An essay on the origins of TTKP lethality

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

An essay that Thom Hartmann wrote for Daily KOS asks this interesting question: “How Come Everything the Republican Party Stands for Involves Other People Dying?”

Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of: Spousal abuse, Obesity, Smoking, Teen pregnancy, Sexually transmitted diseases, Abortion, Bankruptcies and poverty, Homicide and suicide, Infant mortality, Maternal mortality,  Forcible rape, Robbery and aggravated assault, Dropouts from high school, Divorce,  Contaminated air and water, Opiate addiction and deaths, Unskilled workers, Parasitic infections, Income and wealth inequality, Covid deaths and unvaccinated people, Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”), People on welfare, Child poverty, Homelessness, Spousal murder, Unemployment, Deaths from auto accidents, and People living on disability.

But are all these things, along with widespread GOP support for dictators like Putin, Orbán, and Xi, happening because Republicans hate their citizens and worship poverty, death and disease?

Or is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes?

It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism that the GOP has been using for forty+ years to get access to billions of dollars and win elections.

Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in. 

The GOP first openly embraced racism in 1964 when the party’s presidential candidate that year, Barry Goldwater, proudly refused to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It was a huge shift for the party of Lincoln, and when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, the South did a collective “what the hell?!?”

But racism alone can’t explain the entire list above. There had to be something else.

The second element embraced by the GOP that filled out the rest of the list above happened in 1980 when they hooked up with religious grifters and greedy, morbidly rich people.

Prior to that election year, George HW Bush and his wife Barbara were big advocates for Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, had signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law and was also an outspoken supporter of Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood.

The 1980 election saw the first major merger in American history between a political party and a religious movement largely run by grifters. Something that would have both shocked and horrified the Founders of our country and the Framers of the Constitution.

Republicans started talking about God (the word appeared in their platform for only the second time since the Party’s formation in 1856), and preachers and televangelists began to openly push GOP candidates from the pulpit in defiance of nonprofit law and the IRS.

As the GOP went deeper down their religion-induced rabbit hole, their hostility to science was logically accompanied by a hostility to education and educated people. George HW Bush and Rush Limbaugh began talking about “pointy-headed liberals in ivory towers,” openly trashing higher education to bring blue-collar voters into the party.

That was followed by a sustained Republican attack on public education itself by pushing for-profit privatized “charter schools” and vouchers, an ironic position in that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had probably done more to advance public education than any president in the 20th century.

Thus was set up the GOP’s 2020 hostility to masks and Covid quarantines, sex education and birth control, and their 2021 attacks on vaccination. And their continuous denial of global warming.

The other big turning point for the GOP in 1980 was Reagan’s open embrace of America’s oligarchs.

Just four years earlier, in their Buckley v Valeo decision, conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled that when a rich person showered so much money on a politician that that politician pretty much only voted the way the rich person wanted, that was no longer bribery but, instead, First Amendment-protected “free speech.”

In 1978, in a Republican-appointee-only decision written by Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo fame), the Court extended that right to buy politicians to American corporations (it was extended to international billionaires and corporations in 2010 by Citizens United.)

The result of this whole sad history is that Red states have been turned into sacrifice zones for Reagan’s racial and religious bigotry and the neoliberal raise-up-the-rich and crap-on-unions economic policies he inflicted on America.

In the years since the Reagan Revolution, TV preachers have become multimillionaires with private jets, their parishioners have slid deeper and deeper into poverty and addiction, and the unholy alliance of church and state that Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton warned us about is now arguably — behind great wealth — the second most powerful political force in America.

That is sobering. The evolution of the morally rotted TTKP is loaded with toxic radical authoritarians and shameless grifters. Hm, that sounds a lot like the evolution of the morally rotted DJT.