Guns, Germs and Carbon: Escaping the Republican Death Trip
The Republican Party is the party of death. It’s time for party leaders to admit the obvious and start wearing the death’s head skull that was the ghoulish insignia of Hitler’s SS. Yesterday, President Joe Biden – a reasonable man to a fault – lashed into the GOP as “despicable…sick…un-American” for moving aggressively in states from Georgia to Arizona to rob voters – primarily minority citizens – of their democratic rights, in the biggest assault on enfranchisement since the Jim Crow lynching era.
But it’s not just the Republicans’ (maskless) identification with the Ku Klux Klan terrorists of yesterday. It’s the party’s iron embrace of the gun industry and the right of crazed men to shoot up crowded public places with military assault weapons. It’s the party’s sick defiance of basic public health hygiene in the face of the most deadly pandemic in over a hundred years. And it’s the Republican last-ditch defense of the fossil fuel industry, which is intent on ravaging the environment and killing as many people as necessary so it can monetize the last barrel of oil and seam of coal. (As of yesterday, the death toll in Texas was 111 people due to the freak winter storm that blasted through the red state, one of nature’s many violent surprises in the climate crisis.)
Guns, germs and carbon – to paraphrase Jared Diamond – that’s what today’s Republican Party stands for. Death, death and more death. The only people who can rationally (if inhumanely) support such a passion for extinction are those who are profiteering from it. (Just look at Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s list of contributors.) But, of course, the GOP has also attracted millions of irrational followers too. Christian zealots who fear and hate women and long for the end times that Republicans are quickly bringing about. White nationalists who fear and hate people with darker skin colors. Taxpayers who’d rather trash their community parks, schools and public services than lift the boats of poor Black and Latino citizens along with their own.
The Republican Party death trip has become so twisted that even conservative propagandists like David Brooks of the New York Times and PBS NewsHour are jumping off the GOP’s wild horses of the apocalypse. In his Times column today, Brooks even cheers for Biden’s $3 trillion plan to revive America, if fretfully.
Joe Biden and his advisors have reportedly learned from the cautious corporatism of Barack Obama, and are going big. Biden keeps offering Republicans on Capitol Hill an olive branch, and keeps holding onto the idea that the Senate filibuster – the McConnell tool of obstruction -- can be amended and not ended. But Biden knows what he ultimately must do. He must blow past Republican death worshippers in order to breathe new life into his dying country.
At his press conference on Thursday, Biden said he ran to oust Trump from the White House for three reasons: to restore decency to the political system, to rebuild America, and to unify the country. He will never have the cooperation of the Republican Party to accomplish these goals. And he knows it.
Republicans are headed for the graveyard. The rest of us need to bail out of their hearse.
