Scott’s Eleven Points To Serfdom

The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee is the umbrella PAC funding Republican senate candidates believed to be electable and likely to support the GOP Senate legislative agenda.  It’s chaired by Sen. Rick Scott of Florida who has published an Eleven Point Plan to Rescue America that establishes the goals the committee expects supported candidates to endorse..

One might wonder, rescue America from what?  Rescue connotes dire circumstances where failure to rescue probably means death.  Scott’s generalized answer is rescue  from the radical left socialism of the Biden administration’s agenda.  It’s a curious assertion since the Biden agenda is consistent with decades of liberal democracy emphasizing individual rights enjoyed under more just and equitable conditions.  It’s clear from the details in Scott’s plan that socialism is anything more than a federal government stripped of most of its authority.  His model is not a return to the 1920s, as some have suggested, but to the 1840-50 era, if not to the Articles of Confederation.

In eleven broad categories he lists detailed proposals to disestablish the government in the name of preserving libertarian individualism conforming to a nationalistic and evangelical ‘Christian’ world view constructed on a sanitized, romantic version of American history.

I encourage you to look it up for yourself.  It’s a slick, well done website that, for those so inclined, is quite convincing. It lists eleven categories, each containing more detailed agenda items: Education; Colorblind Equality; Safety and Crime; Immigration; Growth and the Economy; Government Reform and Debt; Fair-Fraud Free Elections; Family- Gender-Life-Science;

Religious Liberty and Big Tech; America First.

In each he boldly asserts failures that don’t exist then advocates fixes that won’t work, but they have strong emotional appeal for the GOP base, and perhaps for others.  He appeals to science for which he has little evidence, to the Bible from which he selects dubious proof texts, to economic solutions that have led to economic disaster, and the usual list of right wing talking points about election fraud.

School choice, taken to his extreme, would end with the most marginalized relegated to underfunded public schools while tax payers pay for parochial and privately run charter schools.  His colorblind standards mean no recognition of past oppression and suppression, and assumes everyone will adopt a more or less standard way of being American in the pattern of the white middle class. He wants safe streets without gun regulation.  The economy would operate with little supervision or regulation, leading to even greater monopolistic practices.  The government would be stripped of flexibility in monetary and fiscal policy.  It would be limited to defense, some transportation and limited authority over commerce, that’s it.  Elections would be rigged to assure that only the right sort of people vote for the right sort of candidates.  In one area only would the federal government have great authority – to dictate acceptable family structures, sexuality, gender identity, and moral behavior based on evangelical Christian beliefs.   His guarantee of religious freedom changes nothing in existing law, custom and practice, but it emphasizes the special place of Christianity and Judaism.   America First is plain old jingoistic (white) nationalism that assumes the U.S. can become a self sufficient island fortress standing apart from he rest of the world. 

In the name of preserving freedom and rights, he would impose strict limits on speech, women’s health care, and most forms of assistance to the poor and needy..  America would become a nation of peasants ruled by plutocrats and oligarchs. That’s not the future he promises, but it’s the future his plan would produce.  America would become more like Putin’s Russia than anything else.  

Scott’s plan can be sold to many Americans who believe, feeling more than knowing, that they have been left behind and it’s the fault of liberal socialists.  Another Trump like president with a Scott and McCarthy legislature could make it happen.