Francis Wilkinson is a master of understatement. He notes that the Republican Party has moved seemingly irrevocably away from any notion of enacting immigration reform, despite the best intentions of their party strategists. And he notes that this might not be very popular with certain minority populations.
Immigration reform, including the legalization of millions of immigrants already living in the U.S., is on hold because tens of thousands of Central American children have surrendered to border authorities. Also, because a sadistic army is killing people in Syria and Iraq. McCain, often a summer soldier when the forces of demagogy call, was perhaps too embarrassed to link Ebola to the new orthodoxy; of course, others already have.
It’s hard to see how Republicans walk this back before 2017 — at the earliest. What began with the national party calling for immigration reform as a predicate to future Republican relevancy has ended with complete capitulation to the party’s anti-immigration base. Conservatives are busy running ads and shopping soundbites depicting immigrants as vectors of disease, criminality and terrorism, a 30-second star turn that Hispanic and Asian voters, in particular, may not entirely relish.
I keep coming back to this but I’d welcome a new kind of politics in which the stakes of our elections were less dire. While I don’t mind the GOP doing things that make electoral victory for them more unlikely, I really would prefer that they stop moving in a fascist direction.
I know that the word “fascist” is loaded, but I don’t mean fascist in the Nazi sense. I just mean that they are increasingly a party for which racial identity in central, and in which intellectuals, scientists, artists, feminists, homosexuals, and ethnic and religious minorities are suspect. They are vulnerable to jingoistic messages, will support military adventurism without much prompting, believe in a false and mythological national history, and think of themselves as unique and superior to other peoples with a mandate from God to exercise their power. Scapegoating and conspiratorial thinking are central to their worldview, and they consume media based on fear, hate, and resentment on a near-constant basis. In addition to this, they oppose labor unions and lend their political support to corporate system that fuels militarism at the expense of investment in people and infrastructure.
So, you can point out all the ways that this party is unlike the Nazis, but the concern is with the similarities. With their recent embrace of voter suppression tactics that are now routinely being shot down by the courts, even their commitment to representative government is in question.
If these upcoming elections were just about tax rates, I’d be a lot happier.
