With President George W Bush below 30% approval rate in national opinion polls and the Republican Party facing the prospect of significant, and maybe colossal, losses in Congress in the fall, the currency of the GOP has hardly been lower in living memory. This is as it should be because the party is not merely bereft of ideas on tackling the serious challenges facing America in the 21st century; it has arguably become a force for ill that actually works against the best interests of the country.
Of course as someone who votes a straight Democratic ticket, I don’t pretend to be entirely unbiased. Yet it is surely hard for any observer to deny that on one issue after another, today’s GOP is guilty either of incoherence, betraying its own principles or, worse, seeking to betray our nation’s.
For example, the party of fiscal rectitude has become the party of profligacy. Democrats at least have tried to pay for government programs. The Republicans when they ran Congress, on the other hand, thought (and still think) we could pay for bloated defence, farm and road-building budgets and even an unaffordable Medicare drug benefit program, and still slash taxes on the rich. The inevitable result of this reckless dishonesty is a crushing and growing debt burden for our children and grandchildren.
The GOP offers no plan that realistically even tries to significantly reduce the number of Americans with seriously limited or non-existent health insurance. And they impede Democratic efforts to use government programs to cover even all of America’s children. Indeed, the Republicans often behave as though it is the very prospect of the success of such programs as the Children’s Health Insurance Program that drives their opposition. After all if government achieves what the private market cannot, it undermines the GOP’s overriding governing philosophy.
Thanks to Republican efforts, the social safety net for most Americans remains tattered indeed. In this respect, the GOP differs markedly from conservative parties in other industrialized countries such as Britain or Canada. In these countries there is no question of weakening public social programs such as healthcare, income support and unemployment benefits but merely a debate on how to make them more efficient. In this country, incredibly, we have in the GOP one of the two major political parties that despises the very existence of such programs. This is counterproductive, however, because with a more robust social safety net, American workers would likely feel less insecure about and more supportive of free trade.
It also turns out the party of “small government” supports virtually unfettered government authority for domestic electronic surveillance of communications as well as other intrusive powers such as monitoring what we read in the library. It has even tried to imprison American citizens on American soil without bringing charges until slapped down by the courts.
National polls inexplicably still show the GOP’s strength on national security and foreign policy. Yet the GOP’s often mindless preoccupation with brawn over brain has cost us dearly. We have been shamed in the eyes of the world by torturing suspected terrorists, detaining them in our own version of a Gulag in Guantanamo (or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe) and then setting up kangaroo courts in which to try them. The Bush administration invaded Iraq unnecessarily thereby overstretching and weakening the ground force components of our military by allowing them to become embroiled in an occupation that has no end in sight. Meanwhile we have struggled to consolidate the one clear and necessary military success in Afghanistan for want of the necessary resources.
So there we have it, today’s Republican Party. Insisting on tax cuts for the wealthy but all too willing to spend endlessly beyond the nation’s means to pay; supporting free trade but unwilling to provide a social safety net for Americans who fall by the way; jingoistic in the extreme while it undermines the very foundation of our democracy with its totalitarian overreach and fear mongering.
The GOP seeks to bring profound change to the very essence of what it is that the United States represents - to the world as well as to us. Americans must loudly and emphatically reject this travesty of a Republican Party in the only way that really counts – at the voting booth.
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