THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Over the years I have
written extensively about what I call the “Rightward Imperative and the
Republican Party.” The “Rightward Imperative” is the movement ever
rightward of Republican politicians, from the presidential level to the
lowliest, if they have any serious interest in getting elected. The
Rightward Imperative as a movement itself sometimes focuses on the real issues
that are at the center of the Republican ideology, policies and
programs. For example, Eric Cantor lost his Congressional seat
because he wasn’t tough enough on spending and taxes.
Besides being born with a silver
spoon in his unfiltered mouth, Trump’s defining trait is his cavalier lack of
substance, a man arrogantly devoid of any true ideology or serious knowledge
about anything, nor possessed of any real sense of responsibility for his
social actions. There’s really no there there. In that he resembles the
criminally clueless G. W. Bush, the Idiot Prince, far more than anyone would
care to admit (Ed.).
Indeed, Cantor was “Tea Partied.” (Yes,
indeed, most U.S. politicians have never met a noun that they did not want to
verb.) But more often than not the Rightward Imperative focuses on
the mis-named “social issues,” which are really the issues of religious
dogmatism and authoritarianism, racism and xenophobia.
As I said, in the column cited above, Ronald
Reagan initiated the historical stream of GOP-led right-wing reaction which we
now see in front of us, every day. They do have real policies which have
underlain the Party’s programs since that time. As is well-known, the GOP
represents major sectors of the US economy: the extractive/fossil-fuel industries,
the military industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, corporate
agriculture, the “health” insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and of
course corporate and “investment” finance.
But they could not, and hardly can, run on a
platform of “let the oil and coal companies do whatever they want to,” “we want
the rich to get richer, donchaknow,” “we want to export as much American
capital overseas where it can make larger profits than it can here, so we
really want to de-industrialize our country,” “we don’t care about the health
of the American people but we do care about the profits of the health care
industry,” “we would like to have permanent war if we can get it,” “we want to
completely convert the US economy from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism,”
and so on and so forth.
And thus, their real policies have included
(see Pretty Boy Ryan, himself a true Far-Rightist): further tax cuts for the
rich; creating ever-widening income and wealth gaps; reducing environmental,
transportation, workplace, finance, and etc. regulation to the greatest degree
possible; further facilitating the export of capital; promoting the Permanent
Preparation for Permanent War economy; the abolition of Social Security and the
tattered remains of the “welfare” system, and so on and so forth.
And so here came Donald Trump. He
may be poorly educated, poorly informed, and possessed of little knowledge
about how the extremely complicated U.S. government actually works, but he is a
great huckster. He also understood well the Rightward
Imperative. Whether or not he consciously set out to employ it, he
has proved himself (by lucky instinct) a master of the craft, beginning of course
with the “Birtherism Hoax” of which he was the leading perpetrator in the
run-up to the 2012 election. To be sure, he is not himself much with
the underlying dogmas of the Religious Right, but he surely has known how
important it is to get there in appearance if you want to get the Repub.
nomination.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The Greanville Post
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