lying about an affair was a reason for impeachment. I knew them before they supported a man running for President of the United States who violated almost all of the values they claimed were most sacred.

Today, their core value is a belief in power at all costs. They are employing the same tactics used to disenfranchise African Americans at the beginning of the 20th century while rejecting the power of competition to improve government. They are preparing to embrace tariffs on our allies as a major foreign policy tool. They apparently support upending the post-war order by ignoring the rights of sovereign states. They promote a billionaire who spreads blatant disinformation and supports neo-Nazi organizations on his platform as the purveyor of free speech. They oppose the basic concepts of liberty and justice for all.

As we move into the new administration, my instinct says follow the money. Trump II is little more than a grift supported and enabled by a major political party. The goal is to enrich his family and political allies at the expense of the country. The thirteen billionaires Trump is bringing into his administration are almost certainly in on the grift. Not many people get to be that rich by looking out for other people. Once-respectable Republicans will look the other way as they plunder the country because of tax cuts and deregulation. They’ll bend themselves into pretzels trying to justify Trump’s deals with dictators and authoritarians, but don’t worry, they’ll do it.

There’s little moral ambiguity here. They are siding with forces of reaction that were unacceptable to American society and politics not long ago. Before 2016, Republicans like Thom Tillis would have agreed with me, both about Donald Trump’s lack of character and most of his policies. Not today. Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own image, amoral and driven by greed. It’s hard to respect people like that.

The next four years, and maybe forty, are going to be difficult. The fight out of this mess will be long and hard. The MAGA Republicans are far more ruthless than Democrats or progressives. They have little qualms about manipulating rules, destroying norms and institutions, or harming people because winning is all that matters to them. Giving up, though, is not an option.