From Moral High Ground to Lowest Common Denominator

I don’t know if anyone remembers back this far, back when the Republican Party used to sell itself as the up-keepers of all things moral and pure in America. It’s difficult to win elections when your party represents a small fraction of the electorate so they had to make claims that would arouse the passions of the poor slobs they needed to vote in their policies which reflect the interests of the richest few.

Republicans latched on to the issue of abortion and politicized it to serve their own interests. Rich people always have and always will have access to abortion. The same has been true in Spain where abortion was illegal for decades. The wealthy just go to countries where the procedure is accepted. The Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade in 1973 changed only one thing: now abortion would be available to poor people. Republicans don’t really give a shit about abortion as the rich do whatever they choose to do, but they saw an easy way to swing voters over to their side.

For decades Republicans ranted on and on about American family values (white families, of course) and homos and God and other issues as they pretended to take the moral high ground. It worked. They won a lot of elections and now control most of our government. They have moved away from the thorny task of being morally superior and have changed their tactics in gaining voters. Their new strategy is simply making working class Americans angry, usually directing that anger towards other working class Americans.

Many Americans consider Muslim extremists to be our number one problem even though this is hardly a problem at all. The same goes for illegal Mexican immigration. Make people angry at other groups and you can get them to listen to you. Trump’s “shithole countries” meme is pure fascist rhetoric. Now “fascist” isn’t a word that I use lightly and when I say that something is fascist I don’t fucking mean that it’s sort of, kind of like fascism. Demonizing whole groups of humanity is not like fascist rhetoric, it is pure fascist rhetoric. It is pure filth and needs to be fought by any means necessary.

I never believed the Republican-generated myth that they were somehow more upstanding than Democrats. I don’t give a damn about Trump’s relationship with a porn star, or his proclivity to having Russian prostitutes urinate on him, or the fact that he’s been married three times, or that he is the biggest piece of human garbage I could ever imagine. Republicans spent eight years investigating Bill Clinton over a blow job yet seem unconcerned about Trump’s behavior. I never cared about Clinton’s sex life nor do I concern myself with Trump’s peccadilloes.

What I do care about is how he is quickly dismantling whatever was left of the middle class while he fuels the class warfare at the bottom. The more our nation slides into functional illiteracy, the easier it is to manipulate people on the bottom rungs and pit them against one another while the financial elite confiscates our national wealth.