You Can’t Appeal to the Morals of Those Who Have None
Republicans and the right are morally bankrupt. Stop acting like they’re not.
The American political right has been on a power trip over the past few years. After electing Trump into office, they have been trying to systematically destroy the fundamental rights of every American who isn’t a straight cis white man. Even then, those of us who don’t have money or any kind of power are still pretty hosed.
They have been enacting this playbook since at least 2008 when they recognized that, by taking statehouses and controlling redistricting in the 2010 census, they could effectively co-opt politics in much of the country through gerrymandering. It was a brutally-effective method that systematically disenfranchised most BIPOC by diluting their votes into districts that were safely right-leaning and concentrating the rest into a smaller number of blue districts.
The upshot was conservative majorities and supermajorities in states that might otherwise be more purple or lean left altogether. It also enabled them to ensure their grip on the U.S. House of Representatives was firm and largely unshakable for the foreseeable future, allowing them to influence national legislation as well as state laws.
Generally speaking, the right-wing of America has decided that they have no shame or moral center anymore. As long as they have and hold onto power, they will do anything up to and including selling their fellow citizens down the river if it means they’ll hang on just a little longer. No act is too low or disgusting for them. They literally fomented an insurrection to keep their guy in power after he lost.
How do you reason with that?
Seriously, how do you appeal to the moral center of a party that has none? For a group that likes to crow about how righteous they are thanks to their unwavering faith, they sure are pretty cruel to just about anyone who isn’t a white straight Christian. Moral majority indeed.
Most of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe a few days ago stood in front of Congress and testified under oath that it was settled case law and they wouldn’t vote to overturn it. What did they do the second they had a chance? My gods, I’m shocked!
The thing that gets to me is that a lot of Democrats are still trying to negotiate with them as though they are coming from a place of honesty and integrity. They are not. Republicans will do or say literally anything to get their way at this point, no matter how slimy, disgusting, or illegal, and they do it because they know they’ll get away with it. The Dems won’t hold them accountable because they’re trying to negotiate in good faith with a party that will lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want.
You cannot negotiate or reason with a group of people who have no morals or ethics. For all of the “good faith” that the right claims to have, they sure don’t use any of it when they’re in positions of power, or just at all. When people are hurt or die from preventable things — like gun violence or our country’s terrible healthcare system — they offer hollow “thoughts and prayers” while taking millions from the gun lobby and insurance companies to maintain the status quo.
Look, I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the right is morally bankrupt and that there is little hope in negotiating with many of them for any kind of reasonable change. They don’t care about anyone but themselves, and their elected representatives will throw their constituents under the bus if it means they can hang onto power for another decade.
Democrats don’t tend to be a lot better, but at least they care about the people that I identify as my friends: women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ folx. They may suffer a lot of the moral failings that the right suffers from, but most of them stand for forward progress and not regression to a time when straight white dudes ran everything. Having to choose between that and a political group that wants most of my friends to be stripped of their rights and/or dead, I know where I’m hanging my hat.
And, considering that the right will always fight dirty when given the option, why do we even bother trying to negotiate with them? It feels like the whole “woman who voted for face-eating leopard party surprised when leopard eats her face” meme but in horrifically graphic real-life terms. Democrats try to work with the right on any number of things, then get cheated or backstabbed and are utterly shocked, shocked, I say.
Considering that the Republican party is the party of bigots, Nazis, white supremacists, and misogynists these days, I don’t know why we even bother trying to negotiate in good faith with them. Again, they want a lot of the people who make up the left to either be stripped of their rights or die. That’s the kind of stuff that terrorists say, and you can’t negotiate with terrorists.
The right no longer has a moral compass. It’s time we treated them as such.
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