I am not big on voting, and I haven’t voted in 20 years. Before that, I occasionally voted for Democrats, largely on antiwar grounds. I have cast a ballot for a Republican only once, and never in a general election. I did vote against the Rev. Pat Robertson in the 1988 Republican primaries by casting a vote for Bob Dole.
From what I can tell the Republicans are the enemies of all mankind. What are they for other than war, war, and more war, a Third World model plutocracy, and a fascist paramilitary police state that uses appeals to “traditional values” (which amount to little more than hating fags) as a means of galvanizing support from the red state rubes?
As Robert Lindsay says:
“The Conservative Republican Party: Corporatism and neoliberalism, albeit in a much stronger form than the Liberal Republicans push, a radical near-Libertarian out and out dismantling of government, combined with the usual rightwing nuttery such as ludicrous paranoia of Communism, socialism and the economic Left, crazy conspiracy theory, exaggeration, lies, constant propaganda, racist dog whistles for bigoted White people, homophobia, misogyny and sexism, puritanism, Fundamentalist Christianity, jingoism, xenophobia, paranoia and hatred of the state itself.
A wildly imperial neoconservative and even openly neocolonialist foreign policy, the celebration of inequality, authoritarianism and police state tendencies strangely combined with a bizarre fetish with arming ordinary citizens as if they were the an official army. Sheer contempt for workers and a warlike attitude towards labor unions. Hostility to consumers and contempt for environmentalism, a destructive attitude towards Gaia and our fellow creatures, a celebration of pollution in every form and even apocalyptic manipulation of the Earth’s very climate itself. A head in the sand attitude towards the future and a focus on immediate profits at the expense of all long-term goals.
A general backwards, retrogressive and Medieval tone and even a celebration of a primitive, Neandertal-like mindset. An all out class war designed to immiserate the working, lower and even middle classes and transfer their wealth and income upwards to the upper middle and upper classes. A celebration of the market over all other human values to the point where it is the very reason for existence itself.”
With the exception of the “hatred of the state” part (Republicans only hate the welfare state, not the police state, corporate state, prison-industrial complex, or their sacred military-industrial complex), I generally agree with much of the above analysis. The Republicans are so awful that they make the centrist-liberal-reincarnated Nixon Republicans of the Obama administration (see Bruce Bartlett’s analysis here) look like some kind of leftist revolutionaries in comparison (and they’re such good propagandists they’ve got the red state rubes actually believing the latter).
