I have often compared the GOP’s quisling leaders to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). I see news reports and opinion pieces every day plumbing the causes and depths of GOP betrayal, which remind me of the way the HIV infection brings about the decay and death of the human body. It’s literally as if the commander of a besieged castle should put responsibility for holding its keep in the hands of a cohort secretly allied with the enemy. Even before the day when their betrayal brings about the final collapse of the castle’s defenses that cohort consumes vital resources, reducing the rations available to everyone engaged in its defense.

Abortion and the so-called right of homosexuals to marry are issues that involve the fundamental premises on the basis of which the right of the people to govern themselves was reasonably asserted and implemented in the Constitution of the United States. Such issues also affect the integrity and character of natural rights (e.g., parental authority, the free exercise of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, etc.); the human institutions that implement them (the family, the institutions of worship, free enterprise business associations); and the moral and spiritual character required to defend them (faith, moral understanding, courage, individual responsibility and confidence, as well as mutual trust, and social discipline). The GOP’s quisling leaders are openly betraying the body politic on these vital fronts.

Budget and fiscal discipline; the expansion of government control over trade, healthcare and other business activities; and the maintenance of effective, constitutionally respectful instruments for national security and law-enforcement involve the ways and means wherewith the body politic gathers and organizes its defenses against external and internal threats to its safety and decent liberty. In all these areas, on particular issues like the debt ceiling, the TPP treaty, the political abuse of the IRS, and the massive constitutional violations involved in the NSA’s indiscriminate information gathering programs, the GOP’s quisling leaders are betraying the body politic, openly and without shame.

I think that many if not most of the GOP’s constituents have reached the point where they are seeing and reacting against one or another of these betrayals. But tragically many if not most of them remain  helplessly or willfully blind to the fact that these betrayals are symptoms of an overall syndrome that cannot be dealt with if we’re unwilling to identify, isolate and eliminate the common factor that gives rise to them.

At present in the United States, this common factor is the elitist faction’s obdurate ambition to restore the old oligarchic order of things. That order is characterized by unremitting conflict between the many and the few; a conflict decided, but for brief periods of utter chaos, in favor of the unjust and tyrannical rule of whichever side happens to gain the upper hand. In most eras of human history that has more often than not meant factional rule by some elite group, achieving power either by superior technical means (e.g., better weapons or means of communication) or the intelligent manipulation of the multitudes (better military and political stratagems.)

The Constitution of the United States was predicated on the view that mitigating the depraved, destructive consequences of this age old conflict was the paramount challenge of human statesmanship. America’s Founders took this view because, by and large they understood statesmanship as the effort to establish, stabilize and perpetuate just human governments. Such governments are those that are capable of doing right by the people as a whole, the union of the many and the few, without unjust oppression either way.

In the early years of America’s political institutions government was in the hands of the few. But instructed by the experience of oppressive elitist faction governance in Europe, which they were prone to judge in light of Christian principles of righteousness (i.e., the disposition to live by God’s rule), the Founders were deliberately committed to a concept of government based on respect for the goods that all human beings commonly pursue, on account of God’s will for all humanity. On account of this commitment eminent individuals such as George Washington supported a republican form of government for their country. They rebuked the rule of inordinate ambition, rejecting the unchecked aristocratic/oligarchic forms of government characteristic of their time (and indeed of most human governments up to that time.)

Today the GOP’s quisling leaders still claim to support the Founders’ vision of constitutional government, with powers limited by respect for the God endowed rights of the people. They claim to support the right of self-government derived from these rights, and predicated on the individual’s willingness to do right by God in the use of liberty. But the quislings’ rhetoric in this respect has been, and is continually still being refuted by events. Now almost routinely the GOP’s quisling leaders join with their opponents in rejecting both the principles of right and rights on which our nation was founded. They connive at or openly support discarding or disrespecting constitutional provisions intended to apply those principles.

This is why they are so eager to approve a trade agreement that will expand Obama’s power dictatorially to abuse and subvert the nation’s economic liberty. They call it Obamatrade to foster the pretense that he alone is responsible for its noxious provisions. But if they are ratified, and go into effect, it will be because the GOP’s quisling leaders delivered enough GOP votes to make it happen. The GOP quislings are betraying their good sounding promises to their constituents in order to do the bidding of the elitist faction money powers they now almost exclusively serve.

How much longer must this go on before the people they are betraying cry “enough”? How long before they stop being compliant accomplices in the elitist faction’s destruction of America? The TPP is the continuation of the assault on the people’s material resources, already depleted by bailouts and deficits funded at their expense. The quisling sham will not be needed for much longer, once the people are materially and morally bereft of wherewithal. Then the pretense of continued liberty will morph into arrogant, open, and oppressively tyrannical dictatorship, of, by and for the powerful few.

And when the time comes to ask “Who lost America?” the answer will above all include the stubbornly blind and self-deceiving GOP voters who held on to a party label, and let go of their country.