Rush Limbaugh used to say — before he died — that it was the job of the military to kill people and
break things. He would say this in response to any attempts to make the U.S. military a more
just and equitable institution — allowing women to serve in combat positions, lifting bans on
gay people or trans people serving openly. He was an ugly, ignorant bigot, and I’m glad he’s dead,
but with all due respect, I think “to kill people and break things” is a much more appropriate
description of what the Republican party has been trying to do these last few . . . generations.
But I don’t want to talk about all the killings and breakages
the Republican party is responsible for — I don’t have that kinda time! — I want
to focus on a few examples of how the Republicans have sought — and, sadly,
mostly succeeded — to increase their political fortunes by sabotaging the accomplishments of
their opponents and then treating those sabotaged accomplishments as failures. We
might call it the Break It, Then Blame It method. It’s the Republican party’s favorite strategy.
Welfare! Judging by their actions and statements, Republicans aren’t big fans of welfare in any
form. Know what else they don’t like? Benefits. They’re always trying to cut benefits. Isn’t it
amazing how they’ve been able to rhetorically poison two such beautiful words? Welfare,
benefits, these are good things! These are things we ought to be seeking to promote,
to support, to increase! That was originally the whole idea behind government welfare programs,
you know — and it makes perfect sense when you interpret those words the way we do when we use
them in everyday, non-political conversation: we want to help people living in poverty, we want to
ensure their welfare, so we offer them benefits. Who could possibly have a problem with that?
Republicans, of course. Looking at their policies, it becomes clear pretty soon that they don’t care
about the happiness, health, quality of life — you know, the welfare — of anyone other than
themselves. And the thing that makes Republicans happy, healthy, and improves their quality of
life is money! They love money! So, naturally, they hate social welfare programs most of all,
because money is what’s in the benefits! “You’re giving away money to people in poverty?! Money
that could be ours? Now poor people are gonna have it? What are they gonna do with it?!”
One of the key domestic policy initiatives of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in the mid-1960s was
a series of welfare programs known collectively as the War on Poverty. Two things to know about
the War on Poverty for our purposes here. One: it worked, the number of Americans living in poverty
fell dramatically in the years following the establishment of the aforementioned programs. And,
two: the Republicans fought in this war, too, but they were fighting for poverty.
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the usual Republican talking
points regarding welfare: people become dependent on it, it makes people lazy,
they don’t want to work, it traps people in poverty rather than helping them escape it,
it invites widespread fraud. Republicans are so determined for welfare programs to
be ineffective wastes of money that they have slashed, hobbled and undermined government
welfare programs every chance they have gotten since the War on Poverty began.
When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he cut welfare spending and loosened federal
guidelines to allow states to impose work requirements on welfare recipients.
Federal welfare spending dropped, and the number of Americans in poverty,
which had hovered around the same level for most of the 1970s, climbed.
The narrative that welfare was bad, actually, was a staple of Republican politics for decades
after that, and remains so to this day. It’s become so accepted that you often
hear Democrats parroting the same horseshit — one of the many reasons why being a member
of the Democratic party who would actually like to try and make things better, please,
is such a continually frustrating and disillusioning experience,
but I digress. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed a Republican-supported
welfare reform bill officially called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act — isn’t
that just the most Republican bill title you’ve ever fucking heard? — and continued to tout it
as one of the major accomplishments of his presidency for decades after that.
The act imposed more requirements on people seeking welfare assistance, made it easier
for states to deny them that assistance, and established a time limit after which benefits
would be automatically cut off. It wasn’t about actually helping people in poverty improve their
lives, it was about spending less money on welfare programs, and — because we hate poor people in
this country — it was actually pretty popular for awhile among both Democrats and Republicans,
which is why even today, almost thirty years later, establishment Democrats are still
so fucking obsessed with courting Republican voters — this video isn’t about the Democrats!
Oppose welfare; cut welfare spending and make it easier for states to kick people
off welfare programs, thus making those programs less effective; declare that welfare doesn’t work
and needs to be reformed or better yet just gotten rid of entirely — that’s the play.
Before moving on, I should probably mention that Republicans don’t just hate welfare programs
because they hate spending money, and hate poor people — it’s also because they hate Black people!
And brown people. Much of the welfare spending initiated by Johnson’s War on
Poverty was targeted at communities of color, because they tend to have the most poverty.
Lotta white people didn’t like that, though! “Why should our tax dollars go to subsidize
the lifestyles of a bunch of poor Black people?” Remember “welfare queens”? There’s some grade A
Reagan-era racism for ya. And, this being America, you can’t go wrong with racism.
Gun control! That thing America has never really tried on a national basis,
but which Republicans are sure won’t work.
They insist gun control laws would be ineffective and point at Chicago as an example of a place with
strict firearm regulations that nonetheless has a high rate of gun crime, ignoring the facts that
half the guns used to commit crimes in Chicago originate from somewhere else, and that the
state of Illinois is literally surrounded on all sides by states with far more permissive gun laws.
Kinda hard for one state to effectively enforce its gun laws when all of its neighbors are pulling
in the opposite direction. But of course, that’s not the story Republicans tell when
it comes to gun control. They say the gun laws don’t work, so we might as well not even try.
By the way, despite sharing the entirety of its border with states that have inferior gun laws,
Illinois has a rate of gun death per 100,000 people that is below the national average,
and below the rates of three of those five states with which it shares a border.
Republicans don’t mention that, though. Nor do they mention the numerous examples
of other countries where strengthened firearm regulations have resulted in much lower rates
of gun-related death and the virtual non-existence of mass-shooting events.
It’s not all “break it, then blame it” with them — sometimes they just fucking lie.
Health care! Specifically, the Affordable Care Act. First, Republicans in Congress
fought tooth and nail to ensure that the reforms brought about by the law would be as minimal and
ineffective as possible to begin with, then they and their allies in state houses all across the
country got to work trying to prevent the ACA from doing what it was intended to do.
Republican-controlled states simply refused to expand their Medicaid
programs as provided for in the ACA, even though the expansions came with increased
federal funding. They went to court to oppose specific measures of the law,
like the requirement that health plans include coverage of contraception, the individual
mandate requiring everyone to have health insurance, and the existence of cost-sharing
subsidies designed to encourage insurance companies to reduce co-pays and deductibles.
During the Trump administration, the enrollment period was cut in half,
from ninety days to forty-five, and the advertising budget to encourage eligible
people to enroll in their state health care exchanges was cut drastically, as was funding
to support services like health care navigators who guide people through the enrollment process.
They do all of that, then turn around and say, “Ah ha! Look,
health care costs are continuing to go up! There are still thirty million uninsured!
This is your precious Obamacare! Socialized medicine is a failure!”
Nevermind that A) It’s not socialized medicine, it’s still mostly just requiring people to carry
private health insurance, B) Republicans have intentionally sabotaged elements of
the law intended to lower health care costs, and C) Most of the remaining uninsured people
live in states that did not participate in the Medicaid expansion. None of that
matters to Republicans. We’re meant to notice that it’s broken, not to ask who broke it.
Public education! I saved this one for last because it represents so many things
that Republicans and conservatives in general are just fundamentally against:
It’s publicly funded — “that’s our money payin’ those teachers’ salaries!”
It’s secular — “they’ve banned God from the schools!”
It has one of the largest and strongest remaining labor unions
in the country — “Employees organizing for better wages and benefits?! That’s un-American!”
It played a central role in the civil rights movement — so many racist white people switched
from Democrats to Republicans because of desegregation! And they’re still mad about it!
And so are a bunch of their kids and their grandkids!
And perhaps most importantly: it educates people,
and the more educated the populace is, the harder it becomes to recruit new Republicans.
The Republican party has been trying to kill public education for longer than I’ve been alive,
and their strategy is the same as for all the other areas I’ve talked about in this
video. Is there a more blatant example of Republicans sabotaging something in
an attempt to create a pretext for getting rid of it in recent memory
than President Trump appointing Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education? Betsy DeVos,
whose signature issue is “school choice,” which is really just another name for diverting money
away from public schools and toward private, mostly religious, schools?
Republicans talk about how public schools are failing students while they cut their funding
and give it to private schools. Republicans bemoan the teacher shortage while refusing to
raise teacher pay; refusing to hire more teachers, thus requiring the teachers that are currently
there to shoulder an ever increasing workload; and continuously vilifying teachers as loafers,
socialist indoctrinators, and most recently, groomers. They incite moral panics, they whip
the most ignorant and impressionable members of their base into frenzies about history classes
that make white students feel bad or trans kids being allowed to use the right bathroom or play
sports, and send them to school board meetings. They hammer public schools,
and public school teachers, and public school students, relentlessly, from all sides,
and when their targets finally start to buckle under the assault, they stand back and
go “See?! We told you! It’s government-run education, and government doesn’t work!”
That’s the central theme that ties all of these subjects together. It all comes back to
Republicans being against anything that amounts to the government being used to help people who
actually need help. They’re generally against government, period, but they’re more than happy
to have it around if they can use it to line their own pockets and impose their own backward beliefs
and ignorant, hateful prejudices on others. If the government is gonna be used to lift
poor people out of poverty, though? Or prevent gun violence? Or make healthcare more accessible and
affordable? Or provide everyone with an education regardless of how much money their family has?
Can’t have that! Under no circumstances can we use the government for those things!
So, to prevent such horrors, Republicans do what Republicans do: they campaign to be elected
to run the government, in order to fuck up the government as much as possible, so they can then
turn around and say “Government, right? It’s the worst! So ineffective. Better to just privatize
everything. That’s the ticket. Turn everything over to the private sector, the sleek, efficient,
completely incorruptible private sector. Trust the free market, and everything will be just fine.”
And by “just fine” they mean those who are already rich will have an even easier time getting even
richer, which is the only thing that’s really important to them. Whatever or whoever they
have to destroy in order to keep redistributing the wealth in their direction is fine with them,
just collateral damage.
It’s no wonder the military is the only government institution these assholes never, ever have a
problem generously funding. Like I said at the start, killing people and breaking things
is what the Republican party is all about.