Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. They have long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals -- and it turns out they were onto something. Every six months, the Republican Party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" -- but that wasn't enough. So they found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay," and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. A survey suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why.
Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past thirty-five years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The U.S. must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W. Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice -- pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally) -- even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right -- the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump responded to these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself -- and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clay Johnson studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he was actually worth -$600m. That is, he owed $600m more than he owned. You and I were worth more than him.
Johnson says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects -- which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius."
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 percent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnson studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump -- and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the House slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this -- he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world-view either doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the U.S. will have to extend its debt ceiling -- the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow - or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart."
Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show 'The Apprentice', and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.'... It's so easy. It's all about the messenger." It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was told they have some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, OK?"
This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics." It's named after the DC comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence -- and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America -- or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but it won't be because most Republicans reject his premises. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the underlying whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly.
In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember -- it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s -- and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition -- but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 percent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzsheanism, dedicating to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running -- but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
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And while I am certainly not impressed with Trump, or the leaders of either of our parties in this country, it is a little funny that you're sitting in London hammering America over its imperialistic ventures. Europe, and England have plenty of their own problems you could write about and never run out of material. Europeans invented imperialism- they don't speak Spanish in Mexico and English in India for a lack of imperialism. No thanks to France and England for the manner in which they divided up the Middle East. France in Viet Nam, Portugal in Brazil, the list is endless. From this American, I'd say you need to mind your own business. And then when you call us for help, we will come as we always have.
By the way, if your ancestors around the 1600s-1860s were American and upper class, chances are they owned slaves, so you are now forbidden from complaining about or taking any kind of digs at all against slavery, because that's hypocritical or something.
First, Johann has written extensively about the problems in his nation, and reading him frequently, I would hardly describe his views as imperialist.
Secondly, in this article Johann is doing what AMERICAN journalists should be doing, -- an honest evaluation of our candidates and their views, and what the reality behind the curtain is.
Finally, the adjectival form for the Democrats is "Democratic" not "Democrat" (that is a noun).
I'm not the best typist, so I rarely complain about spelling and such, but this is not a typo, it is done frequently by many on the right.
It makes absolutely no sense to me, and makes the person saying (or writing it) sound incredibly ill-educated.
Perhaps you could explain why this is so common among those on the right? I never hear anyone talk about the "Republic Party" (though I did hear one Democratic Congressman make a speech in which he ridiculed this practice by repeatedly using the word "Republican't").
Yes, Bachman, Palin, Huckabee, Romney and Pawlenty could go head to head in a series of exercises designed to demonstrate their leadership capability. And the Donald could fire one of them every week. I love it.
PLEASE everyone, write the Democratic National Committee Chair and demand that the Dems hire him as their Message Czar!!!!
He's just such a Patriot! I get goosebumps! (they're "hUGE"!)
OK- let's look at that in the real world. The GOP has had since the time of Reagan, over 30 years, to prove their economic polices work, and, ALL of them have proven to be failures. Except, that is, the process of making the rich, richer. There are constants to GOP economic policies:
The nation debt increases (Reagan tripled it)
Jobs are moved overseas
Tax rates on the rich and big business go down, resulting in
The economic burden is placed upon the middle and lower class.
School funding is cut, creating dumber students.
Best line - "Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively..."
Is there really any DOUBT that this scourge needs to be DEFEATED in EVERY SENSE imaginable...
Case and Point --- WMD - they were so sure that they were there that we went to war there and lost millions of lives not to mention innocent Iraqi civilians because they were assertive and wrongheaded in their convictions...
So when voting time comes, citizens are left to choose between two obnoxious, corrupt parties.
There is no "conservative" party or "liberal" party. There are only Republicans and Democrats.
The lesser 3rd-party candidates are fragmented between fringe-element crackpots trying to make a name for themselves, and sincere people who haven't got a rat's a** of a chance of ever collecting enough media exposure and money to actually win.
There is too much power centralized in the Federal Gov't and in the military industrial complex. Eisenhower warned us of this, and it has come to pass.
No kidding. Trump will not be the nominee of the GOP because the GOP are not the lunatics who are trying to label them as.
This article is just another in a long line of people-bashing that leftists and their progressive/liberal cohorts gravitate to when they cannot argue issues.
This fits right in line with the nonsense about Tea Party protesters being extremists. The facts show they are mainstream Americans. But that does not fit the leftist model who refuse to believe that their own ideas may be corrupt and unsupportable by most America. When their ideas and plans are exposed, they lose every time. When they get their message out about a program or idea and very few support it, well that;s because they can't understand the facts. You know, too stupid to get it. Now if they were intellectuals like you, they might have a chance at getting their minds right. But no such luck, so attack, personally, and marginalize anyone who would expose your ideas to the light.
You are the same people who roared mightily about Bush's deficit spending for 8 years, but not a peep at Obama's quadrupling of his deficit spending.
You lie.
Here's the deficit from the past 11 years in billions:
2000 9951.5 -235.97
2001 10286.2 -127.89
2002 10642.3 158.01
2003 11142.1 377.81
2004 11867.8 412.90
2005 12638.4 318.59
2006 13398.9 248.57
2007 14077.6 160.96
2008 14441.4 458.55
2009 14119 1412.69
2010 14660.4 1293.49
2011 15079.6 1645.12
1,412 billion is over 3 TIMES Bush's worst deficit!