Thread.
Q: “Republicans enact policies that hurt their own constituents.
So why do people vote for them?”
A: It has to do with the purpose of government.
For some people, purpose of government is to help people. We think fairness is possible and the government's job is to create fairness.
Others have a different view.
They think there’s a natural order: Some people belong on top; others at the bottom.
They think people with money and power deserve their money and power.
1/
Example: The white supremacy theories that informed the Confederacy.
Hierarchy people don’t believe equality is possible because they don’t think people are equal.
They think the purpose of government is to allocate power and maintain the hierarchy.
When a government helps people, they think the government is taking from the “makers” and giving to the undeserving.
When people lower than them on the hierarchy demand equality, they think those people want to “replace” them.
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19th century America was a strict hierarchy (specifically, a patriarchy) with White men at the top and Black women at the bottom. Black women literally didn’t own their own bodies.
White women were kept out of the professions which kept them dependent on men, which gave men control over them.
19th-century laws reinforced the hierarchy.
Rape laws preserved the hierarchy and were designed to protect (white) men from false accusations, they weren't designed to protect women from attack.
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. . . If a woman got raped, it was seen as her fault. (She was supposed to be guarding the “goods.”) Even after the Civil War, the rape of a Black woman wasn't seen as a crime.
Even men low on the hierarchy benefitted. Think of it: They had no trouble getting a woman. Women literally couldn't say no because they had no options.
Then along came the Civil Rights and women's rights movements and the patriarchy was dismantled.
We are riding the backlash. . .
4/
If you take a long view of history and consider how long we lived in a patriarchy, you can see how rapid the recent changes have been.
The rapid changes enrage and unsettle the hierarchy people. They think liberals are destroying what was good about America. They want to go back to the “good old days” when America was “great.”)
That's why they want to outlaw abortion, make medicine expensive, and dismantle the regulatory agencies created by the New Deal.
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Hierarchy people use law enforcement to maintain the hierarchy. That's why the Republican slogan of "law and order" didn't really mean law and order. It meant "put Black men in jail.”
Fairness people see law enforcement as a way to create justice.
Fairness presidents like try to create fairness to make life better for everyone.
Yale Prof. Timothy Snyder explains what hierarchy leaders do when they are in power.
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I moved to @law-and-politics
DeeKat