THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRAZY 30%

 

As a progressive, I couldn't help laughing at now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's pathetic four day bid for the speakership, in which he went down in flames 14 times before finally eking out a victory.  And to get that victory he had to make concessions to the far right Freedom Caucus, a group of house members on the extreme right.  So my amusement at McCarthy's string of losses is tempered by the fact that the house is now about to get down to business, and for many of those members that means attacking the Joe Biden regime with baseless investigations and holding up things like the debt ceiling vote, which could have catastrophic economic consequences.   While I have no sympathy for McCarthy, who condemned Donald Trump in congress after January 6th and then quickly flew out to Mar-o-Largo to kiss his ring, it will be hard to watch him trying to appease the extreme members of his party for the next two years.   

What the whole voting debacle shows is that there is a significant wing of the Republican party that see the role of government in America only as funding the military and protecting their guns.  Or, as former House Republican speaker John Boehner put in back in 2010 when he had to deal with the extreme Tea Party movement in the House, they only want “to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

The sad fact of the matter is that about 30% of the American electorate are on the extreme right, and because they own one party and vote faithfully, they are able to have an influence far beyond their numbers.  Just look at how the supreme court recently overturned  abortion rights despite those rights being supported by around 60% of the American public, and you can see how a determined minority can slowly but surely drive the country in their direction.  And it's not just abortion rights, the 30% are the ones who think that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, reject coronavirus vaccines, believe in Qanon, think that the earth is only 20,000 years old and marinate themselves in right wing media exclusively.  Quite simply, they hold the rest of the country back, trying to return the country to a past where white straight Christian men ran everything.

Is there anything the 70% of sane people in this country can do about this?  Not much other than vote and wait; the Republican party currently has a serious problem with younger voters, who strongly disagree with them on nearly every major issue.  The party is literally dying out as their voters age.  (And the old notion that people get more conservative politically as they age has never been proven true).  Someday the Republican party will have to start tempering its beliefs or time will throw it in the dustbin.  Sadly, the 30% will go down fighting all the way.