Chris Jepson: The wingnuts are in ascendancy

My Republican bona fides run all the way back to early 20th century Iowa politics. My grandfather, Christian Neil Jepson, served in the Iowa legislature from 1904-06 and oversaw the 1906-07 drafting of the supplement to the Iowa Legal Code. He then, for the next 40 years, practiced law under a code he essentially drafted. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name, in our home, was rarely uttered and then, only as a treacherous betrayal of class. JFK may as well have been the Pope himself, so unimaginable, a Catholic as president.

I would have voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 but for being 15. In 1968 I so opposed LBJ’s Vietnam War that, again, if I had been of voting age Richard Nixon would have garnered my vote. I voted for Jerry Ford in 1976, so questionable the idea of electing an evangelical Southern Baptist.

Coming of age in the 1960s introduced (at a personal level) the idea of conflicting values. Before Vietnam and the push for Civil Rights, white America lived in la-la land (many still do). As a card-carrying white boy from Iowa, I was not exposed to racial injustice and large-scale (community-wide) economic poverty. I simplistically viewed government as a noble endeavor (See: Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”).

Vietnam was a transformative event; so too, the race riots of the 1960s. The murders of RFK and MLK tragically depicted the “violence” inherent within the American system. We (my generation) now completely understood that, logic and reason be damned, America would war against itself through ill-conceived foreign military interventions while turning an indifferent eye to the undeniable racism and malignant poverty at home.

Since then we’ve had a consolidation of wealth in America (at the expense of a shrinking middle class) and Citizens United has codified the power of the uber-rich, further undermining our democracy. Actually, we are not a true democracy where one-man equals one-vote, where the candidate who receives the most votes wins the election. Look no further than the spurious 2000 election of George Bush, when Al Gore received 500,000 more votes nationally, yet did not move into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Spin that any way you will, democracy (America) was not the victor. See: ongoing Iraq War tragedy.

Richard Nixon unveiled the Southern Strategy, an alzheimeric Ronald Reagan embraced ketchup as a vegetable and the Republican Party saw an opening for rolling back FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. Jerry Falwell’s multi-headed religious spawn has metastasized into half the unholy alliance of God and mammon now heading the Republican Party.

Moneyed Republicans undeniably use the millions of social conservatives to elect ALEC-inspired-tools to political office, with the relentless goal of deconstructing public education and “privatizing” social security and Medicare. Simply look at what Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida GOP are doing to the St. John’s Water Management District as suggestive of Republican values at a national level. The gutting of a fish has more dignity.

There must be intelligent, rational entrepreneurial Americans who want to pursue their dreams, make a buck (or two or 12), provide for themselves (and loved ones) and who care deeply about the environment and quality of life of their fellow Americans. Will those individuals ever surface within the Republican Party?

The wingnuts are in ascendancy. But consider them as mere puppets to the financial interests secreted behind the screen, the ones funding the agenda.