The other day, my father was watching television and he heard about the new Republican healthcare bill. He was outraged, and he said, “There’s no way they will be able to get that passed.”
Now there are a few things about this. First is that conservatives, not to mention, Republicans themselves are very much against this bill. Second is that my father is very naive. But mostly, the comment reflected to me that this was typical of how Republicans like my father manage to live with themselves while voting for a political party that is so consistently vile.
Republicans Are Consistent — Really!
It’s all very simple for my father and Republicans like him. The idea here is that, sure, the Republicans are kind of mean, but they (and by extension those who vote for them) aren’t heartless. My father, who is, at rock bottom, something of an ol’ softy, can vote for a party that is cruel, hateful, and vile. And so my father can continue on voting for the GOP, and pretend that sentencing to death hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime is to be poor as a mere aberration instead of its core philosophical nature.
This is not to absolve my father. He should know better. Now at 84, I suppose he can be forgiven, because his mental functioning has really gone down in recent years. But he was the same way twenty years ago. Regardless, I’m not just talking about him.
I’ve long been fascinated that Republicans vote for this. Forget Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas. In that book, he was talking about something else: people allowing social issues to trump the economic issues they traditionally care more about.
What I’m talking about here is Republicans voting for a party that consistently votes against what they believe in. And I think this is the mechanism. They’ll convinced themselves that the Republican Party really does vote as they would like. It’s just that now and then they vote in an odd way.
It’s like going to the same mechanic that you father went to when you were a kid. The GOP may claim that they actually believe with their base of voters. But that isn’t the case. The Republican Party really has changed.
Republicans Really Will Destroy Obamacare
Despite what my father thinks, the Senate will vote for its vicious healthcare bill and tens of millions of people will lose coverage. It isn’t an aberration. It’s what they actually believe. And by extension, it is what my father believes it because he votes them into office.
He can pretend that what the Republicans actually vote for isn’t what they believe, but it is what they believe in. I’d love to give my father an out — an excuse for voting for an authoritarian who wants to see children and the old folk and weak die. But there is none.
Republican Is Republican — Trump Is Nothing Special
And let’s not forget: from a policy standpoint, things are no different now than they would have been in 2013 had Obama won. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up. Call it corporatist money management or nationalistic bigotry. It all ends the same: poor people die and rich people get tax cuts.
This is the Republican Party. This has been the Republican Party for at least four decades. They don’t just hate people like immigrants and black-skinned people; they hate people like my father. The only question is whether people like my father will figure it out before it’s too lake.
Don’t count on it.
Yesterday, I heard a bit of 
On the other side, I hear almost nothing about Sanders except as it is filtered through this caller’s lens. Because that’s all Sanders is. Take his most wacky supporters and define him as such. Matt Yglesias pointed out that the populist demographics in the UK went along with Hillary Clinton voters, “Corbyn’s electoral map, in the end, turns out to look a lot like Hillary Clinton’s. He did well in the most diverse and most educated parts of the United Kingdom and worst among older voters.”
Ossoff, like so many losing Democratic candidates over the years, was brought down fundamentally by arguments grounded in identity politics.
The fate of the American health care system now rests with a group of allegedly “moderate” senators, who are getting ready to approve a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a repeal bill so monumental in its cruelty that they feel they have no choice but to draft it in secret, not let the public know what it does, hold not a single hearing or committee markup, slip it in a brown paper package to the Congressional Budget Office, then push it through to a vote before the July 4th recess before the inevitable backlash gets too loud.
It was always funny, during last year’s presidential election, to hear Donald Trump talk about all the talented people he surround himself with. It was clear even then that this wasn’t true. His entire life was a good example of how the society does everything it can to help the rich.
In the midst of the most devastating testimony delivered about a sitting president in the living memory of nearly everyone serving in Congress today, the Republican speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, shuffled before microphones to say that Donald Trump—in trying to interfere with FBI investigations—probably just made an innocent mistake: “The president’s new at this. He’s new to government and so he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI and White Houses. He’s just new to this.”
I’m really happy to see 
It is significant that we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and not an individual leader, ruler, office, or entity. This is true for the simple reason that the Constitution is based on lasting principles of sound government that provide balance, stability, and consistency through time. A government based on individuals — who are inconsistent, fallible, and often prone to error — too easily leads to tyranny on the one extreme or anarchy on the other. The founding fathers sought to avoid these extremes and create a balanced government based on constitutional principles.