The other day I had to go to Kroger at 5:08 to grab a pound of mushrooms, an ingredient for the meal I had already started prepping. It was, as you may imagine, packed with hordes of real people stopping by after work. Lines to checkout and self-checkout were down the aisles. It was a zoo.

As I threaded my way through the store, a lady in an electric cart eased out of an aisle that I was about to turn into. She apologized for being in the way, but I just smiled and said, “No problem — we’re all in this together, right?” She laughed and acknowledged as much.

Except… not really. We’re not all in this together. Republicans do not believe we’re all in this together. Republicans believe that more than half of us are not “us.” Republicans believe in “us,” but that “us” is rigorously defined as not “them.”

You know “them.” The poor, the hungry, the stranger, the victims. Them. Republicans don’t believe in “them,” at least not in a way that would convince Republicans to govern in ways that benefit “them.”

Here’s one quick, egregious, example: [[[Turmp]]] has refused to disperse funds from FEMA to “blue” states. They talked back to him, so he’s simply not going to release funds that Congress has appropriated for the relief of U.S. states and their citizens after disaster, because they’re not “us.”

That’s at the macro-criminal-grift end of the scale. At the individual level, people are finding their rent assistance, their food assistance, their health assistance, all being cut off because of Republican fury at “them,” the “takers,” the ones getting “fReE sTuFf” KENNETH from the gOvErNmEnT KENNETH.

“THEY” MUST BE PUNISHED, to the point that it is now mainstream (as in “out in the open”) Republican dogma that they must abolish Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “They” are too much of a drag on the budget, you see. Ignore the additional $60 BILLION that Republicans are about to “reconcile” into the current budget, and don’t you dare bring up the $1.5 TRILLION budget Republicans are now putting into the next budget. That money is for “us.” Not “them.”

You will notice that they don’t seem to be all that eager to punish those that are in on the game at the macro-criminal-grift end of the scale. [vid. sup.]

Republicans will object to this framing, of course. It should be obvious, they cry, that Republicans are the virtuous ones, the law-abiders, the devout Xtianists, the patriots. Those others?

Well, they’re… you know. Poor. Uneducated. Different in ways that all right-thinking people should be repelled by. Them. “They” don’t deserve whatever money we as a society might give them to pay rent, buy groceries, have childcare or medical care. They should have made better life choices, right? But my “life choice” of not having bought mushrooms earlier in the day, requiring me to be polite and accommodating to my fellow shoppers, is not at all the same thing as the trap of being poor in these United States.

The whole mindset is grotesque. “Us” vs. “them,” where “them” is anyone who isn’t Republican, “those people” who haven’t earned the right to live. For a pithy and short previous take on the topic, see here.