Republicans No Longer Care About the Common Good

Over the last few decades the Republican Party agenda routinely betrayed the interests of a majority of Americans  through policies that sought to slash the social safety net and shift wealth to the already wealthy.  Much of the party base was duped into voting against their own economic interests by appeals to "god, guns, and gays" and dog whistle racism.  With the advent of Donald Trump, the appeals to racism became open and no longer disguised and the base of the party became openly hostile to the majority of the citizenry and focused solely on its own hatreds and prejudices and obsessed with putting its "rights" and "freedom" ahead of the common good.  Indeed, through vaccine and mask refusal those "rights" now embody the right to sicken and kill others in society.  The selfishness and self-centeredness of the mindset is shocking, although not surprising given the hold evangelicals now hold over the GOP base and the willingness of Republican elected officials and candidates to prostitute themselves to this demographic.  Having followed the "Christian Right" for over three decades, no group in American society is more self-centered and contemptuous of others.  This poisonous midset is now the norm with the majority of Republicans as noted in two pieces in The Atlantic.  One notes as follows:

[T]he best way to think about the Republican opposition to COVID-19 precautions might be as another manifestation of the surging feeling in the American conservative movement that it represents an embattled minority that needs to use the power of government to defend its independence. Public opinion consistently shows majority support for mask mandates and vaccine requirements, but several states, all of them GOP-led, have prohibited them. The minority’s insistence on opposing masks and vaccines privileges the individual rights of the few Americans who don’t want to take these steps over those of the collective mass of their compatriots who don’t want themselves or their loved ones to get sick.

The other looks at the Republican rejction of the belief in the common good.  Here are highlights:

I loved to hear her [my grandmother] stories of living through the Great Depression and World War II. During the hard times of the 1930s, she said, neighbors banded together to help one another, pooling money to assist a destitute family or leaving food on the doorstep of a widow raising several children. While many fought fascism overseas, she and others saved rubber and tinfoil for the war effort and scrimped on food because of rationing on sugar, butter, gasoline, coal, and oil. “Not everybody was selfless, but most of us tried our best,” . . . . . “That’s what you should always do.” 

Sacrificing for the common good was something most of us were taught when I was growing up. Just a few decades later, I’m seeing people in my hometown, and all over the country, thinking only of themselves. They’re not just unwilling to make sacrifices for others during a pandemic; they’re angry about being asked to. 

I brought up the idea that wearing a mask is a small sacrifice that could be seen as a patriotic duty, but he dismissed the notion. “Why should I have to wear a mask to help protect whoever, or somebody who chose not to be vaccinated, when they could put a mask on?” he told me. He didn’t seem to see any contradiction in the fact that his district includes only kindergarten through eighth grade, a tiny percentage of whom would be of age to get vaccinated. 

The situation is only made worse by the many elected officials in my state who seem determined to make masks a political issue. While our Democratic governor is begging people to get vaccinated and to mask up, Thomas Massie, one of Kentucky’s Republican representatives, joined two other members of Congress in suing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for enforcing a mask rule in the House of Representatives chambers. In July, Representative Regina Huff, a Republican who chairs the House Education Committee, tweeted photos comparing Anthony Fauci’s encouragement to get vaccinated to the cult leader Jim Jones’s orchestration of the Jonestown massacre. Republican Senator Rand Paul recently had his YouTube channel briefly suspended because he was sharing false claims about the efficacy of masks, a punishment he welcomed as “a badge of honor.” 

My grandmother had very little patience for political showboating, and I believe she would have been disgusted by the politicization of a virus that has now killed more than 620,000 Americans. I also know that she was a stridently independent and stubborn person who would have resented being told what to do. But any time I doubt that she would have supported masking, I think back to her tales of living through the 1918 flu epidemic as a child, of her belief that she had to help in the war effort, of her fears that one of her children might contract polio in the surge of the early 1950s. Maybe too few people today understand the necessity of putting aside one’s own comforts to help others. Perhaps our sense of community has suffered in the digital age. It seems to me, however, that most of the blame should go to politicians who care more about stirring up fear to defeat their opponents than they do about people’s lives or the economy. 

I try to remind myself that most of us are looking out for our neighbors when I see the bantam-rooster blustering of politicians such as Senator Rand Paul. . . . . Those who are unwilling to sacrifice a small part of their daily comforts for the good of our country seem to be the loudest right now. But the statistics show that they are not in the majority. Most of us are thinking of one another. My grandmother would be proud.