The Fire Next Time, or, Jane Brown's Body

 For some time I've been wondering what the first shot of the coming "next Fort Sumpter" will be. The event that turns our Cold Second Civil War hot.

 Oh, wait. I didn't mention the whole "cold Civil War" thing? Damn. I am getting forgetful in my old age.

So you see, there is no "We the People" anymore.

C'mon. You know that. Just be willing to quit kidding yourself otherwise.

Instead there's a sort of vast inchoate mass of humans who call themselves "Americans" that takes in every damn one and every damn thing under the sky. All sorts of people, being and doing all sorts of things. Moderates, liberals, atheists, Quakers, whackos, undecideds, and the hopelessly lost.

And there's a hard, irreducible, intransigent knot of people who call themselves "Conservatives".

The latter - and they do have some internal divisions, too - don't see the former as "Americans" at all.

These "conservatives" have some ideology but are mostly defined by what and who they hate.

They hate "liberals", first and foremost.

But the different internal divisions hate different aspects of these "liberals".

The racists, who are primarily invested in being white and that being the default position of "American" hate the pushy darks and anyone who has the temerity to even slightly question that White Is Right.

The gunhumpers - many of whom are white, too - hate anyone who tries to pry them off their lust objects, all fifteen of them.

The religious nuts - many of whom are also white (but not all; this is where the largest fraction of not-white "conservatives" come into the GOP tent) - hate anyone who's not doing whatever their invisible sky daddy says they're "supposed" to do, or doing things that the transparent sky wizard says they're not "supposed" to do. So they hate mostly abortions and the women who have abortions, and anyone involved with abortions. But they also hate non-straight people who are doing any sort of non-straight things (like having other-that-hetero-sex) or ARE doing things that straight people are doing (like marrying and having kids and going to yard sales and shit) plus Muslims and Jews and...well, you get the idea.

There's also some people who don't "hate" so much as are either just regular old greedy bastards - these are mostly just your basic rich people doing what rich people have always done, which is simply whatever it takes to make themselves richer - or people who have drunk the Ayn Rand kool-ade and are stupid enough to actually believe that big corporations and big rich people will screw you (the average non-wealthy person) over slower than big government, so they're just fucking idiots.

Anyway...all the the things these people love - theocracy, plutocracy, weapons, racism - are largely anywhere from unpleasant to outright offensive to everyone else. So they can't really run ON those things. Turns out that if you tell non-"conservative" people what these various "conservative" people really want, about 98.7% of those non-"conservative" people haaaaate all that stuff. 

I mean, hate, like with the intensity of a million suns.

So the "conservatives" just usually lie, and instead talk about how if you don't vote for them the commie liberals will flouridate your water and make you gay marry a Muslim transsexual.

Seriously. That's it. Flogging tax cuts for the rich, and feeding red meat culture war shit to the base.

Other than that the GOP's got nothin' for the vast majority of the American people.

So for about the past 40 years the "conservatives" have been at war with the liberals and everyone else who isn't "conservative". It's been a cold war, mostly; until lately no actual shots have fired.

But then on Friday Ruth Bader Ginsberg died and so now here's what's gonna happen.

Trump will send the name of some reliable bag of Federalist Society wingnut hate (apparently smart money is on some Opus Dei lunatic named Amy Coney Barrett who is chock full of the sort of old-fashioned Inquisitorial spite and malice that appalls most cradle Catholics) before Ginsberg is cold.

Moscow Mitch McConnell will ram this internet-comment-section-level-troll through confirmation and she'll be sworn in before Election Day to help her pals like Thomas and Kavanaugh strongarm "conservative" talking points onto everyone in this country.

And then it'll be Game On. 

They'll come for the 20th Century.

You think I'm joking?

Abortion will be first, of course. Roe will be toast. There will still be abortions - because as long as there is sex there will be abortions, don't kid yourself, - but only safe for the rich. For the poor and the lower class they'll often as not kill the women along with their spawn, which is the point.

Obergfell will be next, and, frankly, we'll be damn lucky if they don't overrule Griswold, Loving v. Virgina and Brown v. Board.

Lochner. Fuck. Lochner.

If you don't already, you need to Google Lockner v New York, because that's what the rich "conservatives" really want; a return to the Gilded Age, when plutocrats like John D. Rockefeller could say "The public be damned" and really do it. The six-vote "conservative" Supreme Court is gonna drive us back there most quick smart.

Along with any sort of workplace protection, you can kiss environmental and financial regulations bye-bye. Welcome back to the industrial world that used to set rivers on fire, and the highway to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum by way of 1895.

The only happy news is that as we roam this dystopian thermal hellscape at least we'll all be heavily armed, because any and all sort of firearms regulation is going to be dead'er than a dodo.

So after Donnie and Mitch seat their wingnut it won't matter how many liberals or "centerists" get elected. Every piece of legislation they pass will be litigated to the Supremes, who will take their "conservative" axe to it.

And the only real answer to prevent this "conservative" Day of Jubilee?

Go full FDR. Elect a Democratic President and Democratic Senate and Democratic House, and...

Pack the Court.

And when that happens, the wingnuts will howl like rabid wolves, and the real red-meat nutbars, the Proud Boys and Nazis and wanna-be Freikorps will turn out with their rifles.

And there we'll be; waiting to see who fires the first cannon at the big brick fort in the harbor.

That's how I see it. I don't like that, but I also don't see any way around it. The Right is going to force the Everyone-Not-Right to bend the knee or they'll shoot.

And your and my and everyone else's choice is simply whether we're willing to bend the knee or shoot back.

I don't have to like that.

But I don't see any alternatives other than even worse ones; a corporatist "conservative" future where we all the "rest of us" end up as serfs in climate change Hell.

And, goddamn it, I'll go down fighting before I surrender to that.