Some traditions are good ones. Other traditions are evil and need to be addressed. I am, of course, thinking of one particular tradition.
I couldn’t tell you how many people I know that vote Republican because “my family has always been Republican” or “this is a Republican town.” When I ask such people to tell me what is so great about the Republican platform, all I ever get are FOX “News” sound bites that have absolutely no resemblance to what Republican Administrations actually do when governing. I can usually get these people to admit things like a better minimum wage is necessary, healthcare for all is a laudable goal, and it’s better for abortion to be legal than for women to die in back alleys after a coathanger filleting. The broad mass of us have a lot of similar ideas, but a lot of people will go back and vote Republican simply because they’ve always done it.
They don’t change. The Republican Party has changed, though. To vote Republican in this age doesn’t mean the same thing it did to vote Republican when Eisenhower was President, or even when Ford was. To vote Republican now means that you’ve cast your lot with a nakedly racist organization. An antisemitic organization. A misogynist organization. It’s very clear that in governing practice, the present-day GOP may be to the right of the old Apartheid regime in South Africa. The only consistency there’s been to the entire Trump Administration has been its very public friendliness to fringe racists and religious lunatics. If Trump didn’t make that clear enough with his despicable campaign, then he surely did it when he refused to condemn Nazis who murdered a peaceful protester in Virginia. And if that wasn’t convincing enough, his pardon of a man who ran concentration camps for minorities in Arizona should have been convincing enough. And if THAT didn’t convince you that the man you’re dealing with is a real-life Nazi, how can you overlook what he’s now going to to to countless thousands of kids with his DACA repeal? The only possible reason for expelling lawful people who have lived in this country for most of their lives is a racist one. And his suggestions that he’ll spare the children if we build his border wall… think about that for a minute. The scum is using children as hostages to get a wall that no one save racist dullards sees any point in building. This reminds me of nothing as much as it reminds me of Himmler sparing a few assorted Jewish and other undesirables from the camps and the gas chambers in hopes of negotiating himself a lighter treatment by the Allies who were rapidly bringing Nazi Germany to an end. That’s where we are now. That’s how the world now sees us.
I have said, and I say now, that if we don’t expel this scum from power in less than 4 years, there won’t be a United States of America to expel him from anymore. It’s very clear that New York and California have no intention of going along with his Nazi pogrom against Latinos, nor should they. Every day this scum is in office, chunks fall away from the foundations of the United States. This rot will soon find its natural end, as Trump does more and more blatantly racist things to try to distract us from his criminal collusion with Russia. At what point do we finally decide that he’s gone too far? Do people not realize that he may well have ALREADY gone too far? It seems to me that Republican voters had better carefully reconsider their traditions, and find themselves some new traditions. Enabling monsters is only going to bring us to a kind of ruin we’d have thought impossible just 20 years ago.