by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
“I don't want the government to take my money and give it to poor people. Especially poor black people.”
Republicans are children who never learned to share. Selfish. What's mine is mine.
Children is the right word, because Republicans get childishly bratty and emotional about their beliefs (consider the recent Republican government shutdown temper tantrum, for example). It's a visceral thing for them. They feel.
What do they feel the most? Threatened. They feel threatened by the Other, the Different, the New. They're paranoid. They see so many threats: poor people, blacks, Mexicans, gays, even women. Modernity itself gives them the jitters. They want to move backwards, to some white Christian paradise of the South, when men were men, and women and blacks were slaves.
They want the world to be like them. Reality scares them. They suffer from arrested development. In fact, Republicans are not fully developed human beings.
Their appeal is to childish emotion, not to adult reason. That's why they find it so difficult to compromise.
Democrats are very different. They're about doing the sensible, practical thing. They don't have an ideology, like Republicans do. They don't try to bend the world to some fundamentalist worldview. They try to fix things, not shape the world to some pre-ordained edenic vision.
So, today's question: can we rely on the Republicans to keep screwing up to the point that they lose the House in 2014?
Yes.
Barack Obama has very cleverly decided to make immigration reform the next item on his agenda.
Watch the GOP tear themselves apart over this, as their visceral racist animus against illegal Mexicans fights with the sure knowledge that losing the growing Hispanic vote over this issue, will damn the GOP brand to a loser status.
In this struggle, the child will win, and the grownup will lose, because that's the way the Republican Party rolls.
Is it possible for the GOP to reinvent itself? No. They can never get away from their core belief of hating poor and black people.
Are they doomed? Yes. Demography is against them. The new generation does not hate and fear gays, the poor, blacks, Mexicans or women.
What we are witnessing is the coming permanent minority status of the GOP. Perhaps there'll be a new alignment. Maybe the progressive wing of the Democratic Party will split off, and we'll get a fight between liberals and progressives.
Now that's a fight that might move the country forward.