When Democrats have control of Congress and the White House they pass all sorts of legislation to advance the public good, aid workers, care for the poor and disabled, strengthen public education, and provide for the needs of ordinary people. Occasionally they overreach or their programs don’t work or even backfire; they then fix them or try something different.
When rightwingers run our government, though, they pass laws like Taft-Hartley that gutted union rights, rip up voting rights, make it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute and timber companies to clear-cut, and dial back people’s access to welfare and healthcare programs. And, of course, start wars (Grenada, Iraq/Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq) and pass tax cuts for their billionaire patrons.
Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, and Biden all proposed and put into law sweeping programs to build America and enhance the public good ranging from Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid and greater funding for education.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump all went for tax cuts for billionaires and worked to gut or privatize the agencies, infrastructure, and programs Democrats had set up.
There’s a reason for this.
— Leftwing governments believe in democracy, and so try to accomplish what’s best for the majority of people while protecting the rights of the minority; rightwing governments practice autocracy on behalf of the morbidly rich. Sometimes, like the old USSR or modern Venezuela, repressive and authoritarian rightwing governments pretend to be left-wing, but the police state aspects of their governance give the game away.
— Rightwingers don’t see democracy as a benefit or even an ideal; they see it as an impediment to further comforting the already-comfortable while enriching themselves in the process. Instead of building up disaster preparedness through strengthening, for example, FEMA, they work to redirect those government dollars back to their friends through things like $600 billion a year in oil industry subsidies and over $20 trillion (cumulatively) in Republican tax cuts to billionaires since 1981.
The result — when rightwingers are in charge — is government that’s not paying attention to real threats and, when they come, responds with profound incompetence or cynical exploitation
I do have some disagreements around the edges of this but God damn it’s refreshing to see someone in mainstream media set their sights on what’s actually going on, and then go straight for the throat and keep digging.