With a wink to Jonathan Swift, I submit the following proposal.
Buddhists in the USA should vote republican.
First off, your spiritual life is yours and yours alone. Nothing outside you matters. Provisional exercises are to help people. If the government is a wreck that means there are lots of opportunities for good works and charity.
Secondly, if you know as all Buddhist do, that life is suffering, then to end life, is to end suffering. The policies that lead to more deaths, actually decrease suffering. Survival of the fittest. (But reward fundamentalists who don't believe in evolution.)
Therefore the policies that lead to the most deaths gets rid of the most suffering. No universal health care. Neverending wars. Racial wars and other tensions inside the country. Promote tribalism and pit every tribe against each other. Corrupt government that steals money from the people. Cronyism doesn't give the job to the best person of merit, and the is inefficient. Keep education broken so people can't figure out what's going on. Undercut the idea of truth and the 4th branch, the press, so there are no checks and balances.
Destroy democracy. Create a lot of red herring scandals. Create a lot of strawman arguments. Lie, lie and lie some more. Whenever accused of something, just flip it and accuse the accuser of what they say you are doing. Be as hypocritical as humanly possible. That shows you have power. Exaggerate your popularity and attack anyone who attacks you. Make people pay, power is the ideology. Smite dissenters.
Get rid of whistleblower protections. Get rid of ecological protections. Nominate the opposite of who would help out every department. Get a guy who competes with the post office to wreck it, so he has more business. Get an idiot to run education and promote private education, and religion in school schools. Better indoctrination, not education.
Have so many people leave the sinking ship that it's hard to fill vacancies, and drag your feet to fill them so the government is less efficient. Fill the government with yes-men. Don't hire any minorities or women. Bring back the old boys network. Trade favors to enrich yourself.
Let the police escalate violence in protests. Do not help out the people in times of economic crisis, but the biggest corporations. Escalate class war. Create trade wars with other countries so that trade is hurt. Half stumble on a series of selfish moves that enact policies that kill the most people. Spend a lot of money on the leaders to highlight the differences between those who have power and those who don't. Encourage helplessness, hopelessness, and also have crap mental health policies. Blame everything bad on previous leaders, and take credit for anything good that accidentally happens. Have lax gun laws so that 35 children are sacrificed every year for the love of guns. Fill the police with right wing nut jobs who are not interested in the idea of limiting force to make people comply with whatever comes into their heads. Forget the courts, let the police be judge, juror and executioner. Use the police to incite race wars, class war, and tribalism.
Mismanage pandemics. Don't listen to the experts, in fact make fun of them. Make a bunch of terrible deals that in the end don't help the country, like getting ventilators that don't work. Put your worst people on the tasks. Promote bogus cures that kill people. Drink bleach. Don't coordinate with other countries, or indeed the governors and mayors of your own country. Only give a few favors to the highest bidders. If masks would decrease the pandemic, then say it really doesn't. Misinformation is key. Never wear a mask. Never console the people who have lost people. They are weak, let the dead bury the dead. Blame the victims. It was their fault.
Whenever possible put children in cages. Do as much othering as possible. Us versus them. Black and white thinking, demonizing, fear mongering. Pretend to be a traditionalist, and rant about how nobody really wants things the way they were in a imaginary nostalgic past. Squash evidence to the contrary. Reward every reprobate that embodies your power grab. Get rid of press conferences where representatives answer tough questions.
The president is a huckster who sells the opposite of what people would want if they had enough education and were not distracted by shiny materialism. And promote those who help you sell these "policies" in the media. Have a national convention with no platform. Make political debate a dada dance to frustrate the opposition. Call anyone who pokes holes in your lies an intellectual, and keep the American anti-intellectual tradition. Call the opposition the party of resentment. Anyone who is rich who criticizes the system, point out that they are hypocrite rich to nullify their political ideas of fairness. For any oppressed group find one person who will agree with you and say, "see!" and, "It's all just hokum." The only thing that is sustainable, is people who will betray their tribes for baubles.
The greatest virtue is selfishness and greed. Bail out the Ayn Rand institute if they almost go out of business. No hypocrisy there, keep it moving, gaslight whenever possible. What you going to believe your lying eyes?!
Keep Hitler's works at your bedside.
Basically it's the devo party. Reverse evolve back into feudalism, or even further. I don't know what came before feudalism but evolve back as far as you can go.
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