What it is about today’s vituperative, foam-at-the-mouth Republican party?
No longer disguising their desire to repress women, workers, immigrants, the poor, and all others who differ with (or are different from) their own partisan clan, the party has turned to a politics of hatred and division, openly seeking to punish opponents they now brand as “enemies” and “vermin.” What’s motivating this plunge into such undiluted political sourness?
My simple observation is that they’ve succumbed to a base impulse expressed in one straightforward word: MEANNESS. After all, their current agenda amounts to hurting people they don’t like, trying to keep America’s diverse majority from getting such basic human needs and rights as health care, the vote, fair wages, reproductive liberty, and public education free of church dictates. That’s not “conservative,” it’s just mean.
This malicious strain of selfish Republicanism has flared up periodically in our history, with the few striving to repress the many. Woody Guthrie even wrote an anthem in the 1940s mocking those crusading for such a morally-depraved politics:
“I’m the meanest man that ever had a brain
…I hate everybody don’t think like me…
And I’m readin’ all the books I can
To learn how to hurt…
Keep you without no vote,
Keep you without no union.
…Well, if I can get the the fat to hatin’ the lean,
That’d tickle me more than anything I’ve seen,
Then get the colors fightin’ one another,
And friend against friend, and brother and sister against brother…
…I love to hate and I hate to love!
I’m mean, I’m just mean.”
This song is dedicated to Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, Jim Jordan, Mike Johnson, Greg Abbott, and… well, you know who you are.
Woody Guthrie’s Anthem Mocking Right-Wing Republicanism