The Republican Death Cult: How A Party Sacrificed The Future For Power

In the midst of a crisis, it’s easy to get caught in the moment.

The moment, after all, is a quickly unfurling maelstrom of conflicting information, panicked developments, constant danger, and the realtime unraveling of everything you imagined to be true and real in the world.

The coronavirus pandemic is a unique challenge in that it is a storm of uncertainty that appears beyond the reach of even the most talented and informed experts, the existential danger as fluid as the passing wind, the toll of devastation unimaginable and growing by the minute.

But it’s necessary to remember how we arrived to this America in 2020 and throw away the notion that we were always destined to arrive here, that history is predetermined and inevitable. We must examine both the developments during this crisis as well as the precursors to it, the mistakes and missteps along the way that made it possible and exacerbated the consequences.

To understand the coronavirus epidemic and its madness, we must understand that the Republican Party of the United States of America has ceased to be a political party and has become a death cult that threatens our very society as we know it.

Following the 2012 Election, in which Barack Obama handedly won reelection over Republican Mitt Romney, the GOP read the writing on the wall and understood that America had changed. Obama’s diverse coalition of voters was possibly insurmountable. Republicans realized something needed to change, or else they ran the risk of becoming unviable as a political party moving forward.

The autopsy of that loss became a report that focused on the need to broaden the appeal of the party and to prioritize reaching out to minority groups who had come to understand Republicans had positioned themselves as representatives of wealthy, white Americans and changing the message and makeup of the party. Softening messaging on immigration reform and the vilification of vulnerable populations was going to be necessary if electoral victory would ever happen again.

That strategy, of course, was destroyed in the 2016 primary as Donald Trump, an authoritarian with no principles or ideology besides fascist appeals to white supremacist anger and cultural rage against so-called liberal elites, went full-bore into a divisive strategy that profited from his lack of shame and the media’s incessant need for spectacle and entertainment.

Trump’s rise furthered the decline of the Republican Party, but it was far from the initial event. Republicans have been struck with a chronic disease that is decades old and can be traced back to Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and the dystopian society of the United States in the 1950’s. Year by year, Republicans have embraced fascist approaches and strategies that destroy democratic institutions while leveraging the hate and anger of Americans looking for release. It’s been this strategy, this game-theory, that has pushed the United States in a dangerous direction and threatens to plunge us into a fascist and authoritarian society.

Like the 2012 autopsy, Republicans have had one opportunity after another to change their course and embrace a more humane, reality-based electoral strategy, but forces within the party have pushed it to attack the very notion of reality itself and sacrifice the good of the people for political victories.

In 1984 and 1988, the Democratic Party faced a similar reckoning. The massive reelection of Ronald Reagan and the election of his vice-president George H.W. Bush sent a message to party leadership that Reagan’s messaging and ideas had won the battle and that if Democrats were to ever win another election, they’d need to concede the ideological battle.

That ideological battleground was focused primarily in the realms of economics and criminal justice. Though he knew next to nothing about the economy or the plan he proposed, Reagan was used by radical Republicans and rebel economists to establish top-down markets that benefitted the wealthy while priming the economy to work toward hypercapitalistic goals, including obscene profits, the commodification of the individual, intentionally low wages and lessened benefits, and the foundations of an inherently unstable system that was always on the verge of collapse.

Democrats decided the only way to keep their party viable was to substantially move right and out-Reagan H.W. Bush and his Republican colleagues. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was the poster-boy of this strategy and won the presidency in 1992 using Reagan’s rhetoric and economics to his own advantage. It was a moment where Republicans had so successfully altered the Overton Window of discussion and debate that it could have ushered in an era of bipartisanship.

Instead, they returned to the old ways of Nixon and Goldwater and their predecessor Joe McCarthy and accused Democrats of being socialists with conspiratorial agendas, including a takeover of the healthcare system. In perhaps one of the most damaging memos in history, The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, penning a memo for the aptly named Project For A Republic Future, warned Republicans to fight Clinton’s healthcare reform at all costs, calling it a “serious threat” to the GOP. He admitted there was a healthcare crisis in the country and that reform was necessary, but to allow Clinton a victory and to allow the American people affordable healthcare that might better their lives would be politically damaging for the Republican Party.

Like always, Republicans chose their own political fortunes over the well-being of the people.

Anyone reading this is undoubtedly familiar with what happened in 2010 as Barack Obama attempted a similar reform of the healthcare system, this time armed with a plan designed by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and enacted by future rival Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts. Again, Republicans made a political calculation that any attempt to reform the healthcare system, even though it desperately needed reforming, would hurt them as a party, even as it helped their supporters and fellow Americans.

To fight this moderate reform, they took to the airwaves on Fox News and again criticized a moderate Democratic president of worldwide conspiracies to subjugate the people, to take their guns, to lead a New World Order-style tyrannical coup.

All to avoid losing at the ballot box.

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The results of Reaganomics and the constant Republican drive to lower taxes on the rich at the expense of the rest of us speak for themselves. Due to Reagan’s actions, the world has been overrun by neoliberal ideology that sacrifices basic human dignity for the constant whir and hum of machines programmed to profit and accomplish nothing else. Our lives have been juiced for every bit of productivity while our wages have stagnated and human rights have been attacked. Corporations, spurred forward by unfair conditions and constant governmental assistance, have grown larger than the nations that birthed them and now have nothing even closely remaining to civic pride or responsibility. They hoard their profits, refuse to reward workers, dodge tax responsibilities at every opportunity, and happily leave the United States as a decaying shell.

The games Republicans have played with healthcare have left us vulnerable not just to the coronavirus pandemic, but preventable conditions that kill us early and make our lives more miserable. Healthcare is intentionally hobbled by corporations looking to save money and time. People are kept in the dark about their own conditions and continually forced to choose between eating and seeking treatment.

What’s most tragic, is that all of this was preventable. The Republican Party’s strategy for maintaining viability was never about longterm governance or planning. All of it was immediate, trench warfare style strategizing that only focused on the moment with little in the way of forward thinking. This goes for healthcare opposition, the economic construction, but also their stances on issues like climate change and education. Republicans and corporations know climate change is real. They’ve read the reports, but have decide the best strategy is to deny it now, poison the well, count their profits, and hope the whole thing works itself out. In education, they continually force schools and universities into austerity, starve their staff, ensure the best and brightest seek profit elsewhere, all the while Republicans and corporations demean the profession and vilify experts who might speak against them.

It has never been about the future.

The future is an abstract thing.

There are profits to be had in the future, power to find and mold, but the real money and the real power is in the moment to these people and whether the future can be determined according to their whims.

This pandemic was warned about and warned about by healthcare providers and experts for years. The writing was on the wall. Efforts to halt necessary, lifesaving reform was held back with the full knowledge that the bill would eventually come due. Like criminals floating checks around town and always staying one step ahead of the law, Republicans knew eventually the consequences would come crashing down.

In this way, the Republican Party has become a death cult. With Donald Trump, they have sacrificed all of their principles, including an emphasis on fiscal responsibility and cultural conservatism, in exchange for power. Trump’s base is aging and almost exclusively white. By definition they will die sooner than other voters and are rapidly shrinking from the majority. The mindset that continues to prioritize them is the same mindset that pushes Fox News to lie to their elderly viewers about the dangers of coronavirus even as the pundits and reporters understand they’re actively killing their source of income and power.

The Republican Party has rejected any notion of the future, and with it any plan or movement toward that future. It is the party of the moment, this moment, this moment, this moment right now, and it will cannibalize any moment of the past that contradicts or threatens their power while only hazily accepting that the future is only a day away. They have forfeited any notion of a better future for a more profitable today. And as the pandemic decimates America, killing people made vulnerable by our decrepit and unfair healthcare system and laying waste to an economy designed to explode eventually, their prophecy of an apocalypse will possibly become a reality because of their inability to believe a future was ever possible.

Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. He is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.