The Republican Party’s recent break with some large American businesses over attitudes towards voter suppression laws in former Confederate states is emblematic of the Republican Party’s adherence to reactionary ideologies, and their failure to comprehend changes in the American business climate. Although modern day Republicans claim that they are becoming a “party of the working class”, their ideology is one that discounts workers they claim to represent as disposable commodities, and seeks to employ them at wages that leave them subject to homelessness and poverty in their later years. Ultimately, the “anti-woke” ideology of modern day Republicanism, and the spread of authoritarian and nativist appeals among the GOP base, represents an attempt to distract working class Americans from the fact that the Republican party uses agitative propaganda as a tool to help keep working class Americans poor. In that regard, today’s GOP is employing the same “Confederate Model of Propaganda” that led to ignorant Southern whites choosing to take up arms so as to preserve the practice of slavery.
Read the full text of this essay at the Otter Globe and Intelligencer