Skip to main content

A phoenix out of the bonfire

I hereby declare myself a member of the Radical Republican Party, whose intent it is to displace the Republican Party as it stands in the two-party system of the Union.

The Republican Party as it stands has demonstrated itself to be utterly compromised.  It is rotten to the core.  Hence two of the Radical Republican Party's founding principles must be:

1) The impeachment and removal from office of Donald Trump.
2) The dissolution of the existing Republican party and defeat at the polls of all Republicans in the U.S. Congress and the state houses of all American states or territories.

Additionally, the Radical Republican Party chooses this moment to re-found on the principles of the Republican Party at the end of the War of Secession:

1) First and foremost, the process of making redress and reparation to the descendents of America's slave population must be picked up at the point of its abandonment, at the end of Reconstruction in 1877.  The entailments of redress and reparation are not for any individual to decide, but must be such as definitively end the treatment of the African-American population of the Union as slaves, and so would be expected to include definitive financial payments (possibly extending indefinitely) and definitive actions to redress the century and a half of deliberate U.S. government racial discrimination following the end of Reconstruction.  (See The Color of Law for one among many clear delineations of how such deliberate discrimination has been implemented.)

2) Second, the Radical Republican Party continues to embrace the long-standing principle of the Republican Party that taxation on economic enterprises should be minimized, without however supposing any artificial limits to taxation on the income of individuals.  In the latter it stands in the tradition of the Progressive Republicans, without supporting the racist beliefs and traditions of the Progressive Democrats, of the first decades of the twentieth century.  An activist government is required not as a nanny to the people, but to redress long-standing injustices which manifest now as economic inequality, and in doing so there should be no artificial limitations on taxes imposed, especially on the rich, as individuals.

2a) A qualifier or codicil to the belief in no undue restrictions on economic enterprises is that such economic enterprises must see the true environmental costs of their actions, whether through outright restrictions, strong regulation, or taxes representing externalities.  Climate change is real and must be addressed urgently.

3) Third, the Radical Republican Party continues to embrace the Republican Party's outright opposition to socialism and communism, with the proviso that this opposition extends to those who explictly claim the mantle of socialism or communism (such as Bernie Sanders), and not to labelling as such those who disagree with the Party on taxation or spending or the specific actions to be taken by government (such as Hillary Clinton).

The Party welcomes your comments.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It's not really about the Russians

By that subject heading, I really mean to posit the question: what would it mean for our evaluation of the current political inferno if it were  really about the Russians?  I am supposing first of all that the involvement and attempts to interfere of the Russian government in the American presidential election of 2016 was real; moreover, I believe the Trump administration, including Donald J. Trump himself, colluded knowingly with the Russians. But even taking all that as given, and taking as given that it's a good thing for the legal process to be set loose on these events because they may provide the most straightforward path to the impeachment of Trump, the question remains: is it really about the Russians?  Assuming full culpability of both the Russians and the Trump campaign, it would still remain the case that the interference and collusion consisted in obtaining and promulgating garbage about Hillary Clinton, and messing with people's heads on social media. ...

Is it about the darned fundamentalists?

"Fundamentalist" is shorthand for my ignorance, of course, as is "evangelical."  Not that I have a desire to know firsthand what it's like to attend a small enveloping community dominated by a cult leader with enough money to rent a space, which is how I think of the galaxy of Southern churches out of which the support for Trump and Moore emerges naturally.  It's a little ridiculous for those of us without any inclination to Christianity to go after the lax moral framework of such folk (though much less ridiculous for those who still practice mainstream forms of Christianity or other God-fearing faiths), in my opinion, because so much of their practice and preaching has to do with the salvation of undeserving sinners, and so little of it with the responsibilities of probity, let alone charity.  And that offered salvation might be what draws the angry, the despairing and the depressed to those who will accept them as they are, so we, who fear not the Lord and...

The Color of Law

My review  of   The Color of Law     , a book by   Richard Rothstein : This carefully documented, eloquently argued history of U.S. government policies of overt racial segregation post-Jim Crow, and of the results of these policies, should be required reading, at least for all white Americans who've been inculcated with the myth of "de facto" segregation over the past fifty years (my lifetime). This is a book that breaks the narrative of illusions and lies essential to Trump's and Bannon's racist propaganda -- and ultimately, the facts of this book are part of what must be used to break the spell of lies propping up not only them, but the system of thought that allows white people no different from myself to believe in both gun-supported self-defense of themselves, and police war against black men who presumptively "appear" to be armed criminals.