These people, and millions more like them, were not joking and were not playing. They intended to seize power by force. If you got in their way they were perfectly willing to kill you.
They are still there. They still want the same things.
And their "leaders" - the suit-and-tie-or-power-pumps sockpuppets like Greene and Cawthorne and Cotton and, or course, Trump himself - are happy to use the levers of power to please them while ruling the rest of us with as much of an iron hand as they can.
I have absolutely no idea 1) how you deal with these people - they don't want to play nice or compromise or "govern" with us; they want us silent and, if not silent, dead - or 2) how, in fact, you "govern" a democratic republic with them there.
I wish I had more optimism about this. I wish I thought that the wingnut right was just posturing.
I don't think that. I think that in less than a year they will pull all the levers they tried in 2020, and I think they'll succeed, and I think that, just as it worked in Germany in 1933, it will work again.
And once these new "conservatives" take power they will not let it go.
So those of us who are not of their faction and who are their enemies will be presented with a horrible choice; fight them as they deploy all the power of the State, or let them have their will with us.
And that, frankly, is simply a choice between dying on our feet, or on our knees.
3 comments:
Well said.
We still have not put in place a method to tag groups or individuals as domestic terrorists.
And the bigger problem is that:
1) the 30% or so of the US public that are wingnuts live in this reality and buy into it completely,
2) only about 30% of the public refuses to give the wingnuts a pass, but
3) the remaining 30% are, basically, political morons who are presented with the following everytime they stray into the path of the US media:
(a) The Republican party is trying to end anything resembling democracy in America on the basis of the claim that the Democratic party is trying to end anything resembling democracy in America.
(b) The latter claim is obviously and egregiously false, and is recognized as such by the mainstream media.
(c) The former fact is just as obviously true, but must be treated as false by the mainstream media.
(d) It must be treated as false, because treating it as false allows a very literal maintenance of the Both Sides frame — “Both Sides are making absurdly hyperbolic accusations about how the other party is trying to end democracy in America!” — and the mainstream media cannot function on a day to day basis without that frame. It would be like asking sports journalists to cover sports without ever discussing the competitive outcome of those contests.
(e) So what we have here is the ultimate expression of the rule that every accusation made by the Republican party is in fact a confession. But it’s not a confession that can ever be accepted, because accepting it would disrupt the fundamental legitimacy of the two-party frame in America today.
So the decisive fraction of the public - these nitwits blobbing between Left and Right, largely because they HAVE no actual political convictions and vote or not based on idiotic things like appearances and soundbites and nonsense they hear on Facebook - is presented with not a binary choice between democracy and dictatorship but "two competing narratives".
So what was obviously and visible an attempt to seize power by both legal if underhanded means AND force is treated as if the acts themselves were legitimately debatable. It would be like writing a history text that described the Boston Tea Party as something that historians are unable to determine was an act of political rebellion by a faction of colonial inhabitants of North America or a "false-flag" operation by royalist cadres attempting to smear the loyal colonists of Massachusetts.
When you look at it that way you can see how idiotic and nonsensical that framing is. And yet, that's where we are in this country today.
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