They Will Take It All
It was reported on Tuesday that congressional Republicans have set their sights on rolling back the Endangered Species Act, because of course they have.
It has long been a key component the Grand Old Party’s electoral strategy to insulate itself and subvert the democratic process through voter suppression and aggressive redistricting, but that has always been a means to the true goal: total capitalistic exploitation and the annihilation of the state from any realm where it might impede that exploitation.
The Republican worldview is succinctly encapsulated in the famous misquote of Charles Wilson, Secretary of defense under Dwight Eisenhower and former CEO of General Motors: “What’s good for GM is good for the country.” In the Republican view, true prosperity comes from robust corporate profit and the government should, depending on your strain of capitalism, either remove itself almost entirely from the sphere of commerce (libertarian capitalism) or work aggressively to create the most favorable conditions around the world for the country’s business community (mercantile capitalism). To a capitalist, freedom is a lack of formal societal oversight; anyone who disagrees with a business’s practices is welcome to not patronize that business.
To this capitalist mindset, where corporate liberty , i.e. lack of regulation, is a freedom on par with even or elevated above civil liberty, any limitation on a business’s ability to conduct itself without penalty is an affront to the very natural laws of the universe. Any distortion of the market is not a correction made by a just society to protect the vulnerable, but an outrage; the worthless unproductive masses leeching off the nigh-superhuman creators of wealth. That the capital controlling class is acting in its own self-interest is not an indicator of sociopathy, but of virtue.
It is through this lens that the Republican agenda is best understood. They see their actions not as naked profiteering, but as a moral crusade for liberty, where man’s greatest freedom is to run a business and make a profit, and anything that obstructs that profit, be it taxes or unions or laws against dumping toxic waste in national parks, is an unholy opponent to be defeated.
So the Republicans will roll back the Endangered Species Act. They will force NASA away from monitoring climate change. They will turn Social Security into a hedge fund and take campaign donations from financial managers charging through the nose for its administration. They will wipe out Obamacare by turning Medicaid expansion into tax cuts and block grants, and turn Medicare into health savings accounts. They will trample workers’ rights and turn the country into a right-to-work nation. They will enact voter ID laws and turn competitive districts into safe Republican seats. They will allow police to kill black citizens with impunity because it upholds the societal status quo.
For the next two years, and probably four, the Republican Party will cut every tax and dismantle every beloved progressive protection enacted since Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal to every desperate, despondent soul battered by the Great Depression. They will make themselves rich beyond comprehension; they will let the poor die in the streets.
If we let them.
