Only we can stop the descent into madness
Like clockwork the last three mornings I have woken up at 3am, startled, heart racing, twisting around in my mind the implications of the election of full on wet dream Republican Government. For the President is wrong. Trump is no aberration in the Republican Party. He is the epitome of economic and political forces whose bad behavior these past 50 years has gone unpunished and undeterred and whose wealth and influence have grown continuously. The question is whether our system of governance has reached a tipping point from which our nation — and perhaps the world — cannot recover. For this time around there is no “last best hope for man” across the ocean that can come to our rescue.
The self congratulatory narrative of our culture masks the reality that forces inimical to democracy and the common weal have been emboldened and have now taken the reins of government at the national level. And through cooption of our elites and fear — just think of those 100 million weapons, many in the hand of militias, let alone zealous prosecutors and toady judges — these forces are very likely to succeed in driving our nation to decline and untold suffering.
The principle of democracy is crowd sourcing. The more people involved in decisions armed with the most complete information lead to the best outcomes. The past 50 years has seen a deliberate attempt to suppress the number of people who participate in self-government and to distort the accuracy of the information available to the people to make decisions. Plus there has been a calculated effort to create dissension and distraction on issues tangential to governance, using “Alinsky” techniques of agitation to undermine the opposition.
The Republican Party has not been deterred nor punished for deliberately undermining our government and governmental institutions over the past 50 years.
The surprise of the 1968 election was the Nixon campaign’s derailment of President Johnson’s peace negotiations on Vietnam. Nixon won a squeaker as both the law and order and peace candidate. His secret plan never materialized (as no Republican “olive branches” ever do) and for seven years millions more died, the conflict expanded horrifyingly to Laos and Cambodia and the US was defeated. Domestically, Nixon established a political culture of dirty tricks and appeals to base racial, cultural and religious which are the hallmarks of the modern Republican Party. Among the alumni of that era are the two Rogers — Ailes and Stone — whose impulses to ruthlessly use lies and intimidation to achieve power are the juice of the Republican Party. Read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and let it sink in that one of Donald Trump’s first mentors was Roy Cohn.
Sure there was overreach and Nixon was impeached and a few of his aides went to jail — but that was at a time when Democrats controlled the Congress and the Federal Judiciary was under the helm of judges on the Republican side who were not solely picked for their slavish devotion to party nor trained at dominionist and federalist law schools. And so the sentences were light and most of the actors went unpunished. Bad behavior worked — it won elections and it distracted the fourth estate and the people from the takeover of our institutions. And as was the case going back to 1930s — the real world consequences of Republican bad behavior, namely economic crisis, unemployment, poverty were left to Democrats to clean up and be blamed for. Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980 was largely the consequence of Volker’s economic shock therapy and the deliberate tarring of Carter with the stagflation that had been caused by the policies of the Nixon and Ford Administrations.
The Republican approach to winning elections with base appeals to class, race and religion and dirty tricks - on behalf of moneyed elites whose depredations have been the nation’s central challenge to control since the 19th Century — recurred in the 1980, 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections with increasing boldness. And while the Democrats were given the privilege of cleaning up Republican messes at the national level during the Clinton and Obama years, Republican operatives and their patrons took over the political systems of several states and took hold of our national media through the work of Rupert Murdoch and craven corporate controlled mass media. And their leaders in the the Congress learned that destruction of comity was consequence free.
Why a walk down history? Because Trump is the product of Republican consequence free malevolence these past 50 years. And the institutions that can hold back the worst of Republican rule — war, corruption, suppression and environmental despoliation — have been incredibly weakened.
With a Republican curated Supreme Court the Federal Judiciary will become a joke — the laughable sophistry of Scalia and Roberts will be seen in retrospect as high water marks of American legal reasoning. We have the example of a kangaroo court and prosecutorial misconduct in Karl Rove’s vendetta of Alabama Governor Seligman who remains in jail to this day on trumped up charges.
The media is so corporate, so cossetted and so filled with sycophants, it is hard to see any brakes to bad behavior coming from there. One need only look at this election cycle. Watergate was perhaps the high point of journalism; it has certainly been downhill since.
Of course there are competing elites in the business community that will conflict. But Republicans are pretty wise in the ways of buying them off and keeping them happy on the backs of the majority of Americans.
On the religious front, Elmer Gantry rules many protestant denominations, the Catholic Church remains compromised by its singular focus on abortion and the role of women, and America’s teeny but successful Jewish community continues to be riven by conflicting visions of Israel’s future.
And then there is organized labor — whose influence in the private sector is becoming increasingly irrelevant and whose role in the government work forces has been under assault for more than two decades (with the notable exception of law enforcement and fire fighter unions — the folks who at the end of the day are essential to ensuring property rights.)
So what about the Democratic Party. It has been weak and craven and needs to wake up and be brave, determined and fight and succeed. How to go about this occupies my mind these last three days when I wake up at 3am with a startle and a trembling heart.
For if we do not act, we are doomed. Elie Wiesel died in 2016. Perhaps never again will be never again.
Fascism has crawled onto our streets. There are 100 million weapons on our streets, many in the hands of people who may use them to kill and maim without remorse — as Zimmerman killed Martin. The rhetoric to kill and suppress is loud and clear. Before the Holocaust there was Mein Kampf. Our government leaders are stoking hate and intolerance of the other and hate of the opposition. “Lock her up.” “Git em out of here.” “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” and still be loved. These were all said. They were all rewarded. From words to action. We have seen it time and time again.
And while the narcissism, greed and power lust that underlie these domestic games — games indeed — are bad enough they will spill out into the rest of the world, cutting short the livability of our planet, unless its life is cut short earlier by nuclear armageddon.
I have brought children into this world. That is why I no longer can sleep through the night.
