I have wondered about the Republican Party's identification with the color red since red is the color of Communism. It is funny how recent developments have justified this association; not funny as in ha-ha, funny as in hmm. Consider the behavior of Republicans in states where they are in the majority and at the federal level. Long before they started to pass laws supposedly aimed at election fraud in response to the outcome of the 2020 election, the so-called defenders of personal liberty had no qualms suppressing those very liberties. For example, the Dickey Amendment has prohibited research into gun violence since 1996. The state of Florida has forbidden its officials from even using the term "climate change" in government documents - in the state most at risk from rising sea levels. Similarly, tracking of statistics on police violence is prohibited in many jurisdictions. On the education front they are restricting the teaching of evolution, black history and critical race theory. The most recent addition to this list of unacceptable behavior is the invasion of the privacy of political opponents, journalists and private citizens in the form of Trump Justice Department subpoenas of email and social media accounts under the guise of looking for leaks of classified information. Those inclined to blame former President Trump for the things Republicans are doing should know the Party's "evolution" has been in the works for a long time - Trump was just able to exploit the situation. Remember Richard Nixon's "enemies' list" and his assertion that if the president did it, it was not illegal? Decades of outrageous behavior appear to be on the verge of doing the unthinkable - normalizing the undermining of democratic norms and institutions. The more repressive Republicans become in their quest for power, the more they feel the need to raise the specter of communism when referring to Democrats and others who oppose them. The irony is that it is Republicans who are behaving like our former Cold War adversaries. Anyone remember the closing scene of Animal Farm - the one where the pigs sitting at the table begin to resemble the humans they are conferring with? This normalizing of illiberal behavior is going global - if you consider dictatorships of the Left and the Right, you will see that a significant portion of humanity, maybe even a majority, now lives under totalitarian regimes. As one who has spent almost a decade behind the Iron Curtain, I can tell you this is how totalitarianism looks and feels. If we don't want to face the "red or dead" choice of the past century right here in the good old US of A we better wake up to this terrible reality before it is too late.
- drrama7