Remember when Republicans lost their minds because Anheuser-Busch hired transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote their diet beer brand, Bud Lite? Trump is now telling them to back off, because an Anheuser-Busch lobbyist named Jeff Miller is throwing a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser for him next month in Washington, DC.
Over on his Nazi-infested social media site, Trump posted:
“The Bud Light ad was a mistake of epic proportions, and for that a very big price was paid, but Anheuser-Busch is not a Woke company. Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance?”
Alexander Hamilton reportedly said something to the effect of, “When you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.” This is a textbook case: the only central value Republicans hold any more is greed.
There was a time when the GOP stood for positive, working class American values.
President Dwight Eisenhower embraced anti-trust and anti-corruption laws and the egalitarian American values they reflected. He kept the top income tax rate at 91% for morbidly rich individuals and around 50% for the most profitable corporations, expanded GI Bill benefits, supported free college, maintained and strengthened regulation of banks, built the interstate highway system, encouraged unionization, and funded brand new hospitals, schools, and airports from one end of the nation to the other.
Eisenhower also embraced public education: after the Russian satellite Sputnik went up in 1957, his Education Department helped jump-start programs for gifted kids across the country (I was in one throughout elementary school), producing a generation of engineers and scientists who revolutionized the world in the 1970s with the transistor, integrated circuit, and lasers.
He subsidized the development of what ultimately became personal computers and the internet, and funded research that revolutionized medicine with new classes of antibiotics, cancer drugs, and imaging technologies.
When Eisenhower’s rightwing brother Edgar wrote him a letter in 1954 worrying that all this support for working people and government funding for science was “socialist,” President Eisenhower was blunt in his response:
“[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government.
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
By the third year of his first term, 1955, Eisenhower’s popularity rated by Gallup was between 68 and 79 percent. When he ran for re-election in 1956, his platform was explicit:
“Under the Republican Administration, as our country has prospered, so have its people. This is as it should be, for as President Eisenhower said: ‘Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country — they are America.’
“The record of performance of this Republican Administration on behalf of our working men and women goes still further:
— The Federal minimum wage has been raised for more than 2 million workers.
— Social Security has been extended to an additional 10 million workers and the benefits raised for 6 1/2 million.
— The protection of unemployment insurance has been brought to 4 million additional workers.
— There have been increased workmen’s compensation benefits…
— All workers have gained and unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by 2 millions.”
By the mid-1960s, however, rightwing oil barons like the Hunt brothers had gained ascendance in the Republican Party. They believed that greed should be the central focus of the GOP, that great wealth should be celebrated, and that working people and their unions must be marginalized.
In 1964, Republican activists at the party’s convention booed and shouted down New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller when he called for Eisenhower’s “moderation,” electing instead an acolyte of Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, who declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
Goldwater’s buddy Friedman had a novel idea that he called neoliberalism, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America; in 1981 it became the basis of the Reagan Revolution. In its essence, it said that one of the Seven Deadly Sins — greed — wasn’t actually a sin at all. Greed, Friedman said, wasn’t even a base human impulse that had to be controlled lest it destroy society.
Instead, Friedman preached, greed was good. It animated business and drove consumers. If the economy and the government could just be turned over to those who were the most aggressively greedy, Friedman and his neoliberal colleagues argued, the result would be prosperity for all.
By 1980, the Republican Party had swallowed neoliberalism hook, line, and sinker.
Reagan truly believed that greed alone could power America to success and prosperity. When Michael Douglas made his famous “greed is good” speech in the 1987 movie Wall Street, he was merely echoing the Reagan Republicans of the day.
Thus, greed has become the animating principle that drives the entire Republican Party of today. The only function of government, in their minds, should be to help the greediest in America make a buck.
Public schools don’t promote greed or make anybody money, Republicans note, so they should be destroyed to pave the way for profitable private schools. This is why Republicans across the country are attacking schools and school boards.
Similarly, Social Security and Medicare don’t make money for anybody so they must be privatized. George W. Bush’s invention of the Medicare Advantage scam has already privatized about half of Medicare: Republican Senator Rick Scott has made it clear that when the GOP regains federal power they’ll end Social Security within five years.
Even government service, for Republicans, is a way of getting rich: just look at multimillionaire Paul Ryan. Or multimillionaire Newt Gingrich.
They’ve drilled campaign finance laws so full of holes (with help from 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court) that politicians can now keep most of the dark money they raise, even when they leave office. Donald Trump turned this into an art-form: he’s raised and pocketed three-quarters of a billion dollars just since he left office.
As Trump himself proudly proclaimed in 2016:
“I grab, I am greedy, I want money.”
And for billionaires like Trump, the GOP has been a gift. If not for the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for billionaires and the two wars George W. Bush lied us into, our national debt would today be close to zero instead of over $30 trillion. Instead, you and I are on the hook for that money they borrowed and handed off to billionaires and defense contractors.
The GOP, lacking policy ideas beyond greed and bigotry, has been promoting a long series of scams in the years since Eisenhower left the White House.
— Nixon had his War On Drugs, designed specifically to kneecap the antiwar and Civil Rights movements.
— Reagan pushed “trickle-down” and “supply-side economics,” two particularly evil hustles designed to transfer wealth from working people into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
— Bush Jr. lied us into two wars to get himself reelected and to hand Iraq’s oil wealth off to his fossil fuel industry buddies.
— And Trump, like Bush, doubled down on Reagan’s trickle-down tax cuts for billionaires, adding another $8 trillion to our national debt.
All were almost entirely focused on greed: making the rich richer while impoverishing America’s working people.
Thus, it shouldn’t surprise us when we learn Republicans are willing to set aside their deep-seated hatred of trans people in exchange for a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser.
Priorities!
