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The fringe-right has overwhelmed center-right Republicans to the party's detriment.

As our attention has rightfully been drawn to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Senator Rick Scott (R-Fantasy Land) who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and is thus responsible for getting Republicans elected to the Senate, has released, “An 11-point plan to rescue America,” that “will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs.” In it, he says, “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family.”

I know what I’m getting him for Christmas: a dictionary, because this guy has no idea what Socialism is, but more on that in a minute.

He says kids will recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I enjoyed saying it. It made me proud; but he wants to mandate it, which will ensure kids won’t want to say it, but that won’t matter because it’ll never survive a First Amendment court challenge. And kids will “learn that America is a great country.” But teaching accurate history will not be allowed. There will be no CRT, which isn’t a loss, since it is not taught anywhere this side of graduate school, but the larger point is, no talk about race.

In a move designed to “protect” the nuclear family—tighten your chin strap because the logic gets kind of fuzzy here—businesses will be deregulated; taxes on those making under $100,000 annually will increase (over Mitch McConnell’s dead body); federal infrastructure spending will be curtailed; states will no longer receive federal funding for anything except disaster relief; and Medicare and Social Security will be privatized (ask George W. Bush how that went last time), because, in his words, “government should not be doing anything that the private sector can do better and cheaper.” It seems to me that some things, like prisons, police and fire departments, and schools, should not be profit centers. Didn’t we just learn this lesson: government is not business.

Here, it becomes standard GOP fare with the boilerplate statement that they’ll  “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop socialism.” Again, he doesn’t mean the dictionary definition of socialism where the government controls the means of production (ask the Soviet Union how that experiment went—oh, wait, you can’t because it collapsed under its own weight in 1989). They just mean no more tax dollars spent on the health and welfare of Americans.

As Dana Millbank said out in the Washington Post, “[This plan is] easily the most radical document put forward by a member of the leadership of a major political party in modern times.”

I don’t blame Senator Scott for taking a big old swing at the ball, but with this, the Republican Party has now gone from a platform that removed all criticism of Putin and Russia (the Former Guy saw to that, and we should never forget his fawning over a dictator too evil even for a Disney movie), to no platform at all, “It’ll be whatever President Trump says it is,” to this mean-spirited, wet dream of fundamental “conservative” values that never fails to send people of goodwill running for the hills.

Meanwhile, the entire party is in for a rude demographic awakening. Take climate change, which appears nowhere in this new platform, for instance. In that sphere, we are in for a reckoning. By wide margins, today’s younger generation does not think our current policies will mitigate the climate change they know they’ll have to live with. According to a recent Data for Progress poll, overwhelming majorities of likely 18-35 year old voters doubt our current seriousness, and support the group of policies known as the Green New Deal. Up to 84% of them want to lower utility bills, make our communities more resilient to climate change, and move to renewables faster.

This is a generational divide that can’t be dismissed on account of “starry-eyed, youthful innocence.” Our young adults have seen enough to know that they have seen enough. It’s a nebulous threat on the not-so-distant horizon for older adults, but for the under 35 crowd, it is an existential threat, and they want it addressed.

So the question becomes will a senator who represents the actual Fantasy Land in Disney World get serious and propose a platform worthy of  debate—for we need a loyal opposition with intellectual and emotional heft—or will he continue the degradation and descent into oblivion that the bent-on-suicide right seems to think will rally the majority of Americans and really solve our problems.

©2022 Jon Sinton