When Republicans run for public office, at whatever level of government, one simple analytical or interpretive method to employ with regard to their campaign ads and public rhetoric in whatever fora (e.g., in person or in social and mass media) is to compare what they say to what they do not say. This will allow you to see clearly that the GOP has become a regressive Manichaean political party of inchoate grievance, resentment, fear, anger, racism and rage. They are unable to proffer a coherent and thus plausible let alone positive political platform of public policies that address the sundry problems of our time and place: from climate change to gun violence, from a crumbling infrastructure to environmental degradation, from a deformed and neglected system of public education to racial segregation, from an indefensible military budget to an inexcusably inadequate public health system, and so forth and so on. The substance of their unhinged political ambition revolves around the tired, time-worn ineffective tropes of de-regulation and privatization. The authoritarian and fascist flavor of its rhetoric has resulted in systematically deleterious effects on our electoral system and public discourse, coinciding with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court contemptuous of defensible constitutional doctrines and blithely dismissive of hard-won democratic changes that have given substance to democratic liberties and aspirations. Republicans are shameless in relying on nostalgic myths of American exceptionalism and xenophobic “Christian” nationalism. The cult of Trump, be it its leaders (who are most culpable and blameworthy) or the led, are made up of “social characters” (in Erich Fromm’s sense1) who Thomas Hobbes long ago identified as “the Foole,” the “Dupe,” the “Zealot,” and the “Hypocrite” (the last aptly characterizes Republican leadership, being the ‘worst of the worst,’ and most vile of the vile;’ furthermore, the ‘Hypocrite pretends to believe what the Zealot believes, or what the Foole believes, but only in order to manipulate others in his grab for temporal power’).2
Notes
1. See the term, “social character,” in the respective indices of Daniel Burston’s The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991) and Kieran Durkin’s The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
2. See S.A. Lloyd’s superb discussion of these “civil characters” in the chapter, “Fools, Hypocrites, Zealots, and Dupes: Civic Character and Social Stability,” in her book, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009): 295-355.
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