User:Woozle/Why Republicans Suck/moral absolutism

Republicans and Moral Absolutism

Republicans think they're in the right, regardless of any criticism or evidence. Anyone who criticizes you is therefore the enemy, and not to be trusted. As the second President Bush famously said: you're either with us, or you're against us; either you're with those who "love freedom", or you're with "the enemy". Never mind that his idea of "loving freedom" seemed to involve hoarding it. (I'll touch only lightly on Bush's awfulness; I'd have to write another book to explore the subject even a little bit thoroughly.

That kind of sentiment is what we non-Republicans often refer to as "facepalm-worthy": it's the kind of thing we just can't believe anyone would be so stupid as to say out loud.

I really shouldn't have to explain this, but apparently Republicans don't get it: this is not what America was ever about. This is not what civilization is about. This is what destroys civilizations from within. It is exactly what "the terrorists" want: a black and white world where everyone believes that our in-group is Right and everyone else is Wrong and evil and we'd be doing the world a favor if we just nuked 'em.

In other words: Republicanism is what the terrorists want. When Donald Trump says we should kill the families of known terrorists, he's following their playbook to the letter. When Republican leaders talk about nuking countries whose policies or actions we dislike, they're doing the same way: using the threat to advance their own agenda, then using their agenda to advance the threat.

...which is how the Republican Party makes its living, in a nutshell: create a threat, campaign on promises to defend against it; when elected, go out and attack something not necessarily related to the threat (which may have been imaginary to begin with), and act all shocked when they retaliate or protest -- a new Threat to America! We're saved I mean how terrible, and we must bomb, torture, imprison, or harass more people to show them we really mean business!

Among the fake threats Republicans have ginned up are the following:

• non-heterosexuals and non-cisgendered people: they're different from the majority in certain ways that trigger deep-seated instinctive emotions in many people, and therefore an easy target for demonization
• abortion: aborting a pregnancy at any stage is apparently exactly the same as killing a baby
• liberals in general: apparently there is a growing contingent on the far-right which fervently believes that liberals have destroyed, or are destroying, or want to destroy, America -- while liberals are in fact pretty much the only people who give enough fucks to actually try to fix things, rather than just using a pose of fixing things as a pretext for gaining power.
• terrorists: yes, they actually kill people -- but far less than many other phenomena that Republicans seem to have no trouble ignoring or even playing down. Deaths from terrorism have been on a decline for the past few decades, as well; this is not a new problem, and it's getting better on its own. Terrorists have been one of the primary excuses for dysconservative hypocrisy on the subject of small government: they brought us the dysfunctional TSA (which replaced a private, for-profit system which was working just fine, thanks), a now-even-more-biggerer-than-ever-before Military Industrial Complex, increased government surveillance and reduced rights of privacy against same: 1984 in a bottle (just add media).