In the past few years, we have seen many remarkable things in our government.
In addition to a reversal of control of the reins of the country, there has been the complete collapse of a major political party. Not electorally or formally, of course, but intellectually.
The latest example comes from Arizona. Last week, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill that gives police officers the right to arrest people on site if they have reason to believe they may be an illegal immigrant.
This is absurd on so many legal and policy grounds.
First, how many of us carry around a birth certificate with us at all times, on the off chance our citizenship may come under scrutiny?
Next, Arizona is dominated by whites and Hispanics; how many times in the last century have white people been the target of harsh, anti-immigrant rhetoric? This is clearly directed at Hispanics, who soon will make up the majority in the state.
What we have, in effect, is a blatantly unconstitutional and racist law, signed and cheered by a Republican legislature, governor and party that will result in a massive amount of lawsuits as legitimate Hispanic residents are arrested when they don't carry a birth certificate in their wallet.
Immigration is only the latest example of the lengths to which the Republican Party has gone to write itself off as unserious about national issues, as almost anything short of mass deportation is considered "amnesty."
On health care, the act of guaranteeing millions of customers to private insurers was, pathetically, considered as the government "taking over the health care industry," where every idea posed by Democrats was decried as "socialism."
With regards to climate change, a well-documented scientific fact, the party and activists have moved to denounce any discussion of market-based policies to address the issue as some sort of Marxist plot to exert complete control over all of our lives.
The problem is that the Republican Party, in an attempt gain electoral success, has become a party in which bumper sticker slogans are rampant and some guy you'd like to have a beer with is the best person to implement policies that affect the country and world.
Reason and intellectual deliberation have become anathema to the party, decried as egg-headed, elitist talk.
Sarah Palin, the darling of conservative activists, openly takes pride in her anti-intellectualism. Muncie's congressman, Mike Pence, is very much the same way.
Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic recently lamented this mentality. I want to find Republicans to take seriously, he said, but it is hard.
"Not because they don't exist — serious Republicans — but because ... they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion ... that therapy is a substitute for thinking," Ambinder wrote.
This isn't to say that every person in the party is an intellectual embarrassment. Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar is an example of someone who hasn't succumbed to irrational tribalism. But that's the point — how much do you hear about Lugar compared to Pence?
This tribal mentality isn't particularly new among Republicans. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ran for president, exploiting racial resentment in the South that had been simmering since the civil rights movement.
The reason this was never as problematic before was that the nativists were typically kept in check by the Republican focus on catering to business interests.
That changed around the time then-Sen. Barack Obama ran for president, and Sarah Palin was plucked out of Nowhere, Alaska, to run for vice president on the opposing ticket. The South's racial resentment and nativist rhetoric, combined with the tribal anti-intellectualism, exploded.
Now we have the Tea Party — polls indicate they're largely Republicans too embarrassed to call themselves such — running around repeating everything they hear from the party structure that funds and entertains them.
I admire activism, but I at least prefer that the activists be marching for equality or peace instead of spitting on members of Congress or defending slavery by speaking proudly of the days of the Confederacy.
I'm consistently underwhelmed by the performance of the country's centrist party, but it's downright disconcerting to see the party that once led the fight to free this country from slavery collapse intellectually into a party of activists consumed with a mentality where science and reason are unwelcome.
Write to Michael at mgkarafin@bsu.edu.
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