A Blue Wave is Not Nearly Enough…It’s Tsunami Time
News flash: the November election is not about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is but a septic symptom of a virulent disease. A malignant infection in our country spawned and has fed his festering presidency: the Republican Party. The November election is about freeing the soul of the American democracy that has been hijacked and held hostage by a morally bankrupt and selfishly cruel political party and the insufferably ignorant and angry minority of our populace that identifies itself as its supporters.
A cautionary note on that point. Historically fascist governments have established themselves when only a minority of the population supports them. In the last German election before being appointed Chancellor, Adolph Hitler received just 36% of the vote. (Note: Republicans freak out apoplectically when Nazi Germany analogies invariably pop up, yet daily they become more apropos, do they not? But there were doubtless a lot of very fine people in Nazi Germany, right?)
It’s hard to say exactly how and when the Republican Party lost its soul, but it’s possible to trace the root of the evil all the way back into the early 1950’s. While I grew up in a family and in a neighborhood that universally liked Ike Eisenhower, his VP Tricky Dick Nixon rose to prominence in the “Partei” as a Red Scare commie chaser emerging out of the sordidly lunatic oppression of the Joe McCarthy era.
Joe McCarthy’s right hand man was the universally despised political dirty trickster and all around scoundrel Roy Cohn. Cohn had come to McCarthy’s attention by successfully convicting and sending Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their gruesome deaths in the electric chair. Roy Cohn helped Tricky Dick get elected president and is a bone-chillingly memorable and vividly despicable character portrayed in the play “Angels in America.” He was also an attorney for and mentor to Donald Trump, teaching him the “art of the steal” in the zero sum games of business and politics.
But my parents were Republicans and pretty moderate people, grasping easily that Goldwater was a dangerous crackpot (“In your guts, you know he’s nuts,”) and I recall that there were some folks on our block in Toledo we were to be wary of because they had joined something scary called The John Birch Society. When we moved to New York State just north of NYC my parents were proud to call themselves “Rockefeller Republicans,” who were thought to be socially moderate and fiscally conservative people. After all, Democrats in the South were the racists then, and Democratic bosses in the big cities seemed to be the corrupt ones. So being a moderate Republican in the early sixties appeared to be a pretty good thing.
As a teen I recall a lecture that William F. Buckley, Jr. gave at my high school, and he railed against the extreme right Birchers as much that night as he did the New Deal Left. Nonetheless, Buckley ultimately was instrumental in moving Republicans philosophically further and further away from the middle of the political road.
Then came a succession of what we now call “Movement Conservatives” intent on undoing the progressive New Deal world, which had been enthusiastically supported by both political parties when FDR rolled it out to finally end the Great Depression. Over time it seems American white oligarchs had had enough of an activist government that built infrastructure, provided jobs, regulated the excesses of business and established a social safety net for people. So they triggered their hired gun conservative legislators and governors to angrily oppose activist government as socialist, even communist. Freedom to the oligarchs was the freedom to get as rich as possible, without restraints. (Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College writes brilliantly in a daily blog and lectures on these subjects on Facebook Live. I have absorbed and regurgitate a bit of her wisdom here.)
So through the Nixon years, Reagan years, Gingrich years, a whole lot of Bush years, the Buchanan, Falwell and Huckabee evangelical years, the Tea Party years and the Freedom Caucus years the party that was astonishingly once the Party of Lincoln has freakishly devolved and emerged breathtakingly unhinged. Each generation of extremist thought has fueled a continuous distillation of the Republican Party into an angry elitist party controlled by aristocratic rich white folk, hating the constraints of government, seeing the social safety net as an insufferable burden to them and viciously resenting anyone not white, privileged and Christian.
Southern racists morphed into Republicans. Privatization of government’s functions for profit became a thing. Republicans declared a culture war on progressive ideas, women’s rights and women’s health, immigrants, the poor, people of color, non-Christians and the LGBTIQA+ community. They opposed and acted to unravel prudent regulation of business that protects people and the planet. Oh, yeah…and the Ann Rand (“Atlas Shrugged”) acolytes routinely rejected expert provided advice and counsel, peer reviewed science and verifiable data and factual information in propounding their right wing, fascist leaning orthodoxy.
So, it turns out that Donald Trump is nothing more than a perverse, diseased manifestation oozing from a shriveling and dying political party dominated by white, wealthy, privileged, mostly male, megalomaniacal oligarchs tightly connected to many of the world’s largest corporations. The incompetence, cruelty, corruption and raw criminality of this administration have been tolerated and encouraged by the Republican Party because they simply lack the spine and morality to take a stand for our democracy.
The party has become transparently selfish, craven, depraved, greedy, disingenuous, conniving and mean-spirited as they pursue their reactionary, Neoliberal, libertarian dogma to the detriment of the majority of Americans. After all, these are the crass idiots that refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic because they are protecting their right to be crass idiots, thereby willfully putting everyone else at risk of illness and death.
More specific examples of the mayhem unleashed by Republicans? Why are we in a climate crisis? Why is Vladimir Putin suddenly our buddy? Why has the COVID-19 response been so thoroughly botched in the U.S.? Why are we entering an economic depression? Why are unemployment relief and the eviction moratorium ending? Why are we still witnessing racist violence by law enforcement and the resulting social unrest? Why are federal secret “polizei” being dispatched to Democratic run cities? Why is our constitutionally guaranteed right to vote in a free and fair election being suppressed? Why is the United States Postal Service being kneecapped to throw a monkey wrench into mail-in voting? Why do the poor, people of color, indigenous people and the elderly preferentially suffer and die when we are in crisis in this country?
Why was Donald Trump elected the President of the United States? Why is he still in office?
Because of the Republican Party, pure and simple.
For these reasons a blue wave electing Joe Biden President of the United States in November will simply not be enough. A Blue Tsunami is required to sweep as many Republicans as possible out of office at every level of government and establish a new era of progressive, honest, trustworthy, compassionate, fair and representative government in our country.
We must vote in droves. We must encourage and help others to vote in droves. We must aggressively expose and vigorously challenge every gutless, anti-democratic, unpatriotic scheme of voter suppression the Trump Administration and the Republican Party will use to steal this election from the American public. The scorched earth Republican political campaign is upon us. We must extinguish it with a Blue Tsunami.
We the People have the Power. It is time to use it.
