What is Republic Rebirth?
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.