What the Heck Do Republicans Want?
I Don’t Understand the Working Class
I’ve been trying to figure out what Republicans want.
I know what republican politicians want. They want to privatize everything and pass the tax breaks and incentives on to their corporate overlords. That’s not even a well-kept secret.
The era of opportunity, an unprecedented but short time from about 1945 to the election of Reagan, was deeply resented by those who served the wealthy. Through a long campaign of unbelievable patience and consistent strategies, Republicans have chipped away at the middle class.
But they’re not done — yet.
They want to do away with Medicare, social security, public schools, even National parks. They want to dismantle the USPS and take away teacher pensions, (Florida has already done that) as well as keep wages low and worker’s rights at a minimum. They want private enterprise to control our infrastructure. The list of goals includes dismantling just about anything that is of public benefit.
But for the life of me, I simply can’t figure out what ordinary working-class Republicans want. I’m serious. It makes no sense.
It can’t possibly be that guns and abortion are so important to the average middle class Republican that they’d give up everything else on the above list to control a womb and own a weapon.
Of course, Democrats are told repeatedly that the Republican base is made up of uneducated people who are inarticulate and gullible.
Trump himself claimed that he loved the poorly educated. He made that confession after winning the vote to a roomful of supporters who cheered at this revelation.
You gotta admit that was a surreal moment, one of many.
Yet, deep down inside, we know that the poorly educated are not his only supporters. That group includes a wide range of followers who have demonstrated their ability to unite around one or two issues and never give up. It’s something that Democrats can’t quite wrap their heads around.
No one, for example, thought in a million years that Roe V Wade would be overturned so soon — if ever.
But there you have it. It’s been done and it’s now history. Which only goes to show you that we’ve been underestimating Republicans for a long time. For decades they have been working diligently to bring the party together, a party that now is almost impossible to divide. Have they really pledged their allegiance to the party because of guns and abortion?
Well, sort of.
What they want even more is to WIN. Because they understand that once they WIN, they can do a lot more than just guarantee gun rights and control wombs. Rather than split and divide, or waste time and precious resources, they don’t cloud the horizon with too many issues. Two or three issues are easier to manage than 20 or 30 issues.
If you want to win, keep it simple.
And if they win? THEN, they can continue to chip away at our public benefits, making everything in America for profit. That is the ultimate long-range goal.
That’s why middle-class Republicans keep me confused.
I know some of these people. They’re my neighbors. Like most Americans of the last three or four decades, they are living a debt-driven lifestyle. They’re going into retirement with a mortgage and a car payment.
This has been the plight of Americans for decades now.
The American Dream is fake. Everything that Americans buy is via bank loans or credit cards. They look good at a glance, but most people have very little money in the bank. In fact, if you subtracted their debt from their assets, they’re broke.
Why on earth don’t they see what the Republican Party wants to do?
That’s when I throw up my hands and quit trying to understand them. Unfortunately, there is a good chance that their strategies will pay off again. When it does, you and I will bear the brunt of privatization. They managed to overturn Roe v Wade, much to the surprise of Democrats. That should’ve been a wakeup call. My neighbors have been on a natural high since that BIG win. They love being a member of a winning team. So much so that as the post World War II amazing growth of a middle class finally disappears, they’ll be cheering right up to the end.
Until, of course, it’s too late.
The middle class will dwindle and suddenly the progress made in the past will be glaringly absent. Then the next generation will be required to slowly and painstakingly rebuild a society that has a chance in hell of being great, one with equal opportunities and public investment.
Oh, and by that time, my neighbor will think they’ve always been on board for change.
They won’t even remember that they helped get us into this unholy alliance with the corporate overlords. The democrats will finally have one or two issues that take center stage out of sheer necessity. If they want to eat, they’ll unite. In the meantime, we will have lost valuable time, decades most likely, while we struggle to just get back to where we were in the 1950s.
Sadly, we should’ve been miles ahead by now.
Progress is slow because the evolution of societies is thwarted time and time again by the animal with the big brain— humans. History repeats itself on a regular basis. The world groans under the strain of the selfish gene and tribalism. Two steps forward and one step back is the human dance. Progress followed by regression is the historical norm. It’s all rather predictable.
And that pisses me off!
Teresa is an author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
