Thursday, May 11, 2023

The center cannot hold

 Long read by the High Priest of Centerism William Saletan describing the Fall of the House of Reagan.

I'll make it simple and short for you, though.

tl:dr - the Republican Party is a bughouse full of fascist nuts who aren't going to change and who won't back off until they rule the rest of us.

Those inside who aren't bughouse fascist nuts?

Can't and won't change anything because they believe they are 1) safe from the nutcases coming for THEM, and 2) more terrified of taxes, soyboys, feminism, and drag queens that they are of their country becoming a dictatorship.

The nuts - and the nut-complacent - will not change; there's no reason for them to.

They will rule us, or ruin us. They have no interest - zero - in living in a truly democratic, multiracial, multisocial polity. They will have their God, their guns, their "low taxes", their xenophobia and racist Paradise.

Or they'll burn it all down.

Look, if you dare peer into the abyss, at the execrable CNN "Town Hall" the other night, where a braying Tubby blarted his firehose of lies, other lies, and bullshit out into a baying mob of his CHUDs.

THAT's what lies ahead of us. Fuck, that's where we are NOW; what lies ahead may be even worse.

There is no reasoning with that. There's no "compromising" or "negotiating" with it.

There's fighting and destroying it.

Or being destroyed by it.

The implications are, naturally horrifying. The implications are that more than seventy million of our supposed "fellow Americans" are vicious enemies who won't leave us in peace, who will pursue us until their boot is on our necks, or they are utterly defeated.

I have no idea how the hell you solve that. That's the road to Rwanda. That's The Troubles in Ulster. That's the Greek Civil War, or every other Civil War except our own, where the division was more-or-less neatly geographic.

But that's the reality.

If we want to avoid those outcomes, we need to accept that reality, and the need to do what is necessary to burn out the Republican disease before it metastasizes into the sort of civic cancer that tore Ulster and Rwanda and the England of 1642 apart.

But I don't see my country accepting that; either the reality, or the need.

And that, frankly, angers, and scares the living shit out of me.

1 comment:

Don Francisco said...

There's a very "don't look up" feel to the politics, a clear and obvious danger and nowhere near enough focus and attention on it because the systems reward you for ignoring the danger or collaborating with it. Actually it's worse than that, the worst behaviour is rewarded in most cases, making fortunes for right wing grifters who leech off hatred and ignorance. And even when they occasionally get caught out, it's already too late, the damage is already done.

We complacently think our institutions and the law is enough to roll this tide back, it's not. The right are focused on breaking the whole system (in US and abroad) at any costs. Many times they lose a fight, it's just a temporary setback and cost them little in the grand scheme. By contrast, where is the unlimited money funding anti fascist causes?

It's hard to picture what the future will look like but we know the path it will take, the right forensically exploiting every advantage of the system until it's unrepairable and they can't be expelled from power.