Craven Depravity
Not that anyone should be surprised, but this week shows again that Republican depravity has no boundaries as they jump in in lockstep behind their Dear Leader to create an unsubstantiated narrative of pure fiction disparaging election results. All that matters to them is the future of their Aggrieved White People’s Party; the future of our democracy be damned.
The line of BS never stops: Climate change hoax, Obama’s birth certificate, Hillary’s emails, COVID hoax, Hunter Biden and Burisma. Now the flippin’ election is stolen. And the Right Wing media echo chamber just jumps in and amplifies the hooey.
Fortunately the legitimate media is giving it the play it deserves; buried inside and off page one, as the Right’s pathetic conspiracy theorists play to its adoring zombie cult of mind-controlled lemmings willing to believe any fomenting fantasy conjured up from nothingness and bereft of facts that fits their jaundiced and cynical world view.
Fatefully, I just finished two excellent but ultimately depressing books by Kurt Andersen: “Evil Geniuses” and its prequel “Fantasyland.” In sum, Andersen lays out precisely how it is that a large percentage of the American public has been so easily and thoroughly bamboozled into supporting a Republican Party controlled by scared, greedy, racist white oligarchs who will conspire, connive, lie, cheat and steal to stay in power.
Both books are exhaustively documented with factual information that describes in terrifying detail how our country’s political and financial systems have been hijacked and manipulated beginning in the late seventies by a white, mostly Protestant cabal of wealthy, privileged power brokers. They decided back then that they needed to cheat to win and conspired to do so in a breathtakingly comprehensive way to stay in power and stack the deck powerfully in their favor politically and economically before whites become the cultural minority in this country sometime in the 2040’s.
They have blatantly suppressed the Democratic vote by reducing poling locations in Democratic strongholds and gerrymandering voting districts to protect Republicans, yet only one Republican presidential candidate (George Bush in 2004) has won the popular vote since 1988. Nonetheless, they have rigged the electoral system and the courts in their favor, while either barely controlling the Senate or standing as obstructionists when in the minority.
Another well-annotated treatise to take in if you are really brave is Jason Stanley’s book “How Fascism Works.” The key message here from all three books is: be afraid…be very afraid. If you ever think you are overreacting to or just imagining the depravity you are witnessing before your very eyes, read these books. If you don’t come away with the impression that, “Wow, it’s even worse that I thought,” I’d be shocked.
Vice President Elect Harris and President Elect Biden said all the right things in their victory speeches, and some pundits are telling us it’s time to make nice and come together as a nation. We would all like that. But the stark, gruesome reality of what is presenting itself now is the Chief Narcissist’s inability to easily go away and his party’s willingness to obscenely fuel his sick fantasies, thereby putting the rest of us in peril.
Yes, we all would like to get along. But that doesn’t mean we will condone morally offensive behavior like racism, fascism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, lying, cheating, stealing, criminal conduct or willfully destroying the earth’s ecosystem. Nor does it mean we will tolerate the Right’s silly fear-mongering protestations that the “radical” Left is nothing but anarchist criminals, burning our cities and intent on taking away your guns, gasoline, religion, hamburgers and long showers. Data shows clearly that the real threats and actual violence are coming predominantly from extreme Right white nationalists.
But Republicans are willing to put our democracy at risk for a few more weeks, and so they keep lovingly licking this megalomaniac’s boots a bit longer. They have their base of hostile sycophants riled up and want to keep them hysterically salivating in apoplexies of hatred while they have them there. They need their money to pay off election debt anyway and prep for the next election cycle, so why not? It’s just not in Republican’s nature to put the country first.
They have a little less than half the voters believing that Democrats are all crazy liberals (said with withering distain) and wild-eyed, bomb-throwing communist radicals. They easily and cynically disparage any government policy that might actually reduce human suffering in this country like a solid COVID stimulus and relief package, or affordable health care, or ending systemic racism or attacking the Climate Crisis.
For over 150 years “Socialism!” has been the predictable panicked bleat from the Right about anything that benefits the people: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, the Interstate Highway System, the Federal Prison System, consistent national environmental standards, a cogent national response to COVID-19, just for example.
Many, many Americans have been manipulated into believing that socialism (actually Democratic Socialism) is somehow a really horrible and dangerous thing simply because it’s been so manically vilified by the Right. The truth is most people in the U.S. pathetically have no idea what it is. They are ignorant or just refuse to believe that Democratic Socialism tends to work quite well in many places all over the globe.
But, here we are. The new administration is hamstrung by the old administration because the old selfish jerks choose party and libertarian orthodoxy over country. The new folks are being stymied by the old folks in the middle of a pandemic that has killed over a quarter of a million Americans, and angry, belligerent self-serving yahoos are tying up the courts and polluting our news stream with the same type of fetid lies that put a completely unqualified charlatan in the White House. I guess we should be accustomed to this degree of depravity by now, but it still sucks and is deeply saddening.
It’s not the time to place blame in the Left for not better preventing the depth to which Republicans have taken us, I get that. But I do think the Left had better come to grips with the degree to which it may have been naïve, disorganized and outmaneuvered in confronting the depravity of the extreme Right. And I have one key question for the Left as we desperately wallow in yet more chaos between now and January 20.
What exactly is the Democratic National Committee doing about it?
Not enough, from what I can see
