Dear America,
You really fucked up. I mean, really, really fucked up.
Closing Arguments
Throughout this long, miserable campaign season, every day the news was like “Trump vows to deport gay, left-handed Asian dentists.”
And the next day the news was like “Polls show surge in Trump support among gay, left-handed Asian dentists.”
I can’t explain it. Fuck it, give me another drink.
If a racist rally — a Coachella for bigots — isn’t enough to convince you that both parties are not the same, you are beyond reason. Maybe one day, you will snap out of your right-wing delusion and realize, “Hey, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to vote for guy who assaults women and tried to overthrow the government.”
We are going to elect a politically moderate, well-qualified woman who will continue economic policies that work pretty well.
Or we will elect a felonious, sociopathic lunatic who will likely drive the economy into the ground, open to the door to autocracy and oligarchy, and make life hell for everyone who is a not a white straight Christian male (until eventually turning on them too, because nobody comes out unscathed when under the thumb of an venal, incompetent dictator).
It really is one or the other.
Good luck, America.
The Exact Opposite (Part 2)
In my last post, I discussed how the GOP’s war on reality has convinced Americans that we are living in a dystopian hellhole where the solutions are idiotic proposals that will only backfire and cause calamity.
For example, after decades of obnoxious perseverance, pro-lifers succeeded in overturning Roe vs. Wade. As a result, “following the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to an abortion, hundreds more infants died than expected in the United States.” So congratulations, pro-lifers, on killing more babies. Oh, and those draconian abortion bans “also affect access to broader health care, which can lead to increased risk for both babies and mothers.”
Thanks again, religious zealots.
The GOP has convinced the populace that up is down, evident in the continued insistence that the Trump years were better for the economy, even though almost every indicator shows that this is not true. Despite our strong economy, a huge chunk of Americans “wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession.”
Republicans also want you to know that ice is hot, and fire is cold.
As a final example, let’s consider the idea that so many Americans think Trump is a tough guy who will stand up for our nation in times of crisis. They “support him precisely because they believe he can protect the country in a way no other politician will.” In truth, his style of incoherent, impulsive governance would create “a politically chaotic” America, where “other countries assert more global influence.” Indeed, our “biggest global rivals believe that a Trump victory will serve their interests instead.”
Clearly, millions of Americans are basing their decisions not on facts or even emotions. Rather, they are clamoring for what they sincerely believe is real, despite acres of easily accessibly evidence that shows them they are wrong.
They are listening to Republicans, whose stated goal is to “make America great again, because it’s not great now, what with Black people protesting the police, Pride flags flying, and immigrants seeking new lives in America.” Conservatives don’t want “to hear Spanish at the supermarket or be aware that someone is dressed in drag,” and they are filled with anger at all those “New York and Los Angeles elites who, in the estimation of many Republicans, are actively discriminating against White people and Christians.”
At this point, “it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.”
It is also becoming more difficult to deny that the GOP candidate for president has, right before our eyes, gone “from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention.” The guy is “one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”
And yet, whole swaths of Americans will vote for him, vote for this Wonderland logic, and insist that the truth is on their side.
The Exact Opposite (Part 1)
In a sane world, a babbling old man who threatened to deploy the US military against American civilians would be shuffled off to nap time at the facility, rather than hailed as a conquering hero to millions of conservatives who have the audacity to call themselves patriots.
But the GOP has succeeded in turning our country into a bizarro world of contradictions and backward logic.
This accomplishment may be Republicans’ only achievement of the century, as every other project they have led over the past 20 years—Iraq, Covid, the economy, etc—has ended in full-fledged disaster.
As an example of the fun-house mirror that America has morphed into, consider that Republicans continue to insist that immigrants are invading the country, raping and pillaging at will, stealing everyone’s job, taking over whole swaths of the country, and eating all our pets.
In reality, immigration is a key reason that our economy is doing better than other industrialized nations. Furthermore, “the ‘magic bullet’ driving the post-pandemic population revival of major US urban centers is immigration,” and immigrants are filling a labor gapthat, if left unfilled, would lead to financial devastation. In fact, studies show that “the large influx of immigrants” over the past few years have “helped grow the U.S. economy.”
As for those rampaging immigrants killing and looting nonstop, even Republicans admit that they are making those stories up. Immigrants have lower rates of crime than native-born Americans, as we all know.
Any while we’re at it, please note that “crime rose rapidly at the end of Trump’s term but is now dropping.” In particular, the homicide rate recently saw “the largest single-year decline in the last 20 years.”
That hasn’t stopped the GOP nominee from advocating for a real-life version of The Purge, in which one violent day would bring down crime rates that aren’t that high in the first place.
There are more ways in which conservatives have it completely backwards, but I will save those examples for next week’s post.
Red State Utopia
As all know, life in conservative parts of the country is paradise. It’s euphoria and bliss mixed together and compounded. The red states are so goddamn stuffed with happiness that the only complaints the residents have is that their facial muscles ache from their nonstop smiling.
Well, there is the fact that “red state politics are shaving years off Americans’ lives.” And there’s also the myriad abortion bans that boost infant mortality, force teenage girls to deliver their rapists’ babies, harm literally every American, and basically kill women outright.
But at least you can get plenty of raw milk. You know, because of freedom, or something like that.
Ok, maybe an early death from botulism or an unplanned pregnancy isn’t appealing to you. Hey, there are other alluring factors that these areas provide.
There is the fact that doctors are fleeing red states, which decimates their already shaky healthcare systems. Or maybe you’re gay and want to live someplace where hate crimes against you have quadrupled. Or perhaps you are an ethnic minority, and really dig the vibe of fearing for your life.
That’s a whole lotta charm.
So why do people live in red states, besides the affordability and access to libraries with no books in them?
Well, the “disproportionate power that rural voters wield, and their unusual devotion to Trump” is a plus for those conservatives who hate democracy. They idolize places like Hungary, where free elections have been eliminated. These guys want the United States of America, “one of the world’s great superpowers, to sign onto the program of a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people in central Europe.”
The GOP has based its entire existence on rural white people who see their power dwindling. These Americans believe they are being oppressed, which is hilarious in that being white is worth, by some calculations, hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of one’s lifetime, to say nothing of the cultural power and comfort that comes from being in the majority.
No, they are still upset over Brown vs. Board of Education, even though school segregation is on the upswing, and they go crazy if Latinos actually try to vote.
And what has all this anger, fear, and hostility brought us? For starters, the United States “is no longer among the 20 happiest countries in the world,” and we stand alone among industrialized nations for our rate of gun violence, which is highest in the red states.
Hey, sounds like heaven to me.
That Old-time Religion
Here are some fun statistics for you:
“A majority (52 percent) of Trump supporters say they believe the claim about Haitian migrants abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.” Slightly fewer believe that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth,” and almost a third think that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations.” As nuts as these viewpoints are, they pale in comparison to the 81 percent of Trump supporters who believe “Venezuela is deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions to the United States.”
But they constitute a serious political party, and we should respect their opinions. Right?
Of course, among Trump’s strongest supporters are Christian nationalists. These are people who talk a lot about how much they love Jesus but in reality despise almost everything the guy actually taught. Trump-centered Christians “are not churchgoers and are looking for what they see as retribution against those they believe are destroying traditional values, those who defend a secular society in which everyone is treated equally before the law.” Their support for the GOP is “less about religion than it is about a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically, and Mr. Trump looms large.”
They have found a cozy home in The Republican Party, which is “68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian.”
We’re talking about “Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.”
These religious zealots are “developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in [Trump’s] administration should the former president return to power.”
And what are those plans? Well, it’s the usual right-wing obsession with overturning same-sex marriage, enacting a nationwide abortion ban, and reducing access to contraceptives. But they also want to create “a restrictionist immigration agenda” that allows only those newcomers who “accept Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history.”
So basically, they want an America that is virtually 100% Christian, with a few conservative Jews allowed to hang around.
The GOP is so hyper-religious that they enthusiastically nominate fundamentalists who preach violence in the name of God. And if those lunatics indulge in all the behaviors that they condemn, plus a few straight-up vile acts that should disqualify them from society, well, the Republican Party will stand beside them.
This push for religious theocracy comes at an interesting time in American history. You see, about 28% of Americans say they are “religiously unaffiliated — a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is ‘nothing in particular.’ ” This makes them the largest religious cohort in the country.
In essence, America is becoming less religious even as the dwindling group of extremists among us get more fanatical.
God help us all.
Flip Flop No No
There has been much talk — misguided, self-serving, and delusional talk but active speech nonetheless — about Kamala Harris “reaching out” to Republicans or adjusting her policies to better appeal to conservatives.
Let’s set aside the fact that asking the GOP to do this is never broached. Even in the years before the Republican Party acquiesced into lemming-like obedience to a felonious madman, it was laughable to even consider that conservatives would pull back on their antiquated, frequently obnoxious ideas just to obtain liberal sign-off.
No, it always progressives who must compromise, be civil, go high when others go low, and in general, abandon their principles.
But let’s say that Harris, for some bizarre reason, decides to do this. What exact Democratic idea should she kick to the curb? Democrats are already timid on climate change, gun control, and universal healthcare. Should Harris say, “In the spirit of compromise, I will outlaw gay marriage”? Would that be enough for conservatives?
Ha — no.
Most of the Republican Party has made it clear that they would rather burn the country down than work with groomer Satanists and the woke mob (that is, anyone who doesn’t have a MAGA tattoo inked across their chest). The hard right cannot be appeased.
The few semi-sane Republicans remaining have long ago dropped Trump, so it is unclear what mythical segment of the conservative movement would now acknowledge that the guy is a toxic, gibbering mess who is a direct threat to America. They are more than willing to go down with any ship for which he is the captain.
Pressuring Harris to kowtow to extremists who would happily imprison her is an absurd suggestion. It is also historically dubious.
For example, back in 1964, Lyndon Johnson cut a deal at the Democratic National Convention with Dixiecrats who were ostensibly in the same political party but were also raging bigots. Johnson agreed to “a compromise that would permit the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation.”
And how did this moral abnegation work out for the Democratic Party? Well, in the 1964 election, they lost Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South. And they have continued to lose those states in every election since then, as the racist wing of the Democratic Party absconded to the GOP, where they found a cheery welcome and the foundation of a political base that endures to this day.
So backing down to lunatics didn’t help the Democrats in 1964. And it will not help them in 2024.
By the way, all those xenophobes in the modern GOP had better enjoy their cozy home. Because there is nowhere else for them to go. The political parties will not be flipping back. The Republican Party owns the bigot base for the foreseeable future.
Of course, those lunatics didn’t just self-generate, ex nihilo, when Obama was elected (although everybody knows that the nation’s first black president had a catalyzing effect on racism). No, the backlash to Obama was “really a long-running ‘whitelash’ that’s intricately woven into American history and currently targets not just black people, but any group that threatens a shifting consensus of who is American and who is not.”
Perhaps the GOP will kick out the racists and rebrand (although that won’t be happening anytime soon), or the racists will form a third party, European style. Who knows?
But for this election, at least, the right-wingers are ensconced in the GOP, and the Democratic Party gains nothing by appeasing them.
For once, the Democrats can’t afford to back down.
A Less Perfect Union
What’s behind the GOP’s Ragnarokian rage?
It’s both an excellent question and a great excuse to use the term “Ragnarokian,” which I’m pretty sure is not even a real word.
But why are conservatives so determined to destroy America unless they can reshape it into a right-wing utopia?
Well, for decades, rich jerks tried to control our political system for their own economic benefit. And while they were successful (the wealth gap is a very real thing), they needed the middle- and working-class to vote Republican to maintain this system. After myriad culture wars and made-up threats, many of those voters came to believe they are in a literal holy war against satanic progressives.
So now we have millions of religious fundamentalists “hellbent on overthrowing democracy to impose their religious will on the American majority.” I will quote the historian Heather Cox Richardson at length here:
“In the United States, [there is] a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in. It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.”
But don’t believe me and some egg-head historian. Conservative leaders have gotten up in public and shouted that they want to overthrow democracy and unleash “righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
Millions of Americans no longer believer in the Constitution, and “have no interest in the stewardship of American democracy.” Instead, these theocrats “seek to commandeer the ship of state, pillage the hold, and then crash us all onto the rocks.”
This is not a fringe movement within the Republican Party. No, the GOP threat to democracy is now systemic, and Republican leaders “tolerate or condone antidemocratic extremism because it is the path of least resistance.”
The guiding lights of the modern conservative movement are threatening violence if they don’t get their way, which consists of “restructuring the country so that the right — meaning primarily straight White men, as was the case 100 years ago — can decide how power and status are allocated.”
They want us to be like Hungary (only bigger) or Russia (only smaller).
And speaking of international trends, a recent study concluded that 71% of the world’s population currently lives in autocracies, which “constitutes a 48% increase compared to ten years ago.” And before you think despotism exists only in those sepia-toned third-world nations that provide anonymous villains for Hollywood blockbusters, please note that almost half of the population of industrialized nations “think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government.”
That apparently includes America, where democracy is frail as it faces the onslaught of fundamentalist maniacs.
After 250 years, it can all go away overnight.
Madman on the Loose
Why are we even discussing this?
One candidate has been attorney general of the biggest state in the country, a senator, and the vice president, serving all functions without any real controversy and fulfilling her duties in a competent (albeit unspectacular) manner.
The other served as president, botched the biggest health care crisis in American history, drove the economy into a ditch, tried to overthrow the government, and is running based on a platform of hatred, conspiracy theories, authoritarian fantasies, and pure revenge. Also, he jabbers incoherently, mostly about himself, and displays total ignorance about basic governance.
Polls show a tight race.
Seriously, what the fuck? Who watched that debate, saw an easily flustered septuagenarian rant about immigrants eating cats, and thought, “I’m good with that guy having access to nuclear launch codes”?
It’s only recently that the media has started paying any attention to “Trump’s visible incoherence, cognitive impairment, inability to cogently discuss the simplest public matters, and increasingly strange flights of fantasy.”
But even as Trump’s slippery grasp on reality fumbles away, the GOP will stand by him, no matter what, further proof that we should “ever underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers” (i.e., the Republican Party).
Perhaps nothing can be done to rectify the “worm-eaten degeneracy of the GOP mind.”
But surely, those fabled undecided voters in swing states, the true source of electoral power, will now snap out of it and come to their senses.
Well, apparently, many undecided voters are “still not convinced by Harris.” Yeah, they’re still considering voting for the aging lunatic with 32 felony convictions who talks openly about being a dictator.
Once again, I must ask, seriously what the fuck?
On the Move
Once again, I must take an extended break from my rants, insights, and manifesto-like predictions. I will not be updating this site next week, and possibly for a couple of weeks, because for the first time in over a decade, I am moving.
Yes, soon I will be knee-deep in boxes and awash in dissembled furniture. As such, I will not have time to pop open my laptop and list the 4,891 reasons why you should never vote Republican. That will have to wait a few weeks.
So until I am back online, stay sane, watch out for fascists, and keep on keepin’ everything groovy.
Thanks
