I also disagree on this. Republicans are about equality, meaning equality under the law, not equality of outcome. Republicans have been the driving force in all of the civil rights movements that sought equality under the law, Democrats against them. This has been true for over 200 years for the Democrats, a few decades less for the Republicans who haven’t been around as long.
Democrats were only briefly in the “equality” camp for a few decades in the 20th century and the early 21st. They don’t espouse “equality” at all today, they espouse “equity”, which by definition requires unequal treatment under the law.
New York City is a good demonstration of this idea, where Mayor Mamdani is pushing race-based taxation policies under the pretense of achieving “equity”.
Democrats have constantly changed policies in rather dramatic ways for their entire history as a political party. If there is one constant idea they’ve had, it is that one group is deserving of another group’s wealth and productivity. The entirety of Marxist academic social science thought serves as the pretense for this wealth extraction scam today.
You don’t need a shadowy conspiracy for bad actors who fully understand that the ideology is a massive grift to be leading a political party, and you don’t need to turn every political supporter of the party into an ideological fanatic.
Hitler’s Beneficiaries by Gotz Aly explained how German National Socialists obtained such a high level of support and/or a lack of popular resistance. There was, of course, a lot of penalties for opposing the Nazi Party, but they also operated a vast wealth extraction scam to benefit ethnic Germans. It was the same basic idea of Democrats that one group is deserving of another group’s wealth to achieve a particular conception of social justice.
