The Decline and Fall of the Right-wing: Redux

Not too long ago, I wrote about how the right-wing was self-destructing - basically imploding from within due to overexposure to the rhetoric of the right-wing. But while this appears to be true, it's not the sole cause of the issue (I won't call it a problem mostly because I don't see the decline and fall of the Republican party as a problem). My previous post failed to address these other causes, which was remiss on my part.

Given that the right-wing is primarily composed of (let's be generous here) basically mentally incapable people who willingly give up their capacity of independent thought for the simple-minded comfort of religion, the inevitable fall of the right-wing isn't surprising. Of course, religion is just another made up way to separate people and a large share of the right-wing use it mostly as a way of clustering together by race.

NOTE: This applies to the liberal side as well, though not to the same degree mostly because racists Blacks are usually Baptist while racist Hispanics are usually Catholics and in the United States as a whole, both are minorities. It's not a pass for them because they do the same mindless things for the liberal side although they don't do what the right-wing is doing (which is to say what I will be talking about next).

So what you have is a bunch of people who believe in discredited myths using their religious and political associations to isolate themselves from the rest of society because they hate people who don't look like them or believe what they believe. All of this was explained in my book, so I won't rehash it again.

But in stating the case for my book, I was overlooking one obvious thing: Those who exclude others are doomed in a democracy. And that's one of the reasons why the right-wing will fall - it will exclude itself into political irrelevance.

Consider several of the core right-wing policies:

- They want to make abortion illegal.

- They want to make Gay marriage illegal.

- They want to restrict the voting rights of minorities with "voter ID" laws.

Now, taken one at a time, you're not seeing the full picture. I missed it myself when I first considered these issues. But when you step back and thingk about it, what is really happening here?

The right-wing is trying to restrict, deny, erode or scale back the civil and/or constitutional rights of well over half of the citizens of the United States.

"Okay," you say, "So what? The right-wing is doing that all the time."

This observation becomes a hell of a lot more relevant to the future of the right wing (or any political movement) when you consider what happens to a political ideology that can't get a majority vote in a democracy because it's alienated more than half of the people in the nation by trying to tell them they can't do things that are perfectly legal.

Read back about how the right-wing is beginning to believe its own propaganda. They actually think doing these things is the good and right thing to do.

Todd Akin, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate who is against all abortion, even from rape or incest, honestly thinks women can naturally mitigate their risk of getting pregnant from a rape. Despite the fact they can't, and that not all rape is forceable, he stood by his remarks. After multiple calls to drop out after the "rape" allegation (including Mitt Romney - the current GOP Presidential candidate) - he is now being supported by Republicans, many of whom called on him to drop out, because no GOP contender can be selected now. And the first thing he does is criticized his female opponent as not acting "lady like".

To say that this damaged the GOP is like saying the iceberg had an impact on the Titanic. Women the world over - and especially in the U.S. (Except, of course, the brain-addled few who still cling to self-defeating views of the GOP) - were pretty much ready to perform a Lorenna Bobbit on him.

But then, in the Freudian slip of the decade (which wasn't so much a slip but an expose' that let those who weren't GOP loyalists find out about it), in a secretly taped video, Mitt Romney dissed 47% of all Americans as people who relied on the the government who would never vote for the GOP and that his job as President wasn't to "worry about them".

Here's the quote:

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Now, the fact is that 46.4% of all Americans do not pay federal income tax. Among them, 25,000 people who make more than $2,000,000.00 a year. About 18% don't make enough to have paid income taxes regardless of their exemptions. But this is only FEDERAL income taxes. It doesn't include the state income taxes that almost everyone pays, or the sales taxes that every one pays. No matter how much "on welfare" someone is, they still pay taxes one way or another.

So in essence, Romney just slammed everyone who takes tax deductions or, through no fault of their own in an economy the GOP has done everything to prevent being made better, has no job to begin with. And this coming from someone who only paid an effective tax rate of 14.1% on $13,696,961.00 of income.

His popularity subsequently dropped by several points in several so-called "battleground" states (called such because the distribution of righties and lefties is relatively even with a varying number of independents tossed in to fight over), although overall the race still remains close.

So let's sum up.

- We have a political party that tosses away 47% of all Americans as people who never "take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

- They want to restrict the civil rights of 50.8% of all Americans by making abortion illegal although the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that it's a civil right.

- They want to keep about 30% of all Americans from voting.

- They want to prevent gays and lesbians from getting the same civil rights and civil entitlements that any "married" couple have. Depending on your sources, this number is between 2% and as much as 10% (there are no reliable figures for the actual number of homosexuals as opposed to those who have participated in homosexual acts, who were counted as homosexual when they may not have been).

Let's break it down.

The minorities are both men and women of course, so let's say half are women and the other half men. That adds another 15% or so in the form of men to the women who the right-wing want to restrict the civil rights they have. That brings our total to 65.8% of all Americans. Add in half of two more percent (minimum) of homosexuals they want to keep from getting the same civil rights as heterosexuals and you are at 66.8% of all Americans. Splitting up who is or isn't in the 47% that the GOP doesn't "worry about" is problematic as to how to fit them into the overall total, but we're already at a point where a supermajority (more than two thirds) of Americans are being systematically targeted for restricting some right they enjoy today by the GOP. Even if you put in only 9% more of that 47% who didn't fall into the women/minority/gay group we already have, you're looking at over 75% of all Americans who have been dissed by the GOP or who are actively being targeted to keep them from exercising civil rights enjoyed by everyone else.

This leaves you with less than 25% of Americans trying to decide what to do about the other 75%.

This is the 15 trillion ton elephant in the room I failed to notice. In looking at the trees, I didn't see the forest.

And it's not JUST that they're seeking to do this to the overwhelming majority of Americans in the U.S. It's that they're being "purists" in their ideology, kicking out people who don't meet their standards or toe their political line. Romney is seen as a "Mormon" first and a "Christian" second (despite the fact that the Constitution says that having religion shall not be a requirement of the President).

(I've made the point before, but it should be noted here that the GOP seems only interested in selected parts of the First and Second Amendments - the right to freedom of religion and the right to keep and bear arms - without regard for the rest of those amendments OR any of the other amendments. This seemed like a good place to point this out again.)

The most telling part of all this is that the Republicans SHOULD BE IN THE LEAD in the polls by now. The President is overseeing a shitty economy. Tensions in the Middle East are on the rise after the Libyan embassy attack - an event Romney utterly screwed up in capitalizing on. In short, people don't see the GOP as a viable option to lead the country.

So it comes down to diminishing returns. Rather than expanding, seeking to find others to join their merry band of terrorists, the GOP is imploding, losing moderates by the truckload daily and further isolating themselves because their core followers actually believe their propaganda.

In my previous posts, I made mention of how the right-wing will start the second civil war - almost certainly shortly after Obama is re-elected. It won't be the GOP which does it. It will be the hardest-core right-wingers who can't stand the thought of a "muslim nigger in the White House" (which is a direct quote from several posters I've seen in the last year). They don't care about democracy. They only care about religion and guns.

But they are DESTINED to fail by their core policies - at least as long as they're in a democracy. They spend all of their time trying to kick people out while at the same time trying to convince people to vote for them.

This is another reason why I think a second civil war is coming. There are enough hard-core rightists out there who are willing to murder their fellow Americans over their politics or religion to make it a definite, long-recognized possibility. When democracy fails to give them what they want through peaceful means, they'll resort to their guns to settle the matter.

It's the only way they'll stay politically relevant in what was left of a former democracy. One way or another domestic terrorism will increase with all of it coming from the right-wing. This is one prediction in which I hope I'm wrong, but I honestly can't see how I am. Unless we get a "moderate party" going (which the wealthy DO NOT want since it doesn't lend itself as well to the control of the political process as extremism does), it's going to happen.

Well, I put my life on the line for my country once. I can do it again.