The Freedumb Agenda

 Jamelle Bouie writes an evocative piece about the Republican agenda. He compares FDR's Four Freedoms to the Four "Freedoms" of the GOP. Rather than summarize, I'll just quote:

Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.

There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.

I had an actual exchange with Blog favorite Josh Marshall about Dobbs after Marshall made the point that Democrats have outperformed in every election by about 5-6 percentage points. I noted that it wasn't just Dobbs, but the confluence of Dobbs and January 6th that took the "Republicans are authoritarian theologist/fascists" from MSNBC hyperventilating clickbait to something the average "normie" voter can agree with. Most people don't follow politics that closely (and aren't they lucky) but you can no longer escape the nature of the current GOP.

Republicans are acting as if the 6-3 Court and their gerrymandered maps are a bulwark against democratic accountability. But gerrymanders work by creating small margins for your party and concentrated large margins for your opponent. If Democrats overperform by 6%, that could sweep away the Republican gerrymanders in places like Wisconsin, Texas and North Carolina.

The GOP is the American Taliban. That's starting to sink it where it matters.