My
original plan for the first post of 2021 was to review my New Year’s predictions from last January, discuss how the trends I was anticipating back
then had played out (or failed to play out) in the real world, and make a new
set of predictions for the coming year.
I was
aware that some Republican Senators and Congressmen had caused a kerfuffle by
threatening to raise objections during the 6 Jan counting of the electoral
votes. I didn’t expect much to come of it, though I at least found the prospect
interesting enough to turn on the C-Span feed from the Capitol yesterday
morning to watch the show, and then feel rather annoyed when my own
Congressman, Paul Gosar, made the first formal objection. (I have been saying
since November that refusing to admit Biden’s win at this point is idiotic).
Then I
found out that, after each objection was registered, the two Houses of Congress would have to go into separate chambers,
debate it, vote on it, and then repeat the process four or five
or six times for however many other states were disputed. The whole thing
seemed immensely boring, so I turned off the feed.
An hour
or two later I checked the news and, lo and behold, a mob of Trumpist rioters,
encouraged by the President’s calls to “never concede,” had smashed their way
into the Capitol, looted the place, immortalized their hooliganism with photo
ops like the one at the top of my post, gotten themselves tear gassed, and
finally dispersed after several hours of fighting during which four people were
killed.
Holy
hell.
My 2021
predictions will have to wait another few days. This event is worth discussing,
both for what it says about the idiocy and impotence of conservatism in America
these days, and for what it says about the American people’s loss of faith in their
country’s governing institutions.
Because,
contra the insistence of the mainstream media and the Neocons, the utter
failure of the Electoral Count Riot to overturn the electoral count is not a
heartwarming example of a well-functioning democratic government resisting an
assault by a bunch of fanatics who want to bring it down. Rather, it is the
sort of thing that only happens when a lot of people have already lost faith in
American democracy.
If you
have followed my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m not in the
“keep-it-strictly-legal” camp when it comes to resisting the Left. I’ve said
before that the Right’s failure to resist the Left more forcefully in the past
has led to America becoming much less democratic than it was a century ago. I
have said that some of the Supreme Court’s abuses of power in the 1960s and
1970s deserved to be met with general strikes and barricades in the streets.
And I have pointed to the numerous American parents entangled in transgender
child custody cases, and their failure to flee the country and seek asylum in Russia,
the Philippines, or some other likeminded place, as a sign of inexcusable
cowardice on the part of the American Right.
Still,
what happened yesterday was idiotic, self-defeating, and immoral.
There is
no need to explain in great detail why our messy political situation will not
be improved by the spectacle of one party’s fanatics breaking into the Capitol
in a hairbrained attempt to prevent their own Senators and Vice President from
certifying a member of the other party as the winner of an election which he
actually won.
Even so,
it’s a mistake to characterize the riot as an attack on a properly functioning
set of democratic institutions.
Which is
not to say that the country would be better off if the riot had succeeded. In
the event that Trump had actually proven himself competent enough to stage a
real coup and become dictator-for-life, then it would be naïve for me not to
admit that our constitution was dead and buried. But just as there is more than
one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to subvert a republic.
In our current
system, as I have lamented many times, the role of the voters in the political process is mostly perfunctory. What really happens is that, while the electorate gets a
chance to swap out the President and the Congressional majorities every two or four
years, America’s true rulers in the courts, civil service, universities, and
woke corporate boardrooms just keep on advancing the same neoliberal agenda –
an agenda which presently includes open borders, economic globalization, racial
hatemongering, harassment of domestic industry and small businesses, and government-promoted
sexual deviancy of every sort.
A large
number of Americans are very bothered by these things. And they have come to
realize that most Republican politicians simply don’t care. These issues get
talked about during elections, but once in office, each new crop of Republicans
does little or nothing to stop the courts, the civil service, and various corporations from carrying on policies which their base hates. Which is why
such a big portion of the Republican base has come to loathe the Republican
party.
Or in
other words, America’s so-called “democratic institutions,” by deciding not
to be democratic anymore, have lost the trust of America’s voters. And when
people feel cheated, ignored, or betrayed, they tend to become angry and
irrational.
Thus,
while these abuses of power don’t excuse what the MAGA mob did (Biden, after
all, really did win the November election) they do go a long ways toward
explaining why the mob did it.
And the
mob did it because, all too often, when a respected public institution loses
the people’s trust, they don’t fill the void by trusting something better.
They fill the void by trusting something worse.
For
example, CNN (along with the rest of the mainstream media) has done a lot to
lose the trust of middle Americans. But these former CNN viewers have not, for
the most part, gone over to something better than CNN. Rather, all too
many of them have turned to Newsmax, InfoWars, the Unz
Review, or something else along those lines.
We saw
something similar, but quite a bit more momentous, back in the 1960s, when the youth
counterculture was feeding off of the (real) hypocrisy of many of America’s
traditional authority figures regarding segregation and the Vietnam War. But
the “never trust anyone over thirty” attitude didn’t make the rising
generation better than their (flawed) parents, it made them worse.
Right
now, the story is playing out all over again with the Trumpist Right. Having
lost faith in America’s governing institutions (which only care about democracy
as a façade for their institutional power) they have placed their faith in
Donald Trump (who only cares about democracy when he wins).
There are
plenty of reasons why Donald Trump is a flawed vessel for these people’s faith.
To begin
with, Trump’s record on following through on his campaign rhetoric isn’t that
much better than the typical Republican’s. Trump ran on a platform of ending foreign
wars, but once in office, he kept on bombing Syria, vetoed an Act of Congress
that would have gotten the US out of Yemen, and nearly started a war with Iran
by assassinating Qasem Soleimani. Trump did not fulfil his promises to repeal
Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, or build a border wall. He appointed the
Kennedy-clerk and likely centrist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. And so
forth.
But none
of this matters to the MAGA fanatics, because the old institutions and the old
GOP have lost their trust so badly that Trump doesn’t need to offer something better,
he just needs to offer something different.
Which he
is doing, by leading the bulk of his party into a fantasy-land where he is the
true winner of last November’s election.
Even before
yesterday’s riot, Trump’s blitheringly stupid behaviour had already cost the
Republicans their Senate majority. Georgia’s two Senate races on 5 Jan should
have been easy wins for the GOP, since the losing party in a presidential election
tends to win almost all special elections during the next two years. (i.e. the
losing party’s voters, who feel spurned and disempowered, have a much higher
turnout rate than the contented voters of the new President’s party.)
Of
course, Trump’s refusal to admit that he lost scuppered that process, since it
gave Democratic voters good reason to feel that Trump was still a live threat
to their rights and liberties, leading them to turn out in record numbers and
flip the Senate.
As I’ve
explained here, Trump is not unique among recent Republican Presidents in
leading his party into a fantasy land. Reagan, for example, led the Republicans
into the fantasy land where Sandra Day O’Connor was a pro-life judge. George W.
Bush led them into the fantasy land where the No Child Left Behind Act was an
effective way to advance conservative principles. The list goes on and on.
The
difference between those events and what Trump is doing now is that earlier flights
of fancy simply ended in runs-to-the-left, i.e. Democratic policies being
advanced on the backs of Republican electoral victories. Trump’s flight of
fancy ended in full Democratic control of the government, plus a batshit crazy
riot which has given a great many political moderates good reason to hate and
fear the Republican Party.
The Electoral Count Riot didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it deserves a better explanation than “Trump is a Mussolini wanabe,” or “Republicans are awful.” The riot happened, in large part, because America’s governing institutions have lost the trust of the Deplorables. But the person and ideology which a great many of those Deplorables have chosen to trust in their place do not offer us a realistic path back to normalcy.
So if you
are upset about the things that the lunatic Left and the plutocratic Center are
doing to this country, then I have bad news for you: we cannot expect the Trumpist
Right to offer effective resistance.
The only
solution I can offer now – if it’s even worthy of the name – is to prepare
yourself and your family to live in a country that looks like Russia in the 1990s or
present-day Mexico, because that is where we are headed.
It's pretty depressing to be a patriot right now. The old wish, "God save me from my friends, my enemies I can deal with myself," applies ten-fold right now. The widespread gullibility, ignorance, and outright stupidity on the Right is very dismaying. That's probably always been the case, and your assertion that a large part of the electorate -- and not just the ignoramuses -- no longer have faith in the system -- is of course right on the money.
ReplyDeleteThere is a question -- really, a technical one -- that should be answered: given the large degree of discontent among the Republican ranks -- how was it that only such a deeply flawed individual as Donald Trump was able to give voice to it? There are about 70 million people who voted for Mr Trump -- even if half of them voted for him as the lesser evil, i.e. were 'traditional Republicans' -- that leaves a pool of millions of people from which someone who embodied the 'Make America Great Again' values could have been drawn.
The question is worth asking, because, after 20 January, American patriots will have to ask 'What now?'. I've seen many people saying they will leave the Republican Party. Maybe this will create a viable alternative, but they should study the record of the Constitution Party first. And ... Trump may well decide to retain the leadership of the Republican Party, which in the long run will do even more damage to the conservative movement, but in the short run, means his supporters should want to join it or re-join it.
I do not share the defeat-is-inevitable pessimism of the author though. The Left now has a coaltion roughly of the top third of society, plus the bottom sixth. The Right has the middle half. IF we can find a decent leadership, we have a very good chance to push back against the Left -- although the only ultimate resolution is a re-founding of the Republic on a smaller geographic area than the defunct one now occupies.
In the meantime -- join the National Guard if you're under 35 and have not yet done your military service. Get together with likeminded neighbors and form a 'neighborhood emergency response team', or join a local militia group like the Civilian Defense Force, the Oathkeepers, or the Three Percenters. And follow the wise Mormons, and lay in supplies that will allow your family to last out a year's social disorder that disrupts the supply chains we now take for granted.
Another point: 6 January was NOT what a real 'insurrection' looks like. As Karl Marx warned his followers, "You must not play with insurrection."
ReplyDeleteIn a real insurrection ... well, I won't detail what it would involve. Anyone who thinks about it can figure it out for themselves. But the actual on-the-day actions of an insurrection will only succeed if there have been certain political developments beforehand, developments open to human influence.
Anyone interested in this subject should look up the Wiki entry on a fellow named Louis Blanqui -- here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Auguste_Blanqui
He showed how NOT to do it.