On the Death of the Republican Party (Guest Post)

From Professor/economist/commentator/writer Robert Reich and his Facebook page today:

I’m writing to you today to announce the death of the Republican Party. It is no longer a living, vital, animate organization. It has been replaced by warring tribes of rightwing zealots – evangelicals opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and science; libertarians opposed to any government constraint on private behavior; market fundamentalists convinced the “free market” can do no wrong; corporate and Wall Street titans seeking bailouts, corporate welfare, tax cuts, and deregulation; right-wing billionaires wanting more of the nation’s wealth than they own already; and white working-class Trumpoids who love Donald and hate Muslims, blacks, and Mexicans.

Each tribe has its own organization, its own sources of campaign funding, its own ideology, and its own candidates. What’s left is a lifeless shell called the Republican Party, but the Grand Old Party inside the shell is no more.

I, for one, regrets its passing. Our nation needs political parties to connect up different groups of Americans and to sift through prospective candidates. Without a Republican Party, there’s nothing standing between us and a bunch of liars, bigots, egomaniacs, and creeps who decide on their own to seek the Republican nomination president.

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What I resent most about the groups Professor Reich mentions above are the "...right-wing billionaires wanting more of the nation’s wealth than they own already..."    

They're the worst.  As I've written before, on people like the Koch brothers:  born millionaires, now billionaires.      And they want more.

What concerns me most, as we see the Republican Party self-destruct before our very eyes, is the political and power vacuum it will surely create.

We wouldn't want what comes after to be worse than the mess the Republican Party is and has been since around the end of our Civil War.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party

"The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by. Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate." --Maureen Dowd, writer, columnist at The New York Times Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/dowd-ghastly-outdated-party.html?_r=1

Where did "empathy" go wrong?

Question: Since when did empathy become a bad thing?

Answer: Since the Republican Party went into meltdown and irrelevance, circa 2009

From Wikipedia:

"Empathy is the capability to share your feelings and understand another's emotion and feelings. It is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes," or in some way experience what the other person is feeling. Empathy does not necessarily imply compassion, sympathy, or empathic concern because this capacity can be present in context of compassionate or cruel behavior.

Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry:em·pa·thy
Pronunciation:\ˈem-pə-thē\
Function:noun
Etymology:Greek empatheia, literally, passion, from empathēs emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion — more at pathos
Date:1850
1: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
2: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner ; also : the capacity for this

See? You can tell, right here, above, what the Republicans would be so totally against, when it comes to empathy and President Obama's thought that empathy would be good in a new Supreme Court Justice.

"Understanding".

"Being sensitive to...", "expressing feelings, thought, and experience of another..."

This is all WAY too "touchy-feely" for Republicans.

WAY too feminine.

Shoot, for that matter, way too intelligent.

Republicans will have none of that.