Hey, Republicans! America Doesn’t Need a Second “Government Party”

The GOP debaters in Miami Wednesday night might as well have been swathed in war paint. After two hours of endless blathering about Foreign Wars, Border Wars, Culture Wars, Drug Wars, China Wars etc. it was hard to form any other impression about the agenda of today’s GOP.

To be sure, Vivek Ramaswamy gets a hall pass on the matter because he did nail the worst warmonger in the group, Nikki Haley, with his “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” zinger. Indeed, the entire quote is worth replicating because it’s obvious that as a Republican no one ever heard of, Vivek hadn’t gotten the neocon memo about Washington’s duty to police the planet:

I want to be careful to avoid making the mistakes from the neocon establishment of the past. Corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters, people my age to die in wars that did not advance anyone’s interests. Adding $7 trillion to our national debt. And Joe Biden sold off our foreign policy. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, got a $5 million bribe from Ukraine. That’s why we’re sending $200 billion back to that same country.

The fact of the matter is, the Republican Party is not that much better. You have the likes of Nikki Haley, who stepped down from her time at the UN, bankrupt or in debt, as was her family. Then she becomes a military contractor. She joins the board of Boeing and otherwise and is now a multi-millionaire. So I think that that’s wrong when Republicans do it or Democrats do it. That’s the choice we face. Do you want a leader from a different generation who’s going to put this country first, or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?

Still, there is actually something more deeply awry in Republican land than merely its zealous embrace of the neocon Forever Wars. The modus operandi that all the above-mentioned GOP wars have in common is the active deployment of government power to purportedly do good and thwart evil.

That is to say, the pitch amounts to “elect Republicans and we will power-up the state to make domestic society better and the world safer because we are more virtuous than the Dems”.

Yet what in the world does that have to do with the core anti-state mission of the Opposition Party in the contest of democratic politics?