Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Sunday, January 6th, 2019

The Corruption of the Republican Party

Author:     George Packer
Source:     The Atlantic
Publication Date:    
Link: The Corruption of the Republican Party
Stephan:   From what readers write me I know that many think I am a political partisan, and a liberal Democrat. Sorry, I am not. I am a fact-based scientist whose interest is wellbeing from the individual to the planet itself. I don't care about political parties except anthropologically. I see them much as I would do a cultural study of tribes. If Republicans supported social wellbeing you would think I was a Republican. But they don't. The Democrats have all kinds of problems and do many stupid things, but on balance they do serve the interest of wellbeing, so that's why you see in SR less criticism of Democrats than you do of Republicans. So what are the Republicans? I think that is a very important question, and this past week I think we have an undeniable answer. The Republican Party is a criminal political cult obssessed with power and with only one social priority, profit, and to achieve that priority they will do anything.  Here is the basic argument.

Former Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.

I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind we’ve just seen in North Carolina—after all, the alleged fraudster employed by the Republican candidate for Congress hired himself out to Democrats in 2010.

And I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration, that many of his closest advisers are facing prison time, that Donald Trump himself might have to stay in office just to avoid prosecution, that he could be exposed by the special counsel and the incoming House majority as the most corrupt […]

Read the Full Article