For 50+ years, Republicans have actively worked to erode public trust & faith in our democratic institutions purely for political power. St. Ronald the Reagan accelerated the process with his “government is the problem” rhetoric, which took hold in the public psyche at many levels. Mind you, trust & faith can be good things, but balancing that with a dollop of skepticism never hurts either.
However, the Republicans, while hoping to establish themselves as “the last & only hope for the republic”, have gotten exactly what deserve & laid the groundwork for Donald Trump. So, the most disaffected voters decided to go for broke, apparently believing that they had nothing left to lose, while willfully ignoring what government has done/is doing for them (or having some kind of blind/mystical belief that what they benefit from would not be taken away) . Unfortunately this 20-25% of the electorate strapped up all to the jalopy.
Now, in a darkly amusing way, while Republicans still labor under the illusion that they control the processes & populace… their handiwork in weakening trust & faith in our government has become a ticking time bomb, likely to blow up in their faces. Almost sole credit for the coming debacle is theirs, they’re going to try to say “We didn’t build that.” (while watching THEIR Frankenstein’s monster shred the constitution & burn our cherished institutions to the ground.)
Obamacare, Medicare & Social Security are some of the first candidates for beheading Then will come other, smaller, social programs (including infrastructure, public health, education, etc) that affect the the most voiceless & vulnerable. Hopefully the backlash from just these programs being *threatened* will be enough to slow the destruction, but that is unlikely given the current “we won! We have a mandate!” climate.
Winning has been the main aim of the Republicans for years now. They have lost sight of any actual ideals they may have once had. They pay lip-service to an amorphous constellation of “issues” (which are trotted out on the campaign trail, then conveniently packed away) to keep their supporters sufficiently riled up & voting for them. It’s just another callous calculation to ensure they remain in power, like their embrace of Trumpism & Ayn Rand as the road to the future… a future of wealth, security & power for themselves. Magically this wealth is supposed to trickle down like fairy dust on all us losers at the bottom, and we *will* be grateful. I’ve been waiting for this to work since the 80s.
So now that they have won, what are they going to do? They apparently took Scarlett O'Hara’s oath of being willing to “lie, cheat, steal, or kill” to get power, but again, what are they going to do with it?! The answer is already pretty obvious: slash & burn social programs & infrastructure, while spending like crazy on tax breaks for the wealthiest & unneeded/unwanted military hardware… All under the guise of fiscal conservatism. They don’t want to “drown government in a bathtub” per se, they just want to drown what they can’t control. Or perhaps it would be more honest to say, “they don’t want to drown the government they *think* they can control.”
What the Republicans fail to appreciate here is that the tighter you squeeze a fistful of mud, that more slips out between your fingers.
