Have All Republicans Become Bullies and Buffoons?

The New Mexico Environmental Law Center, in a statement last week, said three locally based environmental organizations — Amigos Bravos, the New Mexico Acequia Association and the Gila Resources Information Project — have joined in an appeal against the Trump EPA over the new so called 2020 Rule that went into effect last week. The Rule drastically shrinks the number of New Mexico waterways that are protected under the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Known to environmentalists as the “Dirty Water Rule,” it “protects the interests of polluters over the interests of the public who rely on clean water for drinking, agriculture, recreation, and cultural values,” says Rachel Conn of Amigos Bravos. It does this by allowing many, if not most, of New Mexico’s small intermittent streams and wetlands to be polluted at will. We can thank the Republican Party for this travesty. There’s no one else on the horizon to blame.

Republicans have come to increasingly oppose environmental regulations, and they stubbornly remain ignorant of pollution’s role in damaging public health. Granted, one of their own, President Nixon, signed the Clean Water Act into law more than 50 years ago. That was an early anomaly. Now the GOP has gone on record in supporting the dismantling of as many environmental laws as possible, laws that protect the public and penalize polluters. This is what happens when an entire political party sees its collective conscience turn to dust by the grinding forces of obsessive, zero-sum partisanship.

“Isn’t there anything positive you can say about the Republican party?” a young friend of mine asked me recently. “Surely millions and millions of people can’t all be as stupid and retro as you say they are.” I’ve asked myself that same question. But I fear that at the present moment it’s true: the GOP has embraced its inner monster. It’s always been a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation with them, but now Hyde, the beast, seems to have taken over completely.

Always a Democrat, I used to consider myself something of a “conservative” in the old meaning of the word. We used to have Republican friends. And we still believe, as I thought they used to, in the conservation of resources, in the truth of “waste not, want not,” in balancing freedom and equality, in leaving your camp site cleaner than you found it, and above all in being polite and respectful to everyone. That’s the conservatism I remember from long ago.

Nowadays, though, Republicans, I told my young friend, seem to have abandoned conservatism and have taken up being everything my parents and grandparents admonished me not to be. They indulge powerful companies who want to leave their “camp site” poisonously dirtier than they found it, spoiling the groundwater, streams and rivers that most of us need to simply keep alive. They are chronically rude, disrespectful and bullying to enormous numbers of their fellow Americans and to foreigners. They disrespect differences. They don’t believe in equal justice under law. And, as horrific as it sounds, they are embracing a view of white supremacy that runs against the very soul of the Constitution and its amendments.

“Do you mean all of them,” my young friend asked? “Aren’t there any good ones left? There must be something worthwhile left in the Republican Party,” he said. “It isn’t logical that there isn’t.” And I agreed. There must be some real conservatives left. It’s just they have no role to play in the party as it has evolved at the moment to its most loathsome, juvenile and hateful extreme.

There are some Republicans apparently in revolt, however, or so we’re told. One such group is called The Lincoln Project, which CNN describes as being “led by a high-profile team of anti-Trump Republicans” including a former Mitt Romney political strategist. I have no way to verify what the Lincoln Project is all about. They have, indeed, produced some scathing anti-Trump political ads. But can one say they would be or have been anti-Nixon, anti-Bush, anti-Cheney, anti-Reagan? The rot in the Republican party started long before Trump.

We have no way of knowing, anymore, what kind of country we’d have — in terms of a healthy environment, and healthy children of all ethnicities, economic means and social standings — if the Republican war against environmental protections hadn’t been so virulent and never ending. And who’s fault is that? The science scoffers are to blame. And they happen to find a welcoming home in the modern GOP. Trump is the last nail in the coffin of environmentalism in the Republican Party, but he is the last, not the first. Republicanism has long been drifting toward know-nothingism when it comes to science, nature, ecology and public health, particularly in the Reagan era when the president said jauntily, and I paraphrase, “you see one sequoia; you’ve seen ‘em all.”

That’s the spirit of the foolhardy dumbing down of life that’s plaguing Texas, Arizona and Florida at the moment where “reopening too fast” (because the virus will vanish like a miracle) has caused new cases of COVID-19 to soar catastrophically. New Mexico and its leadership have been exemplary in doing the opposite. We’re an island of sane responsibility in an ocean of lunacy. Our science-denying neighbors have put everyone in their vicinity at greater risk of catching this hideous disease. That’s the way it is with modern Republicans. Business first, the public’s health — the health of you, me and our kids — dead last.

So when New Mexican children, especially children of color, begin to get sick from having to drink and grow food using dirty water because the GOP has gutted the Clean Water Act under Trump, I think it’s right to place the blame directly onto those who still call themselves Republicans and support the party in its current degenerate and disgusting form.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it