Why the Republican Party is Evil

(c) 2011 by Barton Paul Levenson

1. Introduction.

The Republican Party is the party of evil.

Does that sound insane? Or at the very least, exaggerated? I'm quite serious. I've been thinking about this for years.

Now, granted, I'm a liberal Democrat. But I haven't always been. For some years I was a card-carrying Libertarian Party member. That was after I lost my affection for socialism during my college days.

But the GOP of 2011 is not the GOP of a generation ago. If Dick Nixon or Gerry Ford were to run for president today, they would be denounced as too liberal and could not get nominated. And don't even think about Ike. The modern right already hates his guts.

2. Policy positions.

On every issue, the GOP sides with whatever will hurt people the most. Here are some examples. I know not every Republican holds every position here. But they're willing to vote for people who do.

Foreign policy

Economics

Crime and Civil Rights

Human Sexuality and Reproduction

Science and The Environment

Table Notes.

3. GOP Spokesmen

Think I made up some of the above? That I exaggerated? Look again.

• Legislation to repeal child labor laws has already been introduced in several states. Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has endorsed the idea publicly.
• The GOP still denies, and in effect defends, slavery on Saipan. Tom Delay fought legislation to regulate it. Ralph Reed of the misnamed Christian Coalition said such legislation was un-Christian. That evil hypocrite actually claimed the Christian position for not allowing protection for slaves.
• Rush Limbaugh denounced President Obama for helping African governments fight the Lord's Resistance Army. The LRA is a terrorist group which recruits soldiers by kidnapping children, then raping and beating them into submission, then teaching them to use firearms.
• The position that Lincoln was wrong to fight the Civil War is from presidential candidate Ron Paul.
• The position that contraception should be banned is from presidential candidate Rick Santorum. Rick Perry just wants to ban all funding for it.
• Not one GOP presidential candidate this year is willing to answer the question, "Do you think the Earth is more than 6,000 years old?" They get very angry when reporters ask it.

I am a born-again Christian, a sinner saved by God's grace, after I repented and believed. I firmly believe that the GOP is, in the end, doing the devil's work.

And I am someone who believes in the devil.

4. Psychology of GOP Spokesmen

I will discuss here why I think of the GOP leadership as evil, over and above their support for evil positions. I want to stress two things:

1. These symptoms would indicate evil in anyone, even if all the policies they favored were wonderful. However good the cause, someone who acted like this would be evil and dangerous, as I believe the GOP leadership is.

2. I want to stress, again, that I am NOT here indicting the millions of honest Republican voters. I think of them as badly deceived, and I don't blame them for that. There has been a brilliant, well-coordinated propaganda campaign by the extreme GOP right in recent decades which has misled many Americans. I discuss this further below.

In M. Scott Peck's book, "People of the Lie" (1983), the late Christian psychiatrist argued for a psychiatric diagnosis of evil. Non-Christians overwhelmingly ignored or rejected the book, although Peck was careful to say the diagnosis did not have to depend on Christian theological criteria. In fact, on this subject, Peck was heavily influenced by his mentor, Erich Fromm, whose theology was Jewish and humanist.

Peck argued that the evil personality shows a pattern of constant deception; thus his title, "People of the Lie." He argued that the evil person's central problem is an absolute refusal to acknowledge responsibility or guilt. The evil person is so terrified of being held guilty for something--anything--that he sees every conflict as the other person's fault, or even the world's fault. This typically shows in an addiction to scapegoating. The evil person projects his own failings onto others, to deflect the possibility that someone might criticize him for it.

Ailes and his backer, Australian rightist Rupert Murdoch, are behind a whole stable of American talk-show hosts, all of whom promote an extreme-right agenda. In addition to Rush Limbaugh; Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck are all Ailes creations. All are devoted to lies and scapegoating.

Listen to any of their programs. They spend the majority of their time denouncing liberals for everything wrong with America. They embrace Jonah Goldberg's crackpot theory that liberalism is a form of fascism. They repeatedly call liberal politicians, and liberals collectively, Nazis, Fascists, Communists, Socialists, etc., with no reference to what the terms actually mean. To hear them tell it, if all the liberals would just vanish from the Earth, the world would suddenly become paradise.

When stuck for a fact, they have a simple and reliable tactic: They make one up. Here are some of the outright lies--provable lies, things that can be independently checked--that the Ailes stable has convinced millions of Americans are true.

There's no point in going on. You can find more by searching the internet. The Ailes team has spread so many thousands of lies in the past twenty years that I would run out of server space if I tried to list them all.

The GOP leadership are indeed "People of the Lie." They accuse liberals of doing everything they would like to do.

The future of America under GOP leadership is one in which corporations are free to do anything they can get away with, even if large numbers of people die as a result. It will increasingly become a police state, with harsher and harsher measures enacted against dissidents. Racism, sexism, and antigay discrimination will become increasingly respectable. The most extreme Christian fundamentalist sects will have increasing government power. And things will get worse until, not many decades from now, global warming brings about a year in which every harvest in the world fails, and advanced civilization collapses.

Is this the beginning of the Biblical Apocalypse? I'm no theologian. My guess would be not. Even if most of humanity is wiped out in this century--well, that's happened before, whether you believe in the Toba eruption of 75,000 years ago or Noah's Flood. Humanity will go on. We're just in for a really miserable time, a mass die-off, and perhaps thousands of years of barbarism. Civilization may rise again some day. As a species, we're pretty inventive. The problem is, we're pretty self-destructive, too.