08/07/2023
"Since the years of the Reagan administration, (Republicans have) wanted to destroy the New Deal state (and) recognized that the only way they could win voters to slash taxes for the wealthy and cut back popular social programs
was by whipping up social issues to convince voters that Black Americans, or people of color, or feminists, wanted a handout from the government, undermining America by ushering in “socialism.”
The forty years from 1981 to 2021 moved wealth upward dramatically and hollowed out the middle class,
creating a disaffected population ripe for an authoritarian figure who promised to return that population to upward mobility by taking revenge on those they now saw as their enemies.
Biden’s resurrection of the liberal consensus of the years from 1933 to 1980 is illustrating that the economic problems in the country were the fault of Republican policies rather than of marginalized people.
The extremism of those angry Republican footsoldiers is revealing that they are not the centrist Americans they have claimed to be.
(Republican think tank leaders) embrace the illiberal "Christian democracy" of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, saying: “It’s time to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards.”
Radical right activists like Rufo believe they must capture the central institutions of the U.S. and get rid of the tenets of democracy—
individual rights,
academic freedom,
free markets,
separation of church and state,
equality before the law—
in order to "save the country."
Because those central democratic values are taught in schools, the far right has focused on attacking schools from kindergartens to universities with the argument that they are places of “liberal indoctrination.”
As a Moms for Liberty chapter in Indiana put on its first newspaper:
“He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”
While this quotation is often used by right-wing Christian groups to warn of what they claim liberal groups do, it is attributed to German dictator Adolf Hi**er. "
