Several people have asked me to boil down my long letter to a shorter one. Here’s a try.
Lots of really bad stuff is coming at us. The New York Times editorial this morning notes of some of them: “Sieg Heil!” graffiti with “Trump” and a swastika; school children bullying minorities with racist and nativist taunts; a Trump associate saying that the protests around the country must be “quelled.”
The thing that frightens me most is this: Republicans have been planning for fifty years how to neuter the one branch of government that protects justice—the judiciary. Once they get that into their hands, the powerless have no recourse at all, not even the slow and cumbersome resource of the courts. And we liberals are now powerless.
Yesterday, I focused on the loss of the Supreme Court. A commenter reminded me of a point I meant to make, but loss in my stream of consciousness: The lower courts will fall as well.
Republicans have been preventing justices being placed on the Federal courts for decades. The backlog of appointments is huge. They have been keeping it that way in preparation for this moment. Those appointments will now all suddenly be filled with Federalist Society hack judges. there won’t be any “liberal” circuits any more.
So any challenges liberals try to bring in court will be quashed quickly at the Federal level, and those that do rise the Supreme Court will be either not be granted cert (since the lower courts and doing their work for them anyway), or will be taken up and settled against liberals in order to set the most enduring precedent we have in the justice system.
If things work out this way, none of our rights will matter. Our votes will be stifled by new Jim Crow laws, and our voices will crash against an unmoving wall of “conservative” hatred.
If things work out this way, Republicans will have brought the entire nation right back to 1968. They wanted this confrontation all along, because they lost that civil war just as their ancestors lost the first Civil War, and now they’ve been out for revenge ever since.
Without government protecting us, we will have no recourse except protest, as we had none in 1968. When protest effects nothing, some protesters turn violent. And that provides the pretext for the yahoos to keep siding with the Republicans, to call for “quelling” of free speech, to launch their own pogroms.
This is why we should all be frightened, and why hope is hard to muster.
But courage is believing and fighting even when hope is almost gone.
So, as I said yesterday: Let Death take us fighting, but let us never quit.