Republicans, "The Dark Side", and Terrorism

"Terrorists have seized control of Congress and are holding the US government hostage. The terrorists demand that the government pay them $2 trillion or they will force the government into financial meltdown using their secret weapon"

Sounds like a storyline from a bad Hollywood thriller, but in effect, the above situation, is happening now in the US Congress. The "terrorists" are called Republicans, and they are holding hostage the fate of the US economy.

As explained here the Republicans simply refuse to do business with the government if they do not agree to their demands. Due to the design of the American political system, it means that the US government can in effect be held hostage by the opposing party if they see fit.
As Michael Tomasky explains in the highlighted article, the US system of checks and balances wasn't designed to used for this purpose. The Founding Fathers developed a unique system to prevent tyranny on one hand and discourage anarchic decision-making on the other. While this had led to frustrations from time to time, it is hard to imagine that the political process could be so cynically subverted by one side in order to create inertia and paralysis in the government. But this is what the Republicans have been doing, and have created, as a result.

The paralysis and inertia is designed by a party that instinctively dislikes government, to make the government look ineffective and pointless.
Like minions of the Sith Lord Palpatine in "Star Wars", the Republicans wish to seek out and destroy all that is positive about government in America. To the Republicans, the Democrats, and Obama in particular (if you'll pardon the comparison!) are like the "Jedi", trying to defend the democratic and positive principles of The Republic against the schemes of "The Dark Side", who wish to destroy The Republic and replace it with something akin to an Empire Of Anarchy.

The "Empire Of Anarchy" that the Republicans support is never described as such: like the Sith Lord, they deviously justify their actions for the sake of saving The Republic. They claim that their actions are fighting for the principles that The Republic was founded upon: freedom and limited government. But whatever they might say, their plans create only freedom for the super-rich elite, and anarchy for everyone else.

Democracy, meanwhile, has been conveniently forgotten by these Republican financial terrorists. The majority of the population do not support their views; for the Republican extremists who have hijacked the party (and have done for at least the last twelve years), this is merely a further sign of the righteousness of their path. They are the chosen few who understand the "wider picture", supporting their superiority over the "unenlightened masses" with the idea that the Founding Fathers, too, were wary of the anarchic potential of "full democracy".
This Republican logic is also that found amongst all extremist ideologies - from the Fascist (and Bolshevik) contempt for the softness of "liberalism" (which contemporary Republicanism closely resembles), to the disregard for democracy and their casual attitude to the rule of law. The Constitution and rule of law that Republicans claim to worship is only adhered to when it is convenient, as we found during the tenure of George W. Bush.

What is all the more ironic is that Republicans' disregard for the concept of government is even supported by their own record in office over the past thirty years. Modern Republicanism's "Founding Father" is Ronald Reagan; prior to that, there was more of an agreement on most issues between the two US parties. Considered as a near-deity by Republicans, Reagan's tenure in office was one of gross financial irresponsibility, continued (for the most part) through the tenures of other Republican Presidents, George Bush senior and junior. Put it another way, Republican distrust for government therefore runs into self-hatred, as it was the Republicans who created the circumstances for the financial crisis in the first place. They hate government not only because the Democrats support it, but because they are so bad at it themselves.

It is the Republican neophytes (AKA "The Tea Party"), who are the most selective, disingenuous, and deceptive with these facts: they choose to deify Ronald Reagan and their philosophical inspiration, Ayn Rand, while simultaneously praising and crucifying them whenever the need arises.

In another sense, "The Tea Party" faction that has effectively hijacked the Republican Party, and held the US government hostage to its demands, is a group of nihilists: they seem to believe in very little, finding it hard to rationally explain their thinking, and resort to tactics of posturing to say only what they oppose. They are against government, against taxes, against abortion, gun control, and so on.
The things the are positive towards are very few: the freedom to make money and owning guns seem to be the main ones, which both naturally advantage those who are already rich and those who are suspicious of government and people in general.

The agenda of today's Republicans then is this: simply, to dismantle and frustrate the normal functioning of government, by any means necessary (within the law).

I wonder how much further Republicans would be prepared to go to reach their aims. They are already holding the government to ransom. And if that fails, what then? Does "the law" then become malleable, as it is for those who feel they are above it?

There does appear to be very little in moral terms, between today's Republicans and some terrorists.

"You get the government you deserve"

We're all familiar with the phrase "you get what you pay for". Another phrase which also rings true is that people tend to get the government they deserve.

Why, for example, does David Cameron still enjoy higher personal ratings compared to other party leaders? Cameron is more popular personally than his party as a whole; with Ed Milliband, the opposite is true. For Nick Clegg and the LibDems, both are in the popularity doldrums.
This is mostly down to the psychology of British people themselves. Cameron has successfully been able to convince enough people that the mess that the government and the country is in is mostly down to people as a whole spending too much money. Whether the facts prove this, is irrelevant (the facts, from what I can see, don't support this hypothesis; the banks' bailout and government overspending combined created the problem, not the people themselves).
In other words, British people want to believe that they created the mess; that's why the government as a whole remains much more popular than would have been thought possible. Whereas in Greece the cuts have caused riots and outrage, British people's attitude is to grumble, shrug, then meekly carry on as before. Britain doesn't "do" revolution or outrage; they're too polite.
The attitude of "keep calm and carry on" has infected Britain; as a result, David Cameron's condescending attitude of "I feel your pain" goes mostly unremarked. Thatcher had a similar approach (although Cameron is no Thatcher in terms of personality); it seems people are happy to re-live the agony and the ecstasy of the Eighties. The difference, however, is that even the government admits that the "agony" of cuts and stagnation will last a lot longer than they previously said - lasting for most of the decade. Most British people, though, seem don't seem to mind; maybe they enjoy self-imposed hardship. Why that is so is another question.

Culture therefore plays a large role in the kind of government people get. The USA is another example. Why is the USA consumed with political paralysis? Why has the USA not been able to see what caused the financial crisis (a deregulated an uncontrolled banking sector), and deal with it?
This is because political orthodoxy in the USA has been ruled for the past thirty years and more by the idea that government, by definition, is bad. That's thanks to the likes of Reagan's famous quote that the nine most frightening words spoken are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" - as he also said, the government wasn't the answer to their problems; that government WAS the problem.
But before his time (and since the Depression), government had become the main provider of services to its people, including employment. Reagan smashed that, so generations since then have grown up on the thinking that "government" is almost a curse word. This is why the Republicans have become masters of manipulation; so that all problems cannot, by definition, come from the markets or the ruthlessness of corporations, but must be the fault of government interference. This is why Obama was unable to get through more than half of his programme (with the notable exception of health care reform, though this also was watered down under pressure), and why the Republicans were able to counter-intuitively blame him for the lack of recovery after the financial crisis (even though it was their party who helped to create it).
So the paralysis inside The Beltway is the result of decades of cultural in-fighting over the role of government (or more exactly, "government" versus "anti-government"), making American voters progressively more and more disillusioned with the power of politics; this has been most symbolically displayed in the reign of Barack Obama, and the guerilla tactics of the Republican party.
No wonder, then, that in 2012 the American people feel they will be choosing between a failed leader on one side, and a charlatan on the other (whoever the Republicans choose).
The American people will only get a government that that does something for them when they start believing in government.

A similar sentiment can be said of many of the former Soviet states, such as in Central Asia, and in authoritarian states in general. The circumstances of some countries are different, and can depend on culture as well. In the Middle East, it was long assumed by many historians and theorists that authoritarian government was "natural" for Arabs as they would never understand the concept of democracy. 2011 proved that theory wrong, however: Arabs across the region have shown that if they fight for freedom, it can be achieved. "Freedom" is not a Western luxury.
The regions with the highest number of authoritarian governments include Africa and the former Soviet Union. These are also countries with some of the highest levels of corruption in the world; and that is not coincidence.
Corruption is a cultural trait. Georgia was until recent years also extremely corrupt, until the people decided they had had enough and voted in someone to do something about it; President Saakashvili, although he has lost support since then for other reasons, at least made genuine efforts to get rid of the endemic police corruption, with immediate positive results. Georgia now has much lower levels of corruption.
This contrasts with many other former Soviet states, where corruption so permeates all parts of life it is difficult for people to imagine doing things any other way. Here, corruption is a cultural norm. It has become so because people's levels of distrust in government and each other are, in some countries in particular, so neurotic that it renders any thought of changing the form of government unthinkable. And unthinkable because people's psychology of human nature is so negative that they have become resigned to their fate; a nation's people trapped in a slow sinking quicksand. That is why they have been reduced to deception and official thievery to survive.
This state of affairs is the other end of the spectrum to the optimism of Barack Obama: "Yes, we can". To people in some of the former Soviet states, or abysmally-corrupt regimes in Africa, they only think "No, we can't".
Why do they think they can't? Because their morale and sense of belief in themselves or each other is so low that they think even if they provoke change, the "change" will quickly revert to the situation as it was already, because they believe that anybody else would behave in the same, corrupt way.
If people in states like these start believing in themselves and each other, as those in the Arab world did, then they can make the positive change. If not, then they have only themselves to blame.

The Devil Votes Republican

The popularity of the Republican is a true work of art. It is a political organisation whose continual success and re-invention can only be explained through the kind of cunning that Satan himself would be proud of.

First of all, a brief history.
Created around the time of the Civil War, the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln (who has been admired by many ever since). Although he was assassinated, the party went on to dominate US politics for the rest of the 19th century, being in power almost continually throughout the Gilded Age, all the way up to the Great Depression (excepting Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland). Its low point was the twenty-year absence from power while FDR and Truman ruled the roost at the White House.
The modern Republican Party came about through the efforts of Ronald Reagan (for Eisenhower and the Nixon-Ford administration ran the country as moderates in the traditional Republican mould). Since the time of Reagan, the GOP has morphed into something else; an altogether more fearsome creature.

What does the Republican Party stand for?
A good question, considering its continual success and re-invention. First of all, who votes for them, and why?

A short answer could be average God-fearing, socially-conservative patriots, who fear the government, want to pay low taxes, have the right to earn their money and defend the "average guy on the street", be fiscally responsible, and to be defended against foreign enemies. In other words, traditional Protestant values that have existed in the American psyche since Washington´s day.

The beauty of the Republican Party is that they have successfully been able to persuade people that the country´s best interests are best served with them, and been able to persuade them that this is still true even when faced with clear facts that show them the opposite.

"The country´s best interests" though, depends on how you define them. Where most people might see "the country´s best interests" as meaning "the people´s best interests", the Republican Party sees this as meaning "the best interests of those who own the most in the country".

Foreign policy is an instrument of trying to expand the commercial interests of its funders. This does not equate to the same thing as the people´s interests, as the companies that fund the GOP simply want to expand abroad; if that means closing a factory in Michigan to relocate abroad, then great, as money knows no borders. In this logic, there is no such thing as the "national interest"; as these companies own or buy influence over the nation´s assets, these companies are the "national interest". Patriotism is nothing more than a

The Republican Party´s Foreign policy is, in fact, it´s only real "policy".
What stands for "Domestic policy" is nothing more than another instrument to make the conditions best for those who control the most; deregulation of banking (as first pushed by Merril Lynch´s Don Regan, who acted as Ronald Reagan´s Treasury Secretary and later Chief of Staff) is essential to this function. As are all forms of deregulation. For the companies with the most can only flourish the most if there are no rules holding them back.

"The government does best when it does the least" - this is the Republican slogan. A beautiful logical absurdity: by definition government exists because there is an absence of something. If government exists only to destroy then government by definition is no real government at all. In its place there is a vacuum; anarchy.
The Republican Party seems to want to create a form of anarchy whereby the American people simply pay taxes to fund the "defence of the nation" (meaning "commercial expansion of the elite´s foreign interests"). Taken to its logical conclusion, domestic policy would no longer exist: the government has outsourced all its domestic operations so that it no longer needs to directly spend money on any of its citizens. The people fend for themselves while the "government" uses its taxes to expand its foreign operations. And as the government´s interests expand abroad, this necessarily leads to a further degradation of the conditions at home.

There is a word for this. It´s called tyranny.

This is the Republican dream. To allow this dream to become a reality, vote Republican. Vote Satan