Not long ago, I was driving through a small town in Indiana, on a state highway, cutting through a typical middle-class neighborhood in a low-density area. It was a two lane highway, with houses and some open land and the occasional stores and gas stations on either side, and I was enjoying the scenery when I approached a giant flag fluttering over the road. It looked brand-new, with a deep blue navy color, with white stars and giant all-caps lettering: F*** BIDEN. Without the asterisks.
That was all it said. It was hanging from a branch of an old, tall tree, allowing it to dangle over the road, visible to motorists in both directions. As I passed the good-sized house behind the tree, I noticed a neighboring outbuilding that had painted on its side, in even larger letters: TRUMP WON, also easily visible to motorists passing by.
I guess I’m naïve. I do know that some people hate Joe Biden. I know Joe Biden has made serious mistakes, at least in the right-wing narrative, most notably on the Afghan withdrawal (on another day we can discuss what led us to that point). They also angrily blame him for things that aren't his fault – inflation and supply-chain issues being the most obvious.
But this flag – I would call this more than simple hatred. When one considers the state of the country and the world, for an American in this atmosphere to demonstrate his obscene contempt for a sitting American president – demonstrated proudly by his hanging outside his house a despicable flag, over a state highway, with a vulgar epithet, for all to see – this is far deeper than that.
Undoubtedly many Americans hate Trump. But how many F*** TRUMP signs have you seen; how many HILLARY WON signs? How long do you think these signs would last if you hung one in front of your house? Would you worry about your house if you flew such a flag and painted such a sign? I know I would. To be sure, many Americans do despise Trump, because of what he has done to the country, not least of which was by leading an insurrection against it. Yet therein lies the difference. Joe Biden doesn’t hate the country. Trump and his minions and followers actually do. And they are proud of their hatred and have no shame in their fury.
I use this story to make a point. Much has been written, on this site and elsewhere, about how indifferent, complacent and given to false equivalencies the press has been concerning the many outrages of Donald Trump and America’s right wing. The right's rhetoric has been relentless, vile, crude and just plain stupid. It has been beyond incendiary to the point of absurdity. It is an endless cascade of ignorance and lies, paranoia and delusion. To make matters worse, it originates not totally from some grass-roots outrage but is often manufactured from the top down, systematically, through a regimen of daily talking points and hypocrisies, in a flood of falsehoods spewed by men of women of no character and no charisma, an evil clown-show starring values that are anti-democratic, anti-American and, indeed, anti-humanity. It is spread voraciously by anti-American, pro-Russian news sites as well as by deranged Republicans on Facebook. And it's getting worse.
I must confess that I, too, along with the press, had become inured to this extremism. After a while you must put up some defenses that include disbelief or the ability to laugh at or store this nonsense away. It’s a basic protective impulse that one must latch onto to survive – that, or prepare in earnest for the coming Civil War. Because make no mistake about it – these people already are at war, and they want to any who oppose them.
In recent appearances back on his barker’s carnival circuit preaching to the baying crowds, Trump has turned it up a notch. His flamethrower in on full blast, now including the top favorite hits of the right wing in which he accuses liberals and other Democrats of mutilating children, along with various other evil plots set out to destroy the country. Predictably, the press yawns because, well, it's just Trump being Trump.
But now they are actually onto something new. These are appeals to the QAnon crowd, now a significant portion of the “base,” who believe so many absurdities that if you don’t laugh, you are forced to face the nightmare that is bearing down upon the nation and the world. They are now steeped in their transphobic, pedophilic delusions, and if you consider that they actually believe this stuff, who can blame them for wanting violence? Lie upon lie is spewed, until even Trump's own crowds tire of it, so he must become more and more vile and detestable to appeal to their worst instincts. I won’t link to these recent speeches but listen to them, if you dare. His voice is dripping with hatred – you can both hear and feel the menace. The man, if given power again, will certainly tear down the country in order to satisfy the bloodthirst that he has encouraged. And if he is denied power, either through imprisonment or a lost election that he and his violent mobs will claim was stolen, they will try to take it down by force. Again.
I’ve been thinking about how we got here. Certainly Richard Hofstadter’s famed 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” written following the Red Scare led by the Republican demagogue Joe McCarthy, touched on familiar themes – that there is a streak of paranoia in America, and it has been there since the beginning, and it is an indelible feature of American politics:
"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse."
[Snip]
"As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
"The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations…. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him."
McCarthy, wrote Hofstadter, described a "conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men."
McCarthy and others like him – Hitler among them – were certainly more articulate and intelligent than Trump. McCarthy hated the Russians, or said he did (based on the actions of today's Republicans, many of whom are Russia's allies, one has to wonder). But the same hatred, paranoia and delusions are all there: The manufactured anger at the “other” – now the Democrats and Jews – the same subtext that the only way out of this is violence. And even today the right calls Democrats what they imagine are the paragons of perfidy – Marxists, Socialists and Communists. It is apparent that the Democrats certainly have their problems, but being Socialists or Communists isn’t one of them. Anyone can see this – unless they are paranoid and deluded.
So in thinking about where we are and how we got here, and reading much about the current conditions (Hofstadter wrote another famous work, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” in 1966), I think it’s a five-step process:
- Gullibility, or believing in people and believing what one wants to believe, is exacerbated by a stupefying culture, while poor education, vast wealth inequality and stifled opportunity leads to
- Paranoia among the electorate, stoked by politicians, demagogues and like-minded paranoiacs (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Trump, wingnuts on Facebook and Twitter) who are only out for themselves, to the point of
- Delusion and belief in conspiracy theories (JKF Jr. is coming back; the Democrats are eating our babies and are groomers of depravities) followed by
- Grievance – false equivalency, projection, hatred of the left, blaming of every problem on the “other,” thus forcing them to arm themselves to the teeth until finally,
- Violence becomes inevitable.
What will that look like after Jan. 6? It won’t be standing armies, surely, but rather targeted assaults to try to create a broader violence, to foment larger conflicts. Voting will become battlegrounds. Electoral winners will be decided at the barrel of a gun.
Finally, what has emerged is a GOP that has shed all pretense of being pro-America and for the forces of democracy and republicanism. Yet they clothe themselves as heroes and patriots while they cheer on what Trump called "killers," but are really just kooks, creeps, domestic abusers and serial liars – now seemingly the minimum qualifications for the majority of GOP candidates.
The headline of this diary is a bit misleading. The Second Civil War has already begun, and it didn't start on Jan. 6, 2021. It started at the latest on Nov. 8, 2016, when the right-wing threw a radicalized temper tantrum by electing a demonstrably unfit, anti-American fool. And it won't be over anytime soon. It began years ago in places like that Indiana town I drove through, where Donald Trump won overwhelmingly in a state he carried easily… yet they are unable to conceive of an America that doesn't fit their twisted, anti-American ideals.
Lest you think I’m overreacting to that one flag and sign in Indiana, I can say that while driving back home, I saw many Confederate flags; I saw many pro-Trump signs – going on two years since the election. I saw another “F*** BIDEN” sign, this time on a bumper sticker in the town in which I live. And we all know the “Let’s Go Brandon” slur is commonplace among not just the rabble but among the “leaders” of the Republican Party. And try a Google image search on the phrase “F*** Biden.” The hatred is being stoked. One major, overt attack has already happened. More are to come, both more subtle and more severe.
When one side constantly traffics in hate and delusion, political solutions look increasingly unlikely and war inevitable. One gets the feeling, on that small road in Indiana and across vast stretches of this country, that America is running out of time.