Mitch McConnell knows how to win the midterm: Oppose everything Joe Biden does, blame him for anything that goes wrong, but never lay out an agenda that turns the election into a choice rather than a referendum.
Last week, however, Sen. Rick Scott — a billionaire Medicare scammer who scammed Floridians into narrowly electing him governor twice and senator once, and who is in charge of electing Republicans to the Senate — threw a wrench into the machine with his “11 Point Plan to Rescue America,” a manifesto that mixes Newt Gingrich’s kick-the-poor ’90s with Trumpian authoritarianism, white Christian nationalism, overt attacks on voting rights, economic and constitutional illiteracy, and a Mack truck full of gaslighting.
The 11 points speak for themselves:
There is the Republican plan to “rescue” the country, which was humming along fine until Jan. 20, 2021.
Most of it isn’t new, per se. What’s new is Scott’s attempt to marry the party’s anti-tax, pro-austerity wing with Trump’s populist, authoritarian wing. On the surface, that seems dubious. To the degree Trump had a policy outlook more sophisticated than “Build the Wall,” it was that he promised everything to everyone — cut taxes and increase spending and cut the deficit — and pretended he never made those promises when they became inconvenient.
Scott, however, wants to reframe the oligarchical (read: deeply unpopular) aspects of the GOP agenda as an extension of the culture wars: The “woke” left is sending your money to “undeserving” others; you don’t have to squint to see the racial subtext. From start to finish, this is an authoritarian document dressed up in the language of freedom. Like all variants of right-wing populism, it focuses the grievances of its target demo (a loss of cultural primacy) at scapegoats (the wokes).
Consider how Scott begins his treatise: “The militant left now controls the entire federal government, the news media, academia, Hollywood, and most corporate boardrooms — but they want more. They are redefining America and silencing their opponents.”
Put aside the obvious question — how much LSD does a man have to take to think of Joe Biden as the “militant left”? — and allow me to translate from Fox Newsese: Scott’s version of a white, Christian America that idealizes capitalists (for example, him) has lost favor in the cultural marketplace, and people who espouse racist, misogynistic or bigoted views now face consequences they didn’t before (which they call censorship). A multicultural society forces their children to learn more than the historical myths on which their purported superiority was constructed (which they call indoctrination).
They are victims, forever and always. Scott is promising to avenge their victimhood by imposing their cultural norms on everyone else — in the name of freedom — and maintaining the socioeconomic caste system that has fostered the greatest level of inequality in a century.
That is the Republican Party’s 2022 platform. It’s also a gift to Democrats — if they can figure out how to use it.
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