In 2008, in response to the candidacy of Barack Obama, America experienced the resurgence of the extreme right. John McCain picked the anti-intellectual culture warrior Sarah Palin as his running mate. The crazies came out of the woodwork and called Obama a foreigner, a secret Muslim, and a terrorist sympathizer. But even then, McCain’s actual policy platform included some reasonable and centrist policies: he supported a modest cap and trade bill for greenhouse gases, the expansion of health savings accounts, and immigration and campaign finance reform.
But look what three short years can do. The current crop of Republican presidential candidates is fighting to see who can be the craziest. The two leading contenders, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, both want to repeal the healthcare law, cut taxes for the rich and increase them on the poor and middle class, deny climate change, and stoke the culture wars with new anti-choice and anti-gay measures. The only semi-sane candidate, Jon Huntsman, is polling at close to zero—and even his economic policies would greatly exacerbate income inequality.
The other candidates are engaged in little more than vanity campaigns that they hope will lead to Fox News contracts, reality TV shows, and/or book deals.
Even more depressing than the candidates are the audiences at the Republican debates. So far they’ve cheered loudly for Perry’s record number of executions in Texas, for letting people who don’t have health insurance die, and for the notion that poor people have only themselves to blame. They’ve also booed a soldier in Iraq who happened to be gay. In a display of breath-taking cowardice, not one of the candidates has chastised the audiences. So much for compassionate conservatism.
Whatever the critics say about President Obama, he’s a brilliant man who has used reason, facts, and science to shape his policies, both domestic and foreign. He is not an ideologue and is willing to compromise to get things done. As I have argued before, in many ways he is the pragmatic, centrist candidate that the mainstream media continually pines for—but can’t acknowledge is already in the White House.
Whoever the GOP eventually nominates, the candidate will be on the other end of the spectrum: an anti-reason ideologue. There is no sugarcoating the fact that the Republican Party has gone off the rails, and represents the worst that America has to offer. The choice in 2012 will ultimately boil down to reason vs. fantasy, empiricism vs. quackery, science vs. religion, and progressivity vs. regressivity.
Unfortunately, with unemployment hovering around 9% and many people ignorant of the fact that Republicans have purposefully tried to sabotage the economy, the election will likely be extremely close and Obama could well lose. If he does, the forces of irrationality and corporate greed—which have taken over the Republican Party—will be rewarded for their outrageous behavior with control of the White House.
This already happened in the 2010 midterms, with the GOP taking control of the House on a wave of rightwing extremism. I shudder to think what will happen if the same thing happens in the race for the presidency, or the battle to control the Senate.
The stakes could hardly be higher.
Jason Scorse