Written by Don Washington   

The Republican primary has been called everything from a clown car to an idiot’s parade and I think those descriptions demean clowns and places a stigma on village idiots everywhere. The real truth is that these people, every last odious soul of them are not funny. They are an example of what happens when the political process breaks down to the point where ideas that flow from fear, anger and hatred become mainstream values for respectable and most of all “serious” people.

This is what happens when government is captured by a plutocrat/oligarch-class. Last night’s debate had the society closing sound of big business allies with a friendly government with the blessings of an unforgiving and absolutely fundamentalist religion. It sounded and looked like what George Orwell said about the ruling class; that they would appear to look like the society they came from but would not think of themselves as part of that society but as a society apart. These people are not comical... they are dangerous.

In times of great economic distress buffoons, racists, fear-mongers and idiots can rise to the top with the right backing against failed champions of a liberal society. A real society is always liberal; as it is composed of we the people and is always working toward its highest values; a more perfect union. It is interested in integration and predicated on civil liberties, equality before courts of law because that’s how it knows it is seeking justice and ensuring domestic tranquility.

It allows all of its citizens to be the best person they can be so that they can defend it and its commons and it is not some Ayn Rand inspired nightmare of competition; no it is sworn to the welfare of all its people from the lowest to the highest and it does all of this for as long as it lives. You can tell a society is dying when enough of those who want to lead it stand in opposition to its core principles people, justice, domestic tranquility and the welfare of all of its people not the lucky, wealthy or ruthless few. Last night what we saw on stage was the naked face of power telling society that its days are numbered... that they are coming for it.

Last week Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, Baachman, Cain, Paul and Santorum told us that thirty years of cutting taxes, eliminating the social safety net, improving the lot of the wealthy and the powerful and removing even the feeble remaining controls we have over the corporations, they’ve already sold their souls to, have not been enough. They want what all powerful people always want... more. They do not believe in the commons; they do not believe that anyone has any responsibility for or to anyone else. They believe that no one has any obligation to anyone else in society. Everything should depend on the good will of the wealthy.

It almost doesn’t matter what they said in detail because most of the details were nonsensical. When, you are completely dedicated to giving power to those with the deepest pockets what you say can’t make sense. If you tell the people whose fears and hatreds you are feeding on that they are simply making someone else richer and more powerful at their own expense they will turn on you. Instead you have to say things that do not connect in ways that connects them to those fears and anger and that’s what else we say last night. All of them said that the market is being constrained by regulations that they cannot name. All of them want to destroy the meager and anemic half-measures from Obamacare, to Sorbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank repealed by saying these ideas are draining the nation’s economic strength instead of being pitiful reactions to the very failed policies they are pushing.

What we have to remember is that all of these candidates are manifestations of the darkest parts of our nation’s souls. These Republicans are the handmaidens of power and slaves to market. They have blind faith in savage and unforgiving religions and complete belief in the powers of the Invisible Hand Adam Smith understood can and often does lead to "the vile maxim of the masters of mankind": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other People." They are the champions of financial deregulation, mountain top removal, fracking and the unrestrained outsourcing of American jobs.

These are same forces that defended slavery and hated civil rights. These candidates are descendants of the Red Scare, wholly owned legislators of Robber Barons and supporters Japanese internment camps. They are night riders dressed up as the Sons of Liberty and they the commanders of the same foot soldiers that once burned books and rounded up people asking for their papers; like they are burning Korans from time to time now and demanding papers from random citizens on the street. There is nothing funny about what we saw last night and nothing amusing about what they will do should one of them win.