"I feel sorry for many of my individual friends who are Republicans and/or conservatives, who have to deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement, even if I belong to neither."Because 1) if you're a "Republican" or a "conservative" you made this golem (as Scalzi points out), and 2) without Trumpism there are neither "Republicans" nor "conservatives".
Seriously.
Think about it. Because if you’re still a Republican at this point you’re either one of the deplorables or…what? Still in it for the tax cuts in perhaps the least-taxed of the industrial democracies? Hoping for a juicy piece of privatizing the Bonneville Power Administration? Wishing on a “deregulation” star that your chemical company can return to the fucking pre-Love-Canal Era of Dump Yer Shit Where Ya Wannit?
I mean…take the fantasy economics, the theocracy, the bigotry, and a vague yearning for imperialism (a new American Century) out of the GOP platform and what’s left? The Cuba Embargo?
First, I have absolutely zero “sympathy” for anyone who votes to foist that vile pottage of stupidity and used food on me.
Second - since I swore not to write about this election this isn't about this election - my point is that there is no way for "Republicans" or "conservatives" to "deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement" since fucking Trump IS their fucking party and their fucking movement. “Conservative” in the US has come to mean a credo-like faith in many things that are objectively vile. Trump has not made them more vile – he’s simply stripped off the pretense of civility that made them seem less vile.
For example; think about the Republican and “conservative” position about women. "Women" as in "what role do women play in American life?"
You know what the GOP/conservative version of that role is. Kinder, kirche, kuche. From marital subservience to forced reproduction to forbidden lesbianism to workplace harassment and underpayment to day-care to...well, to pretty much everything the GOP default position is; grab ’em by the pussy. Make ’em do what Daddy knows is best. Patriarchy, beeyotches!!!!
What is Trump doing...other than saying that out loud?
What other than DLC-style New Deal Democratic policies, that is..?
Without Trumpism all the GOP really has left is stooging for open plutocracy, and I can’t imagine even at this point that the Trumpenproletariat will be willing to openly go all D.B. Norton Motor Corps on 9 NOV.
I wonder, though...anybody willing to wager all the money in their pocket against all the money in mine that sometime over the next four years we see a mashup of the “alt-right” Stormfronters and the teabilly Trumpeters going full-on Blackshirt? The GOP becoming a genuine neofascist/white nationalist Fronte National?
4 comments:
That's a pretty safe bet Chief - you are on.
Okay. If we don't have an American National Front by 2020 I owe you...let's see...looks like $1.35.
Let's check back on this in four years.
Whether they get really organized or not, with uniforms and (different) flags to wave, the goal will be to make the country ungovernable for the next four or eight or however many years until a Man on Horseback comes in to save them from themselves.
By then it may be an actual man on horseback, riding in at the head of a column to seize the Capitol and organize for an expedition against the Hill People to seize their stocks of coal and oil shale.
But there will be one...
Karl Marx said that history repeated itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.
I think in this case we are getting the farce first; the next Trump will be a lot smoother and more deadly.
Oh...no question that the GOP obstruction during a Clinton 45 Administration will be EPIC...
I guess your conclusion is my real concern. Trump has shown the (to me, anyway) shockingly large number of "Americans" who are perfectly happy to vote for Putin if he's wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross whether or not he's grabbing a pussy.
As noted above; the GOP now stands for nothing that is not objectively loathsome. Assuming a self-aware populace - one that genuinely understands their own best interests - that cannot ever become the government unless it is cloaked in some miasma of lies and bullshit. The problem with Trump is that, frankly, he's an awful liar. His skin is so thin and his brain so moribund that he's too easily provoked and too easily led into boneheaded contradictions and denials of things he's been recorded saying.
But...you're right in that this could work as the GOP's "Beer Hall Putsch"; a sort of trial-run failure that teaches the would-be autocrat how to gull the rubes better the next time.
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