User:Woozle/Why Republicans Suck/intro
Whatever it once was, the US Republican Party has become truly awful -- that is, far more so than the average political party (by which of course I mean the Democrats). This is a fact that is now pretty much obvious to anyone who isn't a Republican; there has been debate, and the debate is over. Republicans are, as a group and as individuals, absolutely terrible at running a government of any size.[1]
If you are a Republican, you may not care what I think since I'm not a Republican and therefore not to be trusted or taken seriously (which would only prove one of my points: Republicans think they're right by definition, a concept which is explored in a later chapter). If that's true, you can stop reading here, because I'm not going to be saying much of anything nice about your Party as it now stands.
If, however, you're curious as to why so many people find your party and the people who vote for it to be despicable human beings, read on.
Dysconservatism: a litany of badness
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Republicans have slashed budgets for public education at all levels, have inserted unscientific dogma into school curricula, have required stickers on textbooks stating that essential cornerstones of how we understand the world are "just a theory", not to be taken too seriously, have removed any elements of critical thinking from school curricula.
It is by this irresponsible and underhanded ethos -- victory at any cost, we're always right, suppress any information that shows we might be wrong -- that Republicanism has not only thrived but remade much of American culture in its own image: violent, hateful, narrow-minded, dishonest, ignorant, superstitious, paranoid, blindly loyal to the undeserving and trusting of the untrustworthy.
Put more simply: Republican ideology has made us gullible and stupid.
Or, rather, it has made you stupid. Yes, you out there -- railing about how terrible Donald Trump is while preparing to vote for Ted Cruz. Cruz's policies are, on the whole, no better than those proposed by Trump; the only difference is that Cruz is constrained by the needs of the Party establishment, and will backtrack when he accidentally carries Party beliefs to their logical conclusions in public. Trump is that logical conclusion; he is everything the Party wants to say but is afraid to; he is everything that right-wing voters have come to believe because Republicans have led them to believe it. (Listen to Cruz's dad sometime if you want to understand better where Cruz is really coming from.)
What this really comes down to, though, is that the Republican base represents people who don't care enough about the facts to bother checking them, and probably don't have a clue about how to do so. They'll blindly go along with whatever false beliefs their trusted leaders present to them -- and savagely defend those beliefs against any evidence they encounter, no matter how compelling.
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This is not a noble thing, but they seem to think it is. The Republican idea of "how we decide which things are true and which things are false" is basically 100% inverted from the scientific method: instead of collecting evidence, making guesses, and testing those guesses against reality to see if they hold up, Republicans take the truth they are handed and look for evidence to prop it up -- and the only reason they bother looking for evidence is with the hope of convincing us heathens that there is something to their beliefs; they'd be just as happy closing their eyes and ears and just Believing.
This is an absolutely terrible way to attempt to understand the universe, much less run a government. It's the opposite of what works.
Given the numerous Republican attempts to keep others from voting, then, I think it's only fair to break with liberal policy on this one issue and say the following:
If you can't be bothered to check the facts your leaders are giving you -- to research the issues you're voting on, to understand what the other side is arguing and why -- then ask an informed Democrat or independent to explain them to you, or to offer suggestions on how to vote. If you're the sort of person who prefers to let others make the big decisions, then try trusting your informed neighbor instead of the megacorporate news or your megachurch's pastor.
Footnotes
- ↑ If you take any arbitrary piece of terrible legislation that has come out in the past ten to twenty years, it was probably sponsored by a Republican and backed by Republicans. If a Republican and a Democrat disagree over something important, it's almost always the Republican who is not just wrong, but absolutely and utterly dead wrong. I'll expand on this later.