You're all seeing the same thing now. You've caught on to the fact that the Enlightenment has come and gone... if we stand aside and let it happen.
I'm about to do my level best to give you something more than a lamentation.
I'm going to give you a sense of what you are truly fighting against: People who have attempted to steal your birthright - your dignity as Americans - from you all of your lives. People who would rather see the country die to the last blade of grass than change from their deeply heartfelt belief that the most dire threat to their country (sorry, you're not invited) is not Russia, not China, not Iran, not Al-Qaida.
It's YOU and what you are FOR: the great progressive legacy of American history that these evil fools seek to wipe from the memory of the world at every opportunity.
They don't want to share credit for the great achievement that is the United States of America.
What you should get fighting mad about is that most of the credit is YOURS, and they are trying to steal it if they can, and to destroy what they cannot claim as their own.
If this be the end of the Age of Reason, let us fight to defend it, for in doing so we defend all that is worth fighting for in America, including the right to set aside the secular mantle and pray in any manner you so choose.
However, our dear brethren on the right do not see it this way. To them, Empiricism as the fundamental epistemology is dead, that once-great the validator of knowledge, the means of proving what is true and what is false, is out the door.
They have fallen back to impulse, to ecstatic decisionmaking, liberated from personal responsibility for our judgments and actions by immersion in an all-knowing, all-encompassing Party.
The Nazis introduced this, (Godwin can go straight to Hell) and destroyed not only millions of lives but two centuries of some of the best intellectual discourse the world had witnessed since the Age of Pericles.
The Republicans are doing the same. Since their ideology, a direct descendant of the original fundamentalist reaction against science and the Enlightenment, cannot bear the scrutiny of reason, reason has been handed a fatwa by the right. Simply put, for the right to lie, reason must die.
The consequence has been the bifurcation of the country into two camps, one armed with reason, the other with ignorance.
We are faced with the prospect of an America that is ruled not only by people who do not know the facts, but do not care to know them, and do not care to know how to find them if they ever do change their mind.
This movement, this accursed plot, this Ignorance, is handing the keys to world dominance over to our enemies, all so that an especially selfish, self-centered, self-incognizant faction can feel better about itself. No, check that. This movement is far more dangerous. They seek to become a danger to others, in order to feel better about themselves, same as the competing extremists elsewhere.
Unstopped, they will harm themselves and take the rest of the world down with them.
Part of the brazen character of their actions, the crimes grand and petit that are the texture of Republicanism in this day and age, is a reflection of the inability of modern-era Republicans to reflect.
They do wrong, because they simply cannot envisage that it is wrong when it is themselves who are doing it, or wrong when someone with whom they share affinity is perpetrating such acts as blatant lying, affirmation of killing as its own unqualified good, impoverishment of Americans, etc.
It truly escapes their awareness that these acts, reprehensible out of context or in association with persons outside the fold, are wrong when fellow-travelers do them.
Ignorance allows this; it is the selective blanket that allows the barbarian to kill with relish, decry killing by others as suspect, and swear vengeance when bereaved by the killing of kinsmen.
The idea that bloodshed is morally problematic, for the reason that it is bloodshed, is not only impossible to receive -- it is offensive to hear the concept uttered.
Tell me I am wrong.
I wish that were the case.
You now know I am not wrong, not in any particular. Per one recent Front Page diary - Hannibal ante portas. Hannibal before the gate. (ok got a tip I was misquoting, ty!)
We are seeing the willful flight to barbarism by a significant portion of the American popoulation, a catastrophic breakdown of civic values as a response to...overstimulus of civic values. We're too principled, too welcoming, too generous, too...civilized to too many people for our brethren on the right - and they won't stand for it.
There is always the possibility that a dynamic society will progress so far that is begins to leave much of its own membership behind.
We did that with the right the moment we left the benevolent protection of our Sovereign, King George III of the House of Hannover. And we've never stopped leaving the reactionaries feeling out of place and out of breath and out of time.
And once again, we are seeing a full-blown reaction to this phenomenon of the right's feeling that the country is changing - and doing so without their permission. Oh, they might pretend it is about immigrants, or terrorism, or inappropriate numbers of disagreeable people living together (and gettin' married, horrors!) or (most un-American of all!) voting!
If only we'd never seen this sort of thing before. But we have.
It has happened before in modernity; the clearest example being the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, where a society slowly - no, check that - quickly and cheerfully and eyes wide open went completely mad on the liquor of ultra-nationalist frenzy.
I hope to say that there is good news,that enough Americans can see the danger (I pray) to slap some electoral sense into our countrymen.
But they haven't seen. Too many thought the ratcheting up of violent political speech was all about electoral politics - when it was about the rise of a very powerful faction on the right that no longer wants you out of power - but out of its country.
The extreme right wing Republicans are redefining, with glee, what it means to be Real American. That's their term for it. It's a bit folksier than Master Race but it is bandied about by right wing rube and scholar alike with the same glittering shine of madness in the eyes that possessed the Nazis in their own time.
Sometimes, you must not be afraid to call them what they are. Fascists.
Because rest assured, the fear you feel at doing so will be as nothing compared to the fear of Hannibal ad portas - when they come a knocking on your chamber door, ravens out to assure that you quote nothing at all, evermore.
The right are saying already, in broad daylight: if not with the ballot box then we'll win by the bullet box. That's Virginia Foxx. Need another citation? Think "Second Amendment remedies", compliments of Sharron Angle. Need another? Sean Hannity liking being called a Tim McVeigh Wannabe. And the crowd roaring its approval at the label.
I use to say - Somehow we must make our brethren see the danger of the leadership refusing to concede anything to reality that is against a secretive partisan agenda.
What I have seen the past two years suggests, no. The only danger these evil fools see is our continued existence as participants in their government and society.
They do not want us in the picture. Borrowing from any of a number of crusades and jihads in history and fiction - Convert, or Perish - that is their message to us. They are the American version of the Taliban - The Republiban. And they have no regard for many of their fellow Americans as humans, never mind as equals.
The very idea we are their equals under full protection of the laws and Constitution of this land offends them.
That is why they are now out to destroy the Constitution - openly so. It too nice to "people like you".
Everything in its tenets, the high level precepts of the Preamble most of all - is outrageous to the right, if they apply to People They Do Not Like.
That's most of you reading today.
Get the clue. They hate you. They hate you so completely, with such zeal, they cannot bear a day without despising every thing you represent. The very idea of liking the same things unsettles. Tolerance? Coexistence? Cooperation> Sorry, my fellow Americans - They are just not into you like that.
So, what to do? Are we facing a complete collapse of our society, our institutions, our every good thing.
Heh. Every good thing. This is what I wish to those I love. I am sure the Republicans, each and every one, feel likewise for those they consider their own.
The thing is, they don't feel that love for the rest of us.
And now we come to a point where we can, in my opinion, foolishly adhere to a philosophy of appeasement or confront these estranged brethren with the full price of being at the business end of disdain, of hatrred, and of threat should they so much as think of overturning the Constitutional and Lawful Government of the United States of America.
They seem to want a new Cold War, are seemingly willing to threaten a new Civil War to get what they please.
Sorry, no. The future is ours. We are more numerous, more educated and all of us are trainable to the arts of war as easily as we are educable in the arts of commerce and peace.
So let this be the message from left to right, from Democrat to Republican:
We are Americans. In time, far more of us than of you will define what IS American.
Join us in this great and diverse work - in good faith and in peace. Work you profit from in every aspect of your life: good clean water. Good schools. Affordable housing. Safe working conditions. Promotion of the arts and sciences. A strong defense. Good roads. Child care. Care for your disabled friends and family. The means to support every senior citizen you know.
And you dare call what we do un-American. There's more of America you thank God every day for - when you should be thanking us.
But, no. You won't thank us. Some of you would rather take up arms against your fellow Americans. All this talk and debate and pretending to be about winning elections is getting tedious. You're impatient. You want this sorted yesterday.
Fine, then. I add this warning: Fight us, and reap the whirlwind, for whether you acknowledge us as your countrymen and equals or not - we are Americans all.
We know how to fight for what's ours and what's right.
So if this be the end of the Age of Reason, never let it be said that this dreadful tragedy happened without a fight, the consequence of sighs of exhausted despair.
For whatever madness has overcome many of our red brethren, let it be said that, win or lose, Americans true and blue fought to the last to defend their lives, their liberty and every good thing, for friend and foe alike.