I’ve had lots of opportunity lately to wonder about the Republican party and their hate-based politics.
As far as I can tell from what I understand about American politics, the Democrat party tries to constantly improve things – considering new ideas, new processes, and new programs. The Republicans, on the other hand, want everything to be the same as it was in the long-ago “good old days” (which, it turns out, weren’t so good for everyone) and so feel that anyone with new ideas is radical and should be opposed.
This is not to say, of course, that all of the Democrats’ ideas are good ones. Of course they’re not. A lot of them are stupid. But rather than engaging in actual conversation to figure out solutions, the Republicans simply choose to block everything and vilify the thinkers as [insert insults of the day] because it’s easier than actually thinking. Thinking is too much like actual work.
When you don’t have ideas, I guess it is natural to focus only on one’s enemies. Opposing ideas is hard, because you have to 1) understand the idea and 2) have a good alternative. It’s so much easier to just vilify and hate people.
Don’t like the proposal to save the planet? Of course not. It will be expensive, and take a lot of work. But it’s hard to argue logically against it – or even to debate the ideas and arrive at compromises – so let’s focus on hating AOC, on hating Greta Thunberg, (Bonus – they’re both women! That makes them easier to hate!) and anyone else that has ideas.
And who better to hate than brown people? You can tell who they are just by looking at them. No thought necessary. And, since they’re in a minority, it’s pretty safe to blame them for stuff, since they lack the political clout to do anything about it.
Trump is the logical conclusion of this trend. He has no ideas. He has no solutions to anything. All he has is hate. He built his entire campaign on hate, so it should be no surprise that he built his entire presidency on hate.
Immigration is an *ideal* place to focus this hate. Many immigrants are brown. Actual *solutions* to illegal immigration are complicated, expensive, and involve actually engaging with foreign governments to try to get to the reasons these people are coming to the USA. Better just to hate immigrants – much easier to sell.
Addressing a pandemic, too, is difficult, expensive, and involves working with a lot of people you don’t like. Better to focus on the “fact” that it came from China, and so is a problem caused by people that we hate. See? Problem solved!
Hate is cheap, easy, and spreads like wildfire without a lot of work.
Meanwhile, Republicans have boasted for generations that they are the party of family values, of kindness, of big hearts and small government. And, if they say it, it must be so, despite the complete lack of supporting evidence. Right?