Democracy Is Now Un-American

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

Oft-repeated sentiments from prominent Republicans (and their media mouthpieces) about who are and who are not “real Americans” underpin the effort to keep their fellow Americans from voting. Republicans have spent 30 years demonizing their neighbors: from Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, to Muslims and gays, immigrants and intellectuals, to people living in what Americans once proudly considered the cultural melting pots of its largest cities. To anyone, writes Lofgren, “who doesn’t look, think, or talk like the GOP base.” More recently, the enemies list has expanded to include school teachers, public employees, and the nearly half of Americans who — according to carefully parsed propaganda — pay “no taxes.”

Most of the GOP elite probably do not believe all the “paranoid claptrap,” says Lofgren, but that doesn’t keep them from feeding “the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.” Even as the economy shrinks, the conservative message machine has so assiduously widened its citizenship exclusion zone that paranoid patriots may soon find themselves cut off and surrounded in what the founders’ War Department dubbed “Indian country.”

Lofgren, who spent most of that same 30 years working for the GOP on Capitol Hill, now finds himself exiled among the lessers. He concludes:

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don’t want those people  voting.

You can probably guess who those people  are.

As for Lofgren, he retired out of concern for the direction his party is taking America, as well as out of contempt for the “feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats” without the spine to stop them. But retiring, he admits, was also “an act of rational self-interest.” It was fine working on the payroll of an apocalyptic cult so long as its targets were union members and the private sector pensions and health benefits of those people . But once the GOP turned its “decades-long campaign of scorn” against government workers like Lofgren, it was time for him to cash out. “First they came for the communists,” as it were.

The Lofgrens of the Republican Party might long suppress any latent empathy for the struggles of Americans they were hired to serve, but money? Money they understand.

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