The Republican Party’s Politics of Cruelty
The primary result of a nation treating politics like an entertainment is that the real-world consequences of elections and legislative actions are elided in the name of declaring a winner and loser amongst the elite political class, contestants who’ll be back again next week to duke it out on cable news nets and internet forums in an attempt to eke out a victory for their side. The fact that elections and laws have life and death consequences beyond intrinsic symbolic value for actual human beings outside the Beltway who live in this country too is conveniently forgotten because, hey, why spoil the fun?
The Republican Party has exploited this WWE-ification of politics in the Reality Television Age to achieve their organizational goals, while in the meantime eschewing the basic needs of the public and governance. That is because the needs of their base as voters contradicted their needs as people. This base’s distaste for Barack Obama, and the noxious cultural forces that fueled that distaste, was manipulated into a political force by the GOP to service policies that actively harmed that base.
Go ahead. Try to name a single current Republican economic platform that has been proven to help the middle class and working people. It’s impossible. You cannot. There are none. Tax cuts don’t do it. Trickle-down economics don’t do it. Take into account their draconian social policies, and a worldview is crystallized: These are simply the policies of grievance, and taking away the hard-won victories of the Other.
This supreme level of indifference towards the plebes befits a party now led by Donald Trump, a man who himself fueled by petty grievances and viciousness towards his perceived enemies. There are no more “Republican Party Principles”, simply the politics of plunder and pillage of benefits, aids, and rights from American people as red meat to the heartland that is discomfited by a changing culture. Donald Trump’s campaign played upon the fires that the GOP had been stoking for years, that the victories of the Other was to the detriment of “Real America”, that their gain was your loss.
No issue better captures this phenomenon than the debate around the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Obamacare has always been, and always will be, a symbol, an avatar for all that the charismatic young black progressive with the funny name stood for. It is an economic policy that transformed into a social flashpoint. President Obama and the Other he serves got a thing, and “Real Americans” can’t abide by that, so they have to take it away. No matter the consequences.
On the one hand, the ACA has provided healthcare to tens of millions of people. On the other, sure, it ain’t perfect. Yet in the six years since its passage, the Republican Party has not offered any substantive improvements to the program, not a single proposal that could build upon the successes of the law while widening access and reducing costs to those who still don’t have health coverage. Instead, the GOP has beaten the steady drum of “repeal”, over and over again, a steely-eyed mantra to strike fear in the hearts of those big bad progressives.
Of course, in the collective awareness of conservatives across the country, the fight against Obamacare was never over policy disagreements or tax increases. Those existed, but they weren’t what got the base’s blood boiling at town forums and debate halls across the across the country. In fact, much of that base has benefited from Obamacare. Yet they roared with approval when Republican politicians pledged to end it. Why?
This grievance, naturally, has always been racialized. Grievance against most of President Obama’s policies is racialized. As it was put in a recent Vox piece about Kentucky Obamacare enrollees who voted for Trump, “Many expressed frustration that Obamacare plans cost way too much, that premiums and deductibles had spiraled out of control. And part of their anger was wrapped up in the idea that other people were getting even better, even cheaper benefits — and those other people did not deserve the help.”
These “other people” were those who didn’t live where they lived, who didn’t look like them. Not about the brass-tax economics of the program, but what it represented in the cultural consciousness, the perceived giving away of something to the Other, because President Obama himself was an Other.
In any case, both-sideist news media allowed “Repeal, repeal, repeal” to become an unchallenged talking point, an ephemeral rallying cry unmoored from real world costs. Through out the entire 2016 election cycle, a debate moderator never challenged a Republican candidate for President on the notion that repealing the ACA outright would be good for the country. Not a single time was the a Republican asked to show their work, and explain how they would protect the tens of millions of people who stood to lose their health insurance if Republicans got their way.
Now here we are. The Republicans have gotten their way. They control both houses of Congress and the White House. They can pass whatever legislation they want without much resistance standing in their way. This is the dirty part.
It was easy to bloviate on the necessity of repealing Obamacare when the GOP wasn’t in power. They could rattle on about the evils of the ACA until their lungs gave out, win over a bunch of aggrieved voters who just didn’t like the feeling that Obama gave them in the pit of their stomachs, and go on their merry way. There were no consequences to that. Obviously there was no need to ever propose a real replacement plan, as these dogs could never foresee themselves catching this particular car. The inherent political value was in the performance of the chase.
But now it’s within their grasp, and they find themselves at an impasse: Do nothing, reveal themselves to be the craven scoundrels we always knew they were, and risk the wrath of an even greater lunatic fringe, or repeal the law and pass the greatest act of legislative cruelty of the 21st century.
There is a third option, of course, one that our new showman President would appreciate. Create symbolic solutions to a symbolic problem: Pass superficial, feigning changes to the ACA, proclaim in a massive overhaul, then call it TrumpCare, declare victory, then go home. It’s unclear if that’s what the GOP is angling for, but it is certainly a possibility.
Will that be enough? Will it satiate the hungry reddened mass that wants their grievance answered and Obama’s legacy erased, as if the man never existed at all? Maybe. Or maybe not. The beast is unpredictable.
What cannot be erased, though, is how the Republican Party has made vindictive caprice a core tenet of its platform. Obamacare is not a wonky, alternative issue. It’s fucking healthcare, a necessity for human existence. The GOP is willing to strike fear into the hearts of millions and put citizen’s health and safety at risk in order to win an election. And that is truly unforgivable.
