Last night's State of the Union Address really got me thinking.
Not so much about what the President said or didn't say, or what parts of his policies I support or don't support, but about his opposition and the increasingly extreme positions they've taken over the past 15 years and from where those positions have their roots.
Whether we're talking about the Regressive Party's refusal to allow women a personal choice about their own bodies, or their insistence that women should be paid less than men, or their blatantly racist gerrymandering of voting districts, and so on, it's clear that the GOP is defending not so much the population at large, but a very small minority of it. When they say "The American People", it's pretty obvious what Regressives mean: Rich White Christian Men (RWCM).
In that equation, as demographics are shifting power away from that particular group, we're seeing more and more repressive tactics taken to preserve RWCM power. When we take into account the rabid free-for-all gun polices that the Regressives champion and the rhetoric that they use when doing so, as I said in a previous posting, it's clear that what the motivates the Regressives most is fear.
Fear mongering is the proven tactic of the Regressive Party, particularly its mouthpiece, FOX. This much has been long-established in rational circles. But what, at the end of the day, are they really scared of?
We know that RWCM have traditionally treated everybody else like dirt in every way possible. What I think they're most scared of is this -- now that the shoe is shortly to be on the other demographic foot, so to speak -- being treated in kind by the new non-White-male majorities.
Looking at things in this light, like oppressive minority regimes before them, the Regressive party's actions, on behalf of RWCM start to make sense.
"We Want Our Country Back" is their rallying cry against everyone who's not RWCM and a non-white President is the first sign to them that their power is finally waning. So, of course they hate him and everything they think he stands for, whether he actually does or not, and they'll do everything in their power to prove him ineffectual. The longer they can convince the public that non-RWCM are incapable of governing effectively, the longer they can maintain their dwindling monopoly on power.
This is why they're working so hard to keep women and religious/ethnic minorities "in their place" with legislation clearly violating the Constitutional Separation of Church & State, and why they see nothing wrong with violating their own stated principles in favor of maintaining their own power. They fear that they'll be treated by the rest of us the way they've treated us for so long. They fear the turnabout of their own unfair play.
To me, that says that Regressives on an instinctive level know that they've traditionally done very, very wrong. Rather than manning up and admitting their errors in hopes of moving the nation forward in a way that works for us all, they've given into their fear and are doubling-down on the same errors in order to hang on by their fingernails to power that's already nearly out of their hands.
It is the cornered animal that is the most dangerous to deal with.
