There is no bottom

By Deauwand Myers

"Over the last 30 years, the Republican Party has effectively eliminated its moderate and liberal voices ― as well as the conservative voices that put country over party. The consequences of this takeover by an increasingly right-wing faction include the threats to democracy that have become increasingly prominent since the Jan. 6 riots," said former House Representative Peter Smith, R-Vermont, in his guest essay for The New York Times.

"[I will] do whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office … I'm going to be making sure that people all around this country understand the stakes of what we're facing, understand the extent to which we've now got one major political party, my party, which has really become a cult of personality," said House Representative Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, a staunch conservative and adversary to former President Trump.

"We've got to get this party (Republicans, aka the GOP) back to a place … talking about fundamental issues of civics, fundamental issues of what does it mean to be a constitutional republic," she added.

She lost her recent Republican primary to a pro-Trump sycophant, one who denies President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Not to mention, Rep. Cheney's father is former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the most consequential vice presidents in American history ― disastrously so, in part for his roles pushing for the invasion of Iraq in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as well as for trickle-down economic policies.

Rarely do I quote at length members of the GOP, but it's imperative to understand the grave danger our American republic is in, especially when the loudest and most powerful members of one of our two viable political parties is venal, dismissive of facts, prone to conspiracy theories, a white nationalist, Christo-fascist and worst of all, illiberal: they don't care about democracy as long as they stay in power.

This level of power hunger extends to the states and local municipalities, where plans are underway basically to let GOP-led states overturn popular votes in elections if a majority does not like the outcome.

As I said before, in Roland Martin's new book, "White Fear," its central thesis is deadly accurate. The rush to put in lifetime appointments to mostly white, male, conservative judges by the GOP is to secure power, even as white folks will no longer be a majority of the population by 2043. There's a word for that ― minority rule ― and it is tantamount to what happened in places like South Africa.

Let's unpack Smith's quote. His analysis is correct, yet incomplete. The beginning of just naked hostility toward civil rights, women's rights and voting rights can easily be traced to the nativist, xenophobic political movement of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s on to the Lily-White Movement.

The Lily-White Movement was an anti-black, white supremacist political movement within the Republican Party of the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was a virulently racist response to the political and particularly socioeconomic progress achieved by African Americans (many lynchings from then until the 1960s were nothing more than economic envy by poor whites, often targeting wealthy black entrepreneurs) following the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and also a deep mistrust of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which eliminated slavery.

In truth, Republicans have attracted and been purveyors of racial, political, illiberal extremism and political violence for well over a century. The next big sign of that came in GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater's doomed presidential bid. He famously was against the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively. Smith's essay, though true in spirit, misses a whole lot of history way before his defeat in the early 1990s.

Representative Cheney's goals are admirable, but she isn't the best messenger for them. Donald Trump ― ahem ― was right when he called the Cheneys warmongers, and her father was wrong about Reaganomics and trickle-down economic theory.

A rising tide doesn't lift all boats, and since the Reagan era, wealth disparity has gone to near-Gilded Age levels, with Federal Reserve data indicating that as of 2021, the top 1 percent of households in the United States held 32.3 percent of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50 percent held 2.6 percent.

Again, especially during the Reagan years and thereafter, wealth inequality has substantially increased in the United States, and neoliberal policies especially on the right ― but also on the left ― have exasperated the situation.

Further, so many other parts of Cheney's political ideology are in themselves, at the very least, quasi-fascist. She is against sexual minorities getting married and she is against women's reproductive rights.

These are illiberal views to have within a democracy and lend themselves to infatuations with strong men and tin-pot dictators, which is why the GOP's latest crush is on the homophobic, anti-immigrant, white Christian nationalist Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko. Republicans need better role models. Jesus, maybe?

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul.