Exposed: The Most Toxic & Corrosive GOP Meme Ever

It’s one of the most toxic and corrosive memes the GOP is pushing today, that’s now being used to minimize the importance of universal, free and fair elections.

Writing at the Heritage Foundation’s website in a warning about “egalitarianism,” for example, Bernard Dobski also uses the famous John Birch Society mantra as the title for his article: “America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy.”

It’s a memorable slogan, and the GOP has been pushing it ever since the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy echoed it while recommending that Republicans only refer to the Democratic Party as: “the Democrat Party, with emphasis on the rat.”

After all, calling America a “republic” sounds so, well, Republican. Fox “News” follows McCarthy’s “…rat party” dictum to this day.

But recently the stakes have changed for public acceptance of this canard, which has now gone beyond mere political party branding. Hungary, for example, is now fully “a republic but not a democracy”: your vote doesn’t much matter in that country any more, even though they still have elections. The same is true of the republics of Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus, among others.

Once citizens buy into the idea that a nation is a republic but not a democracy, it’s so much easier for “strongman” leadership to justify limiting democratic processes like majority-rule voting so they can rig things so “only the right people” get to vote or have their vote counted.