Climate of Intimidation
Republicans often use intimidation and
force to get their way. This can
be seen on all levels from the national to the personal level.
National Level
The Republican Party has for at least a decade been using clear tactics
of intimidation on the national level.
Congress: During
the
Bush
years,
when the Party controlled the administrative and
legislative branches, they used intimidation to prevent the Democratic
minority from ever opposing them. Congressman Tom Delay
of Texas was notorious for this, earning the name “The Hammer” as a
result. He even hammered fellow Republicans who were not intimidating
enough toward Democrats. A similar climate of intimidation in the
Senate prevented the Democrats, who were just a couple of members short
of a majority, from blocking any Republican initiatives. Bush, Cheney,
Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld got whatever they wanted.
Once the Republicans became the minority party, and especially after
the election of Barack Obama, they took up an absolute practice of
using the Senatorial filibuster to block every action that the new
administration might take. There was hardly any Senate act, including
federal court nominations that Republicans ended up overwhelmingly
approving, that was not initially blocked by threats of Republican
filibuster. They were absolutely convinced that a 40 percent minority
has the responsibility to block the 60 percent majority at every step.
This was noted in a March
2009
report. Democrats did not do this very much when they had a 49
percent minority during the Bush years. Since the 2010 elections, the
Republicans remain the minority party in the Senate; they will probably
continue to use filibusters to block everything. This is the
intimidation that is institutionalized on the Party level.
Bush
Administration: The Bush Administration used intimidation to get
whatever it wanted, which included the power to begin a war on the
basis of false information (see Climate of War). But they used
intimidation against fellow Americans also. Previous to the Bush
Administration, the “material witness law” was used sparingly to make
sure that important witnesses in federal cases would not leave or
otherwise become unavailable for testimony. But after 9-11, Attorney
General John Ashcroft reinterpreted the law to mean that the federal
government could arrest and detain people who were not charged with any
crime, for an unspecified period. Ashcroft used this power to arrest
and detain at least one American citizen of Arabic descent. In 2009,
the ACLU sued Ashcroft for doing this. Ashcroft countered that since he
was part of the federal government, he could interpret the law however
the hell he wanted to. A federal court sided
with
the ACLU in March,
2010, allowing the ACLU suit to move forward, and agreed again in
September, 2010.
State and local level
For the most part, Republican leaders on the
state and local level use less intimidation, and in fact are more
reasonable, than on the national level. When the governors meet to
discuss issues, there is far more bipartisan agreement than in
Washington (that is, there is some bipartisan agreement). With the
exception of people such as South Carolina governor Mark Sanford (see
climate of hypocrisy), Republican governors tend to be moderate.
Charlie Crist felt pressured to renounce Republican Party membership
become an independent because of the national-level intimidation from
Republicans. And there is no Washington Republican as reasonable as
was California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And yet, on the local level (organized loosely by the internet on a
national level) there is a huge amount of Republican intimidation. The
most obvious example is the local militias that hoard weapons. I will
use just one example: some soldiers and policemen have joined a group
called Oath Keepers, who
take an oath
that, if they deem it necessary, they will turn their weapons against
their fellow law enforcement officers and against the federal
government. They have, in effect, taken an oath to commit armed treason
should they consider it necessary. Officially, they claim that they
will disobey any orders that they may receive to fire upon their fellow
American citizens during domestic upheaval. Sounds reasonable, perhaps.
But you will notice that such militias were not widespread during the
Bush presidency. It is only since the election of Obama that these
groups have claimed that they will if necessary take up armed
resistance against the government. This clearly implies that they would
be willing to fire upon rioters on the political left (such as during
the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999) but not upon an armed uprising from
their fellow right-wing militia members. Their clear purpose is to, if
provoked, fire upon a Democratic federal government, but not a
Republican one. The national Republican Party has no official
association with them, but many Republicans encourage them, and the
Republican Party stands to gain from their support and popularity.
The Tea Party movement is not organized (I think) as a militia, but
displays a similar mindless ferocity against Democrats. Their principal
virtue is wrath, so much so that they do not even recognize their
errors when pointed out. One Tea Party protestor held a sign declaring
that the federal government should not interfere with her
Medicare—apparently unaware, even after it was pointed out, that
Medicare is a federal government program. The vitriol of the Tea Party
movement was best demonstrated during the passage of health care
legislation by the House of Representatives in the spring of 2010.
Protestors spat upon Democratic lawmakers and hurled the n-word. Some
Republican congressmen went out to encourage them. The national
Republican Party did not endorse them, but made little effort to
denounce them either.
There are some individual Republicans who will not use intimidation.
They are embarrassed that their Party has now become the party of
ferocious intimidation. Unfortunately, few of these reasonable
Republicans are still in public office. Perhaps the last place you
might expect to find a reasonable Republican is from Oklahoma. But
there is no more reasonable Republican—and few more reasonable
people—than Mickey Edwards, former Republican congressman from
Oklahoma. He is now, among other things, a columnist for Atlantic
Monthly. He specifically denounced
his
fellow Republicans who
encouraged intimidation against Democrats.
His
criticism of the extreme Republicans is much more florid than
anything written on this website.
Personal level
My own experiences over the past three decades have
been, almost without exception, that conservative Republicans use
personal intimidation and slander to destroy anyone who disagrees with
them. This is particularly true of Christian fundamentalist
Republicans, who believe that God has chosen the Republican Party as
his presence upon the Earth today.
When I was a graduate student, I was a member of an independent church
that contained some fundamentalists. I taught a Sunday adult class
about evolution. I was well within the limits of doctrine for that
church. But as a scientist I had to, of course, explain that
creationism, at least in its most extreme form, was wrong. The group of
fundamentalists in this church, and who thought they controlled the
church, decided to use intimidation against me. They spread rumors to
the effect that I was an atheist, though anyone in the class would know
that this was not so. They brought me to trial before the church
council, and I was not allowed to speak. I found out later why. The
council knew that the accusations were lies, and they just wanted to
let the fundamentalists vent their steam; thereafter, I was asked to
continue my class. I was not surprised to find that the ringleader of
opponents was not just a fundamentalist, but was a major organizer of
Phyllis Schlafley’s Eagle Forum, which openly supported a terrorist war
against the government of Nicaragua. A computer science graduate
student, who considered himself a spokesman for all of science, was
present at each of my classes and often diverted the discussion into
directions that were not relevant to the topic of the day, and was one
of my unofficial prosecutors. When Walter Mondale (who ran against
Ronald Reagan in 1984) came to our campus, this graduate student was
the most disruptive of the protestors, who did their best to prevent
Mondale from speaking.
My experiences continued as I worked at Christian colleges for my first
two jobs. In the first job, I was a newcomer to a controversy that was
tearing the college apart and later led to its closure. As a newcomer,
I remained neutral, but I watched nearly everybody else use fierce
intimidation against the other faction. I still remember with fondness
the few colleagues who did not. In the second job, a secret committee
decided to fire me. I was not allowed to know what evidence they based
this decision on, nor was I ever allowed to present any evidence of my
own regarding the quality of work I was doing. In this case, secrecy
magnified the intimidation.
My experiences continued when I took a job at a state university. At a
state university, a
well known conservative faculty colleague not only circulated rumors
about how bad I was (contrary to all documented evidence), but even
left an anonymous note of intimidation in my mailbox. It was not hard
for me and other colleagues to figure out who had written the note (the
only colleague who had a Mac). I left by my own will after I grew weary
of the fighting. Later, another colleague who had also left the scene
of intimidation told me that the man who had chosen to be my enemy had
risen to an administrative position (temporarily) and that he started
lashing out against lots of people at that time. (“All the little horns
started coming out of his head,” this colleague told me.)
Wherever I go, I encounter intimidation from practically every
conservative Republican I encounter, and never from progressives. Nor
have I ever seen a progressive try to assassinate somebody else’s
character. It is not merely a statistically significant difference; it
appears to happen in nearly every case. It is as if conservative
Republicans have a psychological need to destroy others, and that God
permits them to use any means, including lies, that are available to
them.
This brings me to the final topic, one that is uncomfortable but must
be faced: racism. From the Civil War until the 1960s, racism was
associated as much with Southern Democrats as with Republicans. In fact
it was the post-Civil-War Republicans (still guided by the memory of
the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln) who tried to stop
Southern racism, which took the form of horrific and brutal murders of
blacks. But since the 1960s, most racists have been Republicans. Even
the Republicans who are not openly racist or perhaps even aware of
their racism are influenced by it. For example, the Bush Administration
had the worst deficit spending that the nation had ever seen. The
Republicans thought it was just fine. But Obama’s deficit spending
brought fierce rage from Republicans. Perhaps even better evidence
comes from the health care legislation. President Clinton’s 1993 health
care plan was much more liberal or bureaucratic than Obama’s 2009 plan;
Republicans opposed and stopped Clinton’s plan, but they did not
demonize him. Only racism can explain the greater ferocity of
opposition to Obama than to Clinton. Many Republicans even called for
parents to keep their kids home from school rather than to hear Obama’s
2009 back-to-school speech, filled as it was with Communist ideas such
as
work hard and get good grades so you can get a good job and help
society. Republicans, when pressed, would agree with everything Obama
said in that speech; but they just didn’t want a black president saying
those things. The Republican Party did not endorse the vandalism
of
the
black Georgia congressman’s office in 2009
but neither did they openly condemn it. Racism is, of course, the
ultimate intimidation.
The Republican view seems to be, let the federal government have all
power, unrestrained by law, so long as it is a Republican federal
government. But if a Democratic federal government, especially one led
by a black man, wants to even establish (through Congress, by
constitutional means) a health care system, they consider this to be an
unreasonable exercise of federal power. And many of them use
intimidation to further this aim. If there is so much as a single
Republican in a room full of people, it appears, this Republican thinks
that God has given him or her charge of the whole room, and the right
to use intimidation to rule it.
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