This Is What Happens When Republicans Tear Off Their Masks

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/opinion/paul-pelosi-youngkin-lake.html
https://archive.ph/AdUE4

This Is What Happens When Republicans Tear Off Their Masks
Nov. 4, 2022
By Jamelle Bouie

Even by the degraded standards of 2022, it has been shocking to watch Republican politicians and conservative media personalities respond to the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi — Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband — with lies, conspiracy mongering and gleeful disregard for the victim. ...

From the beginning, Americans saw virtue — whether real or feigned, sincere or performed — as a key ingredient in the practice of republican self-government. Yes, the American system was built on the insight that institutions shape behavior and structure incentives. And yes, the main players at the Philadelphia convention tried to build a government that would harness self-interest and vice rather than rely on the better angels of our nature. But they still devoted a good deal of thought and attention to the role of virtue in their new order.

When politicians and other political leaders refuse to play this game — when they drop the pretense of virtue and embrace a politics of cruelty and malice, where nothing matters but the will to power — voters act accordingly. Some may recoil, but just as many will embrace the chance to live vicariously through leaders who celebrate vice and hold virtue in contempt.

In a 1941 essay on socialism and British democracy, George Orwell observed that “An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.” In Britain, he wrote, “such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them.”

“Even hypocrisy,” Orwell continued, “is a powerful safeguard.”

...

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Reminds me of "The Witches".

[Timeflyer]

2. They show us who they really are, and some people admire their cruelty, so it gets worse.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Scratch the shiny golden surface of today's repuglian...

…and reveal the burnt orange treasonous interior.

From Bouie’s great essay:

As George Washington said in his first inaugural address, “There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.”

[Docreed2003]

4. The Republican Party has become, from top to bottom

A party made up entirely of those asshole family members who love to drop racist jokes a family reunions, the obnoxious guy at the bar who loves to talk tough politics, and the crazy nutters who call in to radio programs with harebrained conspiracy theories. They've dropped all pretense of civility and actually became their base.

[blm]

5. Sad truth. And dangerous.

[dalton99a]

9. +1. It now aspires to the lowest common denominator - the violence-prone, illiterate, racist trash

[Walleye]

6. Heard people saying they like Dr. Oz because he's "authentic"

I really don’t get this. He’s one of the phoniest guys I’ve ever seen. Maybe they mean he’s an authentic asshole. I never knew that so many Americans could be so easily fleeced by con men, I guess I haven’t been paying attention. Maybe too many people live in isolated communities where they never encounter anybody different from themselves.

[Rebl2]

8. I definitely

agree he is a phony, just like many republican politicians.

[patphil]

7. Live vicariously through leaders who celebrate vice and hold virtue in contempt.

Pretty much sums up Trump's base.