Burn The GOP Down

A Treatise On GOP Treason

The GOP have proven themselves to be an institution more concerned with party health than democracy or country. They are a group of seditious traitors.

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I should probably start by saying that I get why Josh Hawley is starting the firing gun on the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary this week with a challenge to the results of the Presidential Election on Wednesday - a challenge that will, of course, fail - but just because I get it doesn't mean that it isn't seditious. Hawley is trying to make a big splash, to get Trumpian money and donors behind him as he tries to run for President next time around as the competent continuity candidate, and this steals the spotlight for himself for a day. It's good politics for the junior Senator from Missouri, but again, he's still a traitor to the Republic.

I also get why 126 GOP House members signed an amicus for the Texas lawsuit that was easily dismissed last month - it's good for their internal politics. If any of them want to run for a different - and let's be honest here, different always means higher - office, being a loyal Republican will help you win a Republican primary. It's treason, but it was always supposed to be treason without consequence.

Hell, I even get why the President called the Secretary of State in Georgia to try and illegally have him "find" the number of votes he would need to win the state's 16 Electoral College votes, and it doesn't anger me as much as I would have thought it would. Hell, it doesn't anger me at all. The only emotion I feel is exhaustion, and the only response I can find to any of it is laughter. None of this is funny, but at some point, it's all I have.

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Maybe it's just that I'm a Canadian, and so much of the usual nonsense about America as the Shining City On The Hill fell flat on me, but my understanding of US history never led me to believe that I was a northern neighbour to a perfect democracy. I learned at a young age of the way that the US refused to step up to the plate in both World Wars at first, content to let blood be shed so long as it was European blood and US interests were impacted. The existence of Vietnam and Iraq also weighed heavily against the notion of the US as a moral and just country, especially Iraq - a war that Canada had rightly chosen to pass on entering.

But, of course, it wasn't just America's foreign history that led to my sense of doubt, but the US domestic history - Bush v Gore, the Civil War, the 1876 election and its aftermath, Jim Crow, and even more recent racism - that made tentative. Canada had legalized gay marriage - and, even more so, gotten our Conservatives on board with it - years before California voted for Prop 8. None of this is to say that Canada is the Shining City On The Hill - we aren't, ask our Indigenous brothers and sisters - but I never understood how people could think of America as a bastion of democracy and everything I was told democracy was about - freedom, liberty, and justice - when within this century the result of a US election was decided by the Supreme Court.

The arguments - such as they ever were - for US intervention in Iraq once the Weapons of Mass Destruction defence went away was that democracy and liberty and freedom were essential, more important than anything. As a precocious 11 year old who followed the 08 Primary insanely closely and who had the great misfortune to learn was gay that May, those arguments fell notably flat. When California - yes, even deep blue California - voted to ban people like me from the institution of marriage, all the good will I had to the US was gone.

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No honest reflection of America's history would make one surprised by the third rate authoritarianism that the GOP are now exhibiting - a country founded with the 3/5ths Compromise, with a Bill Of Rights that lacked an Equal Protection clause, and whose pre-1860 history is a nightmare which most people opt to ignore. The Civil War fascinated me, obviously, but what did even more was the aftermath. How could the US, after winning the war, lose the peace? A war fought and won, at least notionally, with good intentions descended into a loss, with the Confederacy dead but their ideas very alive.

Of course, every country has a history it isn't proud of, but even within my lifetime, the GOP haven't cared about democracy. Voter ID laws have been enacted across the GOP controlled states, designed to disenfranchise those who are least likely to have passports or driver's licenses - which, shockingly, disenfranchises poor, non-white people, who generally vote for Democrats. They pass draconian laws designed to stop past felons from voting, but do so in a country where what passes for a felony has no business passing as such, and where the administration of justice is not so much blind as blindly racist. They defend cops who kill Black people for the crime of being Black, or hell, they defend people who claim some form of right to kill Black people because, well, they feel like it.

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The reason I can't find it within myself to be angry at blatant sedition is because America has always been treasonous - not to any law or oath, but to the idea of what America was supposed to be. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" is in the second paragraph of the Declaration Of Independence, and yet, that has never been true. Not for one minute of one day has America been true to that declaration, and ever since Goldwater, the GOP have been the party trying to stop that from being true. Democracy and freedom is supposed to be about humanity, and that humanity has never been extended fully or completely to everyone.

Is what the GOP is now doing - open sedition, with seemingly no concern for the consequences, an open escalation of their authoritarianism and their treason? Of course. But it is just that, an escalation. It has been happening for years, for decades, hell, since the founding of America. Consent of the governed was supposed to be a hallmark of America, but now the GOP are just finally acknowledging that they don't care about the consent of the governed. It's newsworthy, and terrible, that they're saying the quiet part out loud now, but it is not the beginning of something, but merely the middle of a pattern long since established.

The GOP are traitors to America, worthy of every sling and arrow of outrageous fortune they may face. Just don't act like their treason started now, or with Trump. Hawley et al are merely the latest in a line of American traitors that extends the history of these United States. They will fail, but this time, we cannot allow the traitors a noble defeat. To everyone who values the idea of a free America more than the Republican Party, I have just four words. Burn the GOP down.

Your country depends on it.