I’m On the Pavement, Thinking About The Government

The current Republican Party is the charred ruins of a house destroyed by wildfire. They’ve normalized for the entire USA racism, sexism, anti-semitism, Nazis, Russia, demonizing immigrants, school bombings, school shootings, lying, bullying, threatening, breaking and entering the Capitol, blatant voter suppression, environmental destruction, class warfare, blocking gun laws, politicizing school curricula, and a few other sins and crimes I’m omitting out of the tedium of the recitation.

Last night, Trump said Jewish voters would be to blame if he loses the election.

Right, that’s anti-semitism.

He complained that he had not “been treated right” (presumably by American Jews) after his support of Israel.

Speaking at an antisemitism summit hosted by Republican donor Miriam Adelson, and later at an event held by the Israeli American Council, Trump said “If I don’t win, I believe Israel will be eradicated.”

Meanwhile, GOP Senator and Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance has admitted to deliberately spreading lies about the Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio, because he believes that doing so brings attention to the campaign topic of immigration.

Vance’s evil bullshitting has caused school bombing threats that have closed schools in Springfield, Ohio, frightened parents, who are afraid to send their children to school, targeted a population of citizens in the state he represents, brought neo-Nazis from out of town. Trump has repeated and amplified the evil bullshitting himself, and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, has rung in against the bedlam. "Hate groups coming into Springfield, we don't need these hate groups," DeWine said in an interview last week debunking the Haitian pet-eating claim.

The GOP house fire burns, the nation burns with it.

I've been wondering who is going to call or has already called the meeting of sane Republicans to lay out the vision and policies of the new Republican Party? I'm thinking about a meeting like the Powell Memorandum* meeting.

Will the proposals for a new, clean and sober Republican Party include a return to small government and fiscal conservatism?  Do they have sources of new, young leaders to train who are not in the same vein as Cruz, Vance, Greene, McConnell?

I don't see Republicans going to campuses and recruiting eager youth who are moved by a message of "We've changed, we're different now, we're not just for tattooed barbarians with guns any more." The tropes of socialist, communist, are just insults thrown by vulgar anti-intellectuals.

Who will fund the new GOP? Will they continue to rely on misinformation and disinformation, self-interested ruthless billionaires, and the dingbats of the Heritage Foundation, or will there be any interest in the good of the nation, the good of the world?

I think we need to watch and listen, and talk with any thoughtful Republicans out there.

*On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. mailed a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chair of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was entitled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System,” and outlined ways in which business should defend and counter attack against a "broad attack" from "disquieting voices."

At first, the memo was seen by only a few members of the Chamber of Commerce. But on September 28 & 29, 1972, when columnist Jack Anderson revealed the existence and contents of the memorandum in his Washington Merry Go Round syndicated column. The Chamber published the memorundum in full in Washington Report, the Chamber's newsletter. An off-print of the memo was made available to anyone requesting it from the Chamber.

The Powell Memorandum and its consequences are well summarized in the Wikipedia article on Lewis Powell.

The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the U.S. It inspired wealthy heirs of earlier American industrialists, the Earhart Foundation (whose money came from an oil fortune), and the Smith Richardson Foundation (from the cough medicine dynasty)[17] to use their private charitable foundations, which did not have to report their political activities, to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Richard Mellon Scaife in 1964.[17] The Carthage Foundation pursued Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Powell Memorandum ultimately came to be a blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.[19][20][21] CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.[22][23] Historian Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms."[19] Political scientist Aaron Good describes it as an "inverted totalitarian manifesto" designed to identify threats to the established economic order following the democratic upsurge of the 1960s.[24]

Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program, including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books, papers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, and influencing public opinion.[25][26]

This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission relied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti.