It is a political fact of life in this country that Republicans get themselves elected by distracting their base, inasmuch as their actual priorities consist mainly in screwing that base. It always reminds me of the Bob Dylan song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, that taught me as a young teen about the political methodology employed by the right. In those days, that included Southern Democrats, but those days are long gone. Republicans now have a monopoly on the tactic. It’s against the rules to explicitly demonize black people nowadays, though the implied demonizations are becoming closer and closer to explicit. Gays don’t work very well any more, so they’ve gone on to transgender people, who have to be the most vulnerable and least threatening people in the country. But for people who need a bogeyman, they apparently work.
Still, it seems to me that you have to be a bit careful in terms of how you screw the base while you distract them. At some point, you risk them getting wise to the fact that they’re getting screwed and, more importantly, precisely who is screwing them.
Which brings me to the latest Republican proposal: abolition of the income and payroll taxes, replaced by a 30% national sales tax, which would presumably be on top of the various state sales taxes. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s indicative of where these people are coming from, and as the linked article notes, the Democrats have actually opened fire.
The objective, of course, would be to screw the base by shifting the tax burden even more onto them, while relieving the rich from what little remains of their own tax burdens. The thing is, even the yahoos, or lots of them can understand that they’d be screwed by such a system, though they might not realize that besides hitting them hard in their pockets, it would likely destroy social security, something upon which they all rely, though they’d never admit they only get it because of us libtards.
I remember sometime in 2013 predicting on this blog that the next Republican presidential candidate would be nutjob, and that they could no longer get by appealing to the crazies but nominating “centrists” like Romney or McCain. Sure enough, we got Trump, and we’re not likely to see a reasonable Republican candidate (are there any reasonable Republicans?) in 2024 that gets any measure of primary support.
The inmates have taken control of the asylum, and it’s only a matter of time before they insist on pushing proposals like the national sales tax, because though they have risen to power by utilizing distraction etc., rightwingers who think like their nutjob base (but who still want to screw them) are now actually members of Congress, and they don’t have the brains to realize that you have to make sure you disguise the stuff you’re doing to your voters. You don’t say the quiet part out loud.
The Republicans have, in the past few years, lost quite a few former Republicans, the type of person who inherited their party affiliation from their parents, and who only now, with Trump, have come to realize that the party of their parents is no more. The party, now more than ever, can’t afford to lose the nutjobs, but proposals like the national sales tax might even make those folks take notice. It might help if the Democrats made it a point to keep asking those type of people precisely what the Republicans have actually done for them lately.
Meanwhile, folks like DeSantis are trying to insure that the base stays as ignorant as possible. The attack on public education is all about keeping the majority of the country as ignorant and as open to propaganda as possible.
We have to hope that the Democrats will get their act together and highlight this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter that it went nowhere. It’s indicative of what they want, and if they play it right it we can use it against them like they used “defund the police” against us.
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