A couple of posts ago I ranted a bit about the GOP bubble mixed with the certainty that God is with them, and how that leads to an ossified Party that may seem strong, but is dangerously inflexible.
It’s rather like a badly infected cut on your finger.
The cure? It doesn’t appear to be reasoned arguments, because reason is no longer a respected part of the Republican Party.
But there are hints that there is a cure, or at least a treatment, and, while it’s not what I should hope for, it’s at least more likely to work than shouting at them.
It’s reality.
The first notable incident of reality deflating at least a few Republican members was the Kansas taxation and budget debacle, as I referenced in the rant, above. The executive summary is that the GOP dropped tax rates like a rock into a pond and expected the resulting tsunami to lift all boats into resultant economic miracle.
They waited around for several years, and while their state Party Leader Sam Brownback remained faithful to the vision, the resulting budget deficits and anemic growth persuaded enough of his cohorts to band together with state legislature Democrats to return tax rates to levels somewhere near which will restore the State’s budget.
Thus did the Holy Tenet of Lowering Taxes Is Always Good take a hit for Kansas Republican Party members.
The second incident, which brings me a sort of tired, just how big a bat will it take to beat some sense into these idiots?, hope is reported in WaPo yesterday, and concerns the recent spate of hurricanes battering my favorite toxic state, North Carolina:
It took a giant laurel oak puncturing her roof during Hurricane Florence last month for Margie White to consider that perhaps there was some truth to all the alarm bells over global warming.
“I always thought climate change was a bunch of nonsense, but now I really do think it is happening,” said White, a 65-year-old Trump supporter, as she and her young grandson watched workers haul away downed trees and other debris lining the streets of her posh seaside neighborhood last week, just as Hurricane Michael made landfall 700 miles away in the Florida Panhandle.
Of course, anecdotes aren’t worth much.
An Elon University survey taken in early October, after Florence hit, showed that 37 percent of Republicans believe global warming is “very likely” to negatively impact North Carolina coastal communities in the next 50 years. That is nearly triple the percentage of Republicans — 13 percent — who felt that way in 2017.
The percentage of Republicans who felt climate change is “not at all likely” to harm the state’s coastal communities dropped by 10 points over the past year —from 41 percent in September 2017 to 31 percent now.
“That suggests to me that there’s a very large minority within the Republican Party who are at least open to the first steps to accepting that climate change is a possibility,” said Jason Husser, a political science professor who directs the Elon poll. “It signals some sort of tipping point.”
Good old-fashioned polling is more interesting, not only because it’s statistical, but because it bypasses the leadership, which is naturally heavily invested in the ideology, or Holy Tenets, and goes right to the base. Furthermore, this contrast with the balance of the Republican base nationwide really drives the point home, doesn’t it?
Nationally, a wide partisan chasm remains, with only 11 percent of Republicans describing climate change as a “very big” problem compared with 72 percent of Democrats, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.
Remember, from years ago, North Carolina Republicans banning the use of climate change theories in formulating State policies, laws, regulations, etc?
Moreover, nearly half of Republicans surveyed said that incorporating findings from climate-change scientists into local government planning is a good idea and three-quarters said real estate development should be restricted along flood-prone areas.
This is the start of a story of painful hope. Hope, because people really can learn and change. Painful, because it’s going to take hurricanes and rising temperatures and possibly a lot of preventable deaths and misery to get their attention. And really painful because so many of these folks want to lazily put it in God’s domain.
Plenty of residents in North Carolina’s southeastern corner still reject the science, attributing changing weather patterns to God and the cycle of nature. A group of college students fishing off a pier on the barrier island of Wrightsville Beach last week called climate change a “load of crap.” A surfer taking advantage of Michael’s turbulent waves dismissed it as “propaganda.” A sunburned construction worker said it’s not worth worrying about because “God takes care of it.”
It doesn’t matter that I’m agnostic, the above attitude is laziness even if I’m a (insert favorite religion here), because we caused this. That’s what anthropocentric means. The scientists may have stopped using Anthropocentric climate change in some of their reports, but it’s the proper terminology for the phenomena they’re measuring and trying to understand. To blame it on a problematic supernatural creature about which nothing is known is simply a symptom of someone giving up on a hard problem.
I suspect a good cultural historian of the United States could point at a number of historical inflection points in which religious fervor swept regions of the United States, only to have it all fade away as reality impolitely intruded. Just think of all the Final Days cults we’ve had to endure, or, if we’re not personally injured by them, laugh at.
So know hope. It’s better than living in constant despair.
