The GOP doesn't care about you. It never has.

The terrible tragedy in Texas is a clear example. Republicans fought efforts to address climate change, making storms stronger, wetter, less predictable, and more frequent.

For years, Republicans have told us that government is the enemy. As a matter of tactics, when fighting this enemy, they charged it was cesspool of waste, fraud, and freeloading. They claimed it housed “deep state” actors who were sabotaging the nation. These tactics have always been dishonest. The truth is that they simply do not believe government has a role in public health, education and well being.

The terrible tragedy in Texas is a clear example. Republicans fought efforts to address climate change, making storms stronger, wetter, less predictable, and more frequent. They slashed funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as the National Weather Service, two organizations that help predict and protect us from weather-related disasters. And they defunded FEMA, the organization that helps us after disasters. Locally, Texas officials did not think it was important to fund updated flood warning systems. These decisions are not about waste, fraud, or freeloading. They simply reflect the Republican view that government has no role to play.

Photo credit: Rodolfo Gonzalez / Associated Press

You won’t hear that talked about. Every tragedy that their policies bring meets the same response. You know it. It goes like this: Now is not the time to talk about it. Now is the time to come together to heal. It’s not appropriate to politicize this disaster.

I’m sorry, that just dishonors the dead. We have repeated tragedies precisely because they refuse to talk about it, because they know that if they can delay the conversation they can change the subject.

But this subject needs our urgent engagement. It’s bigger than cuts to the National Weather Service, or policies governing guns, or our approach to climate change, or even cuts to Medicaid. It is about the role of government.

Republicans argue that government should protect us from military threats and keep our property safe. (Donald Trump’s view differs from the GOP’s traditional view in that he thinks government is a tool for personal enrichment and private retribution.) Theirs is a vastly smaller conception of that thing we do together- governing. It looks a lot like the government we had in the 1920s.

The vast majority of Americans disagree with their view. We want government to protect not just our property but our rights. We want government to invest in our education, our science, our infrastructure. We want a government that broadly conceives its responsibility to make our communities safer. That broader conception includes, among other things, warning us about storms, protecting our water supplies, assuring our food is safe, and limiting workplace hazards.

The Republican view of government is so unpopular that they have now moved away from the idea of democracy as the basis of governmental legitimacy. That’s a big claim, but radical gerrymandering, the erosion of the voting rights act, the legalization of unlimited gobs of dark money in elections, and more recent efforts to limit voter registration cannot be understood as anything else. Here, again, the tactics of their attack on democracy mirror their attack on government. They claim voting is riddled with fraud, elections are fixed because undocumented immigrants are encouraged to vote, and, um, Chinese hackers are tampering with the results. None of this is true. The charges are just meant to undermine the idea of democracy as they have undermined the idea of government.

The GOP does have an idea about the form of government we should have. It is one where the wealthiest empower a leader who governs without the inefficiencies of checks or balances, and one where elections are decoration meant to appease the population. There are plenty of countries like that. Hungary, Turkey, and Russia come to mind.

But today’s GOP doesn’t just think government should be small and they should rule. They are also the most corrupt bunch we’ve ever seen in power. How else could they manage to increase our annual deficit by between 3 and 4 trillion dollars while cutting spending?

Imagine that. They reshaped the government along the lines they have always wanted. Much smaller. Not committed to our education, our health, our well being. Limited in ways it has not been for generations. Yet they somehow managed to do that AND put us in debt for generations to come. How is that possible?

Simple. They gave vast sums to the wealthiest among us. And, for the first time, they created a huge national police force and prison system that reports to the President alone.

And with that, I concede, their government really is the enemy.