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Republicans Expect Americans to Obey, Not Participate in Political Life of the Nation
In an interview last April that aired on CNBC, Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp praised the Augusta National Golf Club for not following in the footsteps of Major League Baseball and re-locating the prestigious Masters golf tournament it hosts. Major League Baseball, of course, in wake of the Governor signing voter suppression legislation into law, announced it would no longer hold its annual all-star game in Atlanta this year, choosing instead to schedule the game in Colorado.
The nature of Kemp’s praise revealed quite starkly what we need to understand as the Republican Party’s intense and open disdain for democracy and its vision of itself as a ruling political class whose obligation to the people is not to represent them but to dictate to them. The people’s role, in turn, is to obey and comply.
Indeed, Kemp said in the interview, “I personally applaud the Masters for not getting involved in politics” and bowing to “growing calls by activists that are trying to pressure people’ in the sports industry.
To underline the obvious, here we have a political leader in a supposedly aspiring democratic society offering positive reinforcement to an organization for not participating in a political system that hails itself as one governed by, of, and…
