Republic Rebirth

A crazy experiment to see if any gold can be synthesized from the lead of republicanism.

Or put another way, if I'm attempting to create a republican system that, as you may have seen in my previous post, is essentially all progressive values... why not just support progressives? I guess because I'm a little absurd.

It's true though, I don't see progressives as enemies, and that is currently the direction I vote. However I think there is one area in particular where a progressive republican could differ from a progressive democrat: decentralization.

I believe that basic human needs should absolutely be enshrined in law as universal rights, as anyone with progressive values would agree. However, while these rights should be universal, I think it would be preferable that they be implemented through a diversity of means, by many kinds of institutions (except corporations, which have proven they shouldn't exist).

I also want to work on this project, because I think certain changes are inevitable, and that means some ideas should no longer have a home. Namely capitalism. If we can plant the seeds now, of a republicanism that categorically rejects capitalist ideology, it might hasten the day when society as a whole rightly recognizes it as the form of tyranny, and ever-present threat to all forms of democracy that it is.

In the future it will be normal to group capitalism right alongside monarchy, theocracy, and dictatorships – an ugly thing that we don't do anymore.

Is this an impossibly uphill battle? Probably, but what does it hurt to write, write, write? Besides, if conservatives can steal libertarianism from anarchists, wouldn't it be fun to take their words too? We all know how much they hate when everyone else redefines a word in a way they dislike.

RR is an effort to see how wildly republicanism can diverge from current norms, circa 2022.

The seed of the idea began years ago, when I did some searches to see if there was such a thing as a right-leaning group that accepted human-caused climate change as real, and had any intentions of doing anything about it. I found nothing, not even a hint.

A few years later I searched again. That time something did seem to show. It was a libertarian group claiming to be in favor of environmental protection. I looked at their articles only to find the same old rubbish under a new coat of paint. There were posts about how “efficiency” was the key, and that Big Gov got in the way of efficiency, and thus environmental protection. In their bizarro world, building more oil pipelines is good for the planet! It's not like corporations want to be evil. They only have to because government regulations force them to.

In other words, thinly veiled astroturfing, and a political ideology that amounts to little more than blaming all their problems on the government.

Does identifying as Republican have to mean being a climate denier? Let's cast the net wider. Do they have to be anti-science? Anti-education? Does being a Republican mean having to gaslight entire groups of marginalized people, denying the reality of systemic racism and bigotry in our societies?

Here's a radical one: is it mandatory for a Republican to be pro-capitalist?

There is a lot to talk about. This blog is an effort to carve out a space and get into all these things, to see if others have been asking the same questions. I intend to to forge a new kind of republic ideology, so that the moniker is something I no longer have to call “they”, and start calling “us.”

Oh, and that effort to see if anyone on the right is accepting climate science? I did one last search before writing this, and it does appear that things could be starting to change, though I have doubts about how effective that change can be without biting directly into root causes. Still, change is constant.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/25/916238283/light-years-ahead-of-their-elders-young-republicans-pus-hgop-on-climat-echange