Republicans say they’re for “freedom.” They’re not, except for gun owners and people behaving badly.
“States where the GOP controls both the governorship and state legislature are moving in unprecedented numbers to restrict abortion, limit access to voting, ban books, retrench transgender rights and constrain teachers’ ability to discuss race, gender and sexual orientation at public K-12 schools and increasingly at public colleges and universities,” CNN says.
“Many of the same states are simultaneously rescinding restrictions on gun ownership” and imposing stiff penalties on protesters who commit minor infractions such as impeding street traffic. (Read article here.)
Did you vote for Republicans because of the “small-government, low-tax agenda that long topped its priorities”? That Republican Party is gone, replaced by an unruly mob led by cynical demagogues who stoke “roiling cultural anxieties and resentments,” including undisguised racism.
Now Republicans, too, participate in protests and civil disobedience. But they’re protesting legitimate election results, and rebelling against common-sense safety measures during a life-threatening public health crisis.
At the same time, red states are “remaking the American civil liberties landscape at breathtaking speed” — and not in a good way. They’re rolling back decades of social and legal gains. “In many ways, the red states are attempting to tilt the nation back toward a pre-1960s model, when the basic civil rights and civil liberties available to Americans diverged far more depending on where they lived,” and — although not specified in the CNN article — what their skin color is.
And that’s politically combustible because, “Even as the nation grows more racially, religiously and culturally diverse than ever, that means roughly half the states are on track to impose rules across this broad array of cultural flashpoints that primarily reflect the demands of one shrinking group: conservative and often older White Christians.” And this group increasingly is rejecting democracy and seeking to impose its rules on the majority of us — and supporting violent private militias and sometimes openly talking about coups and civil war.
This isn’t a party I can vote for. How about you?
Below: This cartoon was published in The Federalist, a conservative magazine, in June 2020, at the height of the BLM protests — which were overwhelmingly peaceful — and before Republicans rioted at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 over certification of the November 2020 presidential election results. Hypocrisy is a modern GOP specialty.
