The President's Toxic Legacy

Is the president an elitist?

Troye described one COVID-19 task-force meeting in which she said the president — a known germophobe — remarked that the pandemic might be a "good thing" because it prevented him from having to shake hands with "disgusting people." -- Business Insider, Sept. 17, 2020

Building the authoritarian radical GOP deep state

A Washington Post article describes an effort the president is making to enable mass firings of federal employees he deems to have been disloyal. If he succeeds, they will be fired for being ‘underperformers’ or agents of the deep state. Fortunately, Biden can undo most of the damage by executive action because the damage is being done be executive action. Also, since the employee protections were put in place by congress, a lawsuit claims that the apparently intended mass firings are illegal. WaPo writes:

“The outgoing Trump administration is racing to enact the biggest change to the federal civil service in generations, reclassifying career employees at key agencies to strip their job protections and leave them open to being fired before Joe Biden takes office.

The move to pull off an executive order the president issued less than two weeks before Election Day — affecting tens of thousands of people in policy roles — is accelerating at the agency closest to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget.

By fast-tracking a process that gave agencies until Jan. 19 to identify affected jobs, the administration appears to be signaling its intent to leave as big an imprint as possible on a workforce it has long mistrusted. Democrats on Capitol Hill are trying to block the effort.

The executive order has a flip side, too. The administration could use it to assign current political appointees to the new personnel category, giving them a more permanent status than they currently have — although Biden could easily fire them.”

In other words, a new GOP precedent is the building of a true deep state by demanding federal employees be loyal to the president before being loyal to the constitution, the law, the public interest or truth. At present, those values are above loyalty to the president. What we had is, more or less, the opposite of a deep state. What the president wants is the epitome of a deep state. And, by its acquiescence the GOP leadership accepts this apparent new normal. It is now fair to call the GOP leadership the head of a deep state, radical right Christian nationalist ideology. Most rank and file republicans would not see it that way, but that's what it is.

Before the 2016 election, a few observers predicted that such back and forth changes seemed to be inevitable when a president from the other party came to power after an election. The first president would be reversed as much as possible by a new president in the other party. The ping-pong game of doing and undoing would go on for as long as the two-party system remains hyper-partisan, broken and paralyzed like it is now.

Reinforcing the radical right mirage and hypocrisy of concern for the little guy 

Political theorist Hannah Arendt was familiar with the demagogue dictator propaganda tactic of lying so outrageously and often that people started to believe the lies. The main ‘rationale’ for the phenomenon is purely human: No one could possibly make up such incredible whoppers, so they had to be true. 

The GOP is now fully engaging with this toxic tactic. Demagogues, dictators and totalitarians of the past have used it with great but lethal success. Packaged with the toxicity is blatant hypocrisy.  The WaPo writes on the latest whooper:

“President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself ‘Middle Class Joe.’

While Trump’s populism often manifested in style rather than substance, he was able to appeal to a unique coalition of voters that politicians from both parties are now aiming to capture in a post-Trump era, said Amy Walter, national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

‘It’s this us-versus-them mentality — a belief system that there’s a real America, and we’re the only party fighting for it,’ Walter said. ‘I think that’s where Trump was the most successful, and I don’t know how well anyone else is going to be able to do that.’

‘Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,’ Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter. ‘I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.’”

Elitist president recently playing golf as he quite often does

(since inauguration, at least 145 golf outings, most recently Nov. 26, 2020; 

total taxpayer cost to date: ~$142 million)

Apparently, Rubio forgot that the GOP was fully on board with ‘normal’ policies that left us dependent on China.’ He helped get us here.  Rubio himself wanted more trade with China and he supported the TTP multilateral trade agreement before he was against them. Not surprisingly, he is a lying hypocrite about this, just like most of the rest of the GOP leadership.

This hypocritical elitism criticism is purely hyper-partisan GOP dark free speech intended to deceive and further polarize the American people. The GOP never complained about the millionaires, billionaires, lobbyists and ethically challenged and conflicted business executive elites he larded his incompetent, corrupt administration with and/or took his orders from. 

Conclusion

Both matters discussed here point to the same thing. Hyper-partisanship, polarization and partisan distrust and intolerance are not going to go away. Neither is the contempt for truth and sound reasoning the authoritarian radical right GOP has to rely on to keep from being swept away by natural demographic and social change. In its deep immorality, the radical right will continue to poison American society and the minds of tens of millions of Americans. This does not bode well for the health of democracy, the rule of law, truth or social healing. What, if anything, can snap the GOP leadership out of the toxic authoritarian hold that the president and ruthless radical right ideology has trapped it in?