So what’s next?
For some time now it has been my view that there no longer exists a bottom to how low Republicans can sink. In the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, it appeared we saw what looked like a bottom. Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, Kevin McCarthy and others of similarly disgusting pedigree seemed to express genuine horror at the insurrection. I assure you that was not the bottom of Republican evil. It was merely a temporary resting place on their continued fall into the infinite abyss.
No, Republicans have it in their heads to deprive Americans of every human right advancement they have ever made in the last 246 years that remotely smacks of liberalism or interferes with their power or their money. They will not stop until America is transmogrified into one vast theocratic tyranny. The fiction that is “The Handmaid’s Tale” is becoming terrifyingly like reality. Republicans clearly mean to carry things that far and even farther.
Their motivation is because they can. Popularity of an issue is vanishing as a motivator and being replaced with an all-consuming lust for greed, power and evil, and an almost Putin-like disregard for how it makes them look.
Kicking Roe v. Wade to the curb is their most recent goal. Next they’ll be coming after same-sex marriage, transgender rights, gay adoption, firing people for their sexual orientation, hate-crime legislation and any number of good things we’ve made spectacular advancements in for the 21st century. Then they’ll start to go after the best we’ve done in the 20th century, like interracial marriage, divorce, the right of women to vote. And they will never, ever stop.
If you doubt that then listen to this. Since 2020 Both Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas have been publicly calling for a revisitation of the Constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry. Roe really is the thin end of the wedge of their evil. Theocracy is their goal.
Just imagine what’s going to happen to protest movements like BLM if Republicans should take over. If they could make any protest against bigotry-fuelled police brutality and murder illegal they would do so in a heartbeat. They love the idea of police beating and murdering black people under color of authority. They just have to be careful about drawing the enmity of the world, as did the Nazis in the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938.
As ever their ostensibly big enemy right now is the whistleblower. Republicans claim to be furious about who leaked the draft of the Roe repeal attempt. But think about it. Why do they care? It’s not like they’ve committed a crime that they never want anyone to find out about, like when their favorite criminal president tried to blackmail the President of Ukraine. No, they committed a crime, the draft of the repeal of Roe, and it was something they knew everyone would hear about sooner or later. They’re just trying to gaslight you, trying to flabbergast you with impotent anger. They’re trying to demonstrate publicly just exactly how evil they can be.
This race to the bottom to impress Trump will continue long after Trump is dead. It’s taken on a Frankenstein momentum of its own. The world of the Republican has become so corrupted with evil that evil will one day soon replace every other consideration as their principal goal.
George Orwell summed up the Republican best when he translated the Declaration of Independence into a single Newspeak word: crimethink. “If you want a picture of the future,” O’brien says to Winston Smith in Orwell’s “1984,” “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.