Empathy is No Substitute for the Experience Itself
“Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty first century schizoid man”
--King Crimson, 1969
On January 20th, newly elected US president Joe Biden told the nation; “Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.” Which, at that snapshot in time, was a true enough statement. Through a miraculous set of actions, by just a very few Americans, the Republic survived while the very first non-peaceful transfer of power took place in modern history. If it were not for a handful of ethical attorneys general and state legislators, the first American coup would have taken place and put in power someone not democratically elected by the people, thus ending the American experiment.
One of today’s leading voices on authoritarian demagogues is the author Ruth Ben Ghiat. In her book: Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, she outlines the history and rise of current authoritarians, their appeal to the masses, and their stranglehold on democracies and the rule of law. While many Americans, and most of the Western world, breathed a sigh of relief this past week…the last thing any of us can afford now is to let our guard down. Oh sure, the theme of the Inauguration was America United and, within minutes and on queue, Fox and their alt-right alternatives were hemorrhaging anti-Biden speech. Even the ‘failing’ New York Times made the cut with a breaking news story that the new president was wearing a Rolex watch on his arm! How in the world can we be united when the president is an out of touch elite, wearing a $7,000 watch?
Address the Things
“We’ve got to address the things that put him [Trump] there in the first place.” –James Mattis, USMC 4 Star General
If you are old enough to remember 2009/2010, then you know that the The Council for National Policy threw all their chips at the “Tea Party” movement. Heralded as a ‘grassroots’ movement, the Tea Party was the brainchild of the CNP, with the bulk of the cash coming from the Koch’s and their group Americans for Prosperity. A large chunk of the Tea Party clan morphed into MAGA in 2015/2016 and, fueled by QAnon and a flood of insane conspiracy bullshit, it met its ultimate zenith in the January 6th riot on the Capitol.
However, if we are to realistically ‘address the things’ as Mattis says, we need to go back further than the 1980 official birth of the CNP…to “The origins of our discontents.” We need to go back to the John Birch Society and then further back to the birth of Fusionism in the United States. Cloaked under monikers of “Libertarian conservatism,” “Neoconservatism” and “Anti-collectivism,” Fusionism’s roots are in Jim Crow and segregation. As I pointed out in the past, QAnon is a reboot of Nazi propaganda used in its terror on the Jewish state…and that conspiracy was a reboot of the “Illuminati” and the “Freemasons,” which itself was a reboot of an ancient conspiracy of the Knights of Templar and the bank of France in the 12th century.
The common theme for all these age-old conspiracies is unbridled racism. “A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
In his inaugural address, Biden, for the first time ever by any elected official…not the least a president…said the following: “And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront, and we will defeat.” This sounds good on paper, but on the other side of it is the all-powerful CNP (unlimited piles of cash) and a political party that has given up on governing. The current situation within the modern GOP is seven plus decades in the making. From the very early days of Fusionism, through John Birch, through the CNP Reagan years…to today’s QAnon-fueled insanity, racism is at the heart of the argument. Biden is the first modern politician to ever give voice to the truth that white supremacy has been driving the bus.
The words rang so strongly through the politi-sphere that it caused Fox News’ own in-house white supremacist, Tucker Carlson, to have a cow on air. “Now that we’re waging war on white supremacists, can somebody tell us in very clear language what a white supremacist is?” the Fox News host asked Wednesday night. If someone calling out white supremacy makes you upset to the point of looking in the mirror, then it is possible that you might be the problem? Let’s give Tucker a break. He does not even know what white supremacy means!
Hey, Tucker, I will give you a clue. After you check out the guy shaving in the mirror…it starts with Fusionism and, sometime in the mid-1960s, when the John Birch Society was flourishing it cemented itself into the GOP. What could have possibly happened in the mid-1960s that might have influenced this thinking? Lemme see, The Beatles?…nope, Martin Luther King?…getting warmer, the Civil Rights Act? Oh, fuck yeah, Civil Rights! That’s right, for nearly 60 years, the ‘party’ has had a perennial hard-on for civil rights. The Proud Boys that stormed the capitol in their racist wardrobes are the sons and daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters of The Southern Strategy chuds who raised new crops of piece-of-shit white supremacists in the south. After live-streaming themselves committing sedition, they learned why grandma and grandpa wore hoods. Insurrectionists’ social media presence gives feds an easy way to ID them.
Watching Georgia fall in 2020 and 2021 delivered a deep blow to the Southern Strategy. Black and brown people voted in record numbers to oust a white supremacist from the White House. Now, with a replicable ground game developed by Stacy Abrahms, the entire Southern Strategy is teetering on the edge of collapse. The reality today, in the bulk of the states in the south, is that there are more minority voters to fetch than there are “negrophobes.”
Politics, as messy and corrupt as it is, is about one thing: Math. It should not be surprising that a party that has prided itself on anti-intellectualism, anti-science and anti-reason would also be really, really bad at math. It is true that Drumpf engaged a large part of the non-voting white population in the past five years…the reality is that the GOP strategy since the early aughts has been drawn around subtraction rather than addition. Subtraction is math, you can give them that fact. Politically, it is a losing mathematical strategy. While Democrats focused on addition, to an almost nauseating degree (taking any and all—including those who don’t know what ‘gender’ they are), the Republican party doubled down on gerrymandering, removing access to voting and demonization of anyone that doesn’t look like “us.” As the pie continues to naturally shrink for the Republican party, it has made zero effort to expand its reach.
Fusionism itself was born out of the idea of a “big tent.” If you could coalesce the religious right, with strong libertarians and foreign policy hawks and free trade advocates, you could build a broad coalition of voters. Sadly, as Stuart Stevens outlined in: It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, the party gave up on any premise that it was about building a broad coalition. Populist demagoguery took over in the form of authoritarianism and the party reverted to its Southern Strategy roots. Thus excluding the emerging plurality of non-white voters.
What comes next? Drumpf is talking about starting a “Patriot Party,” which may become a new separatist party in the United States like France’s La Penn or Syria’s Ba’ath Party. The “Patriots” already put up their own website, which reads like a QAnon on opiates. Or we may see another version of the CNP’s Tea Party Patriots that promises to stay within the boundaries of the modern GOP and attempt to infiltrate government like we saw in the 2010 elections. The establishment GOP is betting on the latter. The whiny, sycophantic Lindsey Graham, and Florida’s Marco Rubio, are proof positive that the establishment is scared. Following the insurrection at the US Capitol, large corporations began pulling the plug on political donations. Marriott, Blue Cross, Commerce Bank, Dow, American Express…the list just keeps getting larger. The money is drying up fast. The big unknown now; who will the Koch’s and the Mercer’s put their money behind? Will the CNP step in and fill the gaps left by big corporate donors, or will they take a bet on a smaller sliver of QAnon-type crackpots like they did with the Tea Party?
It would not be totally out of form for them to choose the latter. After all, they staunchly supported a serial philanderer and con-man and look where that got them…lost the House, the Senate, and the Executive branch. The Trump experiment proved one thing to the CNP…there are soft spots to be pressed in American Democracy. They have tested the edges and they know the weak spots now. In the 20th century, Dictator 1.0 included taking over a military complex. In the 21st century, Dictator 2.0 requires taking over the courts first. We almost saw a total collapse of democracy based on that strategy if it were not for the moral character of many DOJ officials.
What a Friend We Have in Jesus
If American Theocrats are going to achieve their life-long dream of a “Christian” United States, they now understand that following the Hungarian model is the best strategy. Putin played Hungary like a fiddle and Viktor Orbán was a good little puppet…and much smarter than Trump. The error for Putin and the CNP was banking on a guy who is not just severely challenged intellectually, he was just lazy as fuck. It is harder to perform a religious takeover of a nation when the cult leader spends his days watching cable TV and tweeting (in between lines of Adderall).
You can bet buttons to bows that the next demagogue they back will not be complete idiot and moron, and emotionally damaged malignant narcissist. They are lining up quickly to be the new darling. Former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is most likely the first in line. He is already deep in the CNP and he speaks exactly the way a ‘good’ demagogue would speak. He knows how to simultaneously talk the nationalist line, pepper it with some down-home country religion, and top it all off with a smattering of dehumanization of “them.” Ted Cruz has the religious thing going, but he is too mutually loathed to get the big guns to back him. Hawley was prepping himself for the CNP, but his now infamous Nazi salute to the insurrectionists has most likely torpedoed his career….prompting local newspapers to call for his ouster from the Senate and earning him the wrath of both George Will and The Lincoln Project.
On the other side of America dancing with complete authoritarianism is the reality that we might, as a country, begin to look at the festering wound for which the remedy has been Band-Aid after Band-Aid for decades. Let us say the GOP splinters into an establishment faction and a separatist wing. It leaves the ‘party’ as nothing more than a regional force which can affect ballots in highly centralized areas, while leaving it totally impotent for a national strategy. If the country decides to make a sincere move to align itself with the quest of equality for ‘all,’ then one of the national parties is going want the emerging voting block of that healing. Right now, the Democrats seem best positioned to take advantage of the math.
In either case, you want to be with the party that represents democracy as opposed to autocracy. This time around, we had just enough ‘better angels’ to assure that the Republic continued forward. The next time we might not be so lucky. It seems that Biden is banking on this. “In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward.” It is a tall order. The task is up to the voters. Bottom line, there is NO unity, NO peace without accountability. Sure, we can love our neighbor. But if our neighbor builds some gallows outside our home and screams chants about hanging us, we have a moral obligation to hold that person accountable. If we do not, it will be a short period until the next gallows is constructed.
For now, we need to find a new word for Trumpism…and then fight against those forces with everything we’ve got.