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There is great truth to the idea that history repeats itself. Every time the Republican party loses an election, their next strategy after plain obstructionism is to worry about things that no red-blooded American is actually worried about until they are told to worry about. This is what we call the “culture war.”
You’ve no doubt seen all over social media about “cancel culture” or about “transgender woman in sports.” This is all a ruse. Like most deplorable actions by those on the right, the philosophy can be traced back to their second favorite President, Ronald Reagan. Despite Reagan’s rosy image as a doting old fool who liked Jellybeans too much, Reagan’s impact on the modern Republican Party is cogent. Many people with faulty memories of that time period would say, “Oh heavens no! The political climate was so civil back then. Everything is so extreme now.” It should be noted that civility does not equal positive. Reagan spent most of his Presidency talking off about the infamous “welfare queen” or inciting the moral panic about homosexuality and the AIDS crisis. The modern GOP’s presentation is a natural evolution of this, the othering of your fellow American.
The Republican Party, who call themselves “conservative,” has an ideology centered around harkening back to a mythical past. When racism was solved by Martin Luther King Jr, there weren’t so many gay people, and people could afford to go to college by working as a janitor. To put it plainly: they are delusional. This past does not exist. One the first count, racism was not solved by Dr. King because he was assassinated. That very fact alone proves that. Two, gay people have existed throughout history and their more recent prominence is due to societal change, not the frequency of their population. Third, college is exorbitantly priced today. They want you to believe that these things are the way they say they are rather than how they are in reality and the sad thing is that they’ll probably succeed.
Every time Republicans lose any sort of power, they revert to telling you that Lola Bunny in “Space Jam” lacking her breasts is the biggest crisis that America is facing right now or that the estate of Dr. Seuss, a private entity, discontinuing the publishing of a mere six books is an attack on the Constitution itself. It’s ludicrous. It’s like complaining that your oven is the wrong color while your entire house is burning down around you. It drives home the point that Republicans don’t have any actual policies. They just have fear tactics to both rile up their base and control them. As mentioned, history repeats itself. We saw similar tactics from the Catholic Church during the Renaissance. They subjugated their people to the point that a such thing as the Papal States was even allowed to exist. Tell me, why does a church need to operate a government? Why does a government need to frighten its people to get them to vote for them?
Anybody should be able to see that all of this is just against any logical thought. They cry and bemoan that the left is “promoting transgenderism” (an actual quote by the Governor of Mississippi, by the way) when literally every scientific study says that transgender people are valid. They cite the Bible as evidence to how society should be organized when the United States is not a theocracy. I sincerely wish that the right could abandon this culture war nonsense and develop some policies. I probably wouldn’t agree with them but at the very least, some objective discussion could be happening and not this delusional nonsense. The United States’ greatest asset is diversity. Welcoming the lived experience of others is something we should agree on supremely, not waste time arguing about.