Onward Fascist Soldiers
I say this as an independent who has voted for Republicans before: Most of the 2022 GOP candidates running for senator, congressperson, governor, and the like are some or all of the following: election denier, huckster, crank, imbecile, clown, weirdo, seditionist, fascist, white nationalist, conspiracy theorist, QAnon loon, inveterate liar and/or crypto Nazi.
No matter how much ink has dried analyzing the moral and philosophical collapse of the party of Abraham Lincoln, warning bells can’t peal loud enough across our land. Too many voters are apathetic or foolishly complacent this year about the state of our looming fascist disunion.
Ohio Democratic Senate candidate, Tim Ryan, avows that he’s running on behalf of what he rightly calls “the exhausted majority.” Congressman Ryan should go further and remind voters about the luxury of exhaustion. Protecting democracy is an ongoing project, and it’s ceaselessly hard work. Authoritarians count on such exhaustion. They feast on the lethargy of a low information electorate. But true to any extremist movement’s spirit, hell hath no fury like their ideas scorned. Lest you have any doubt, see the almost successful coup at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and its participants’ violent attempts to invalidate the 81 million votes for Joe Biden.
Today’s Trumpublican Party did not emerge accidentally or just by mere happenstance. For the past forty plus years, the party whose founding, creedal mission was the thwarting of slavery into a young and burgeoning nation, made an unholy alliance with sectarian zealots who preach fascist politics in the name of God. Also in the bargain, militia types and white nationalists now endemic to MAGA, but who were largely relegated to the crazy margins, even though the party’s many racial dog whistles would bind them to the party with mouth frothing devotion.
Ronald Reagan courted what was then Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority as “faithful” constituents, even as he whispered his political calculus to his advisers admitting he would just “jolly them along.” But he and his political bedfellows’ pious overtures would (wittingly or not) constitute a proverbial promissory note. The ostensibly secular arena of democratic politics was now rife with theocratic potential, given the Christian Right’s insistence that the Bible supersede the Constitution as a governing blueprint. Paradoxically, it took the handiwork of an amoral, irreligious con man, and his brazen commandeering of the Republican Party, for the loan to come due.
Indeed, this debt shall now be repaid. Which means these warriors for a would be Gilead are girded for a new crusade and they aren’t staying quiet about it. In fact, the Federalist, the magazine for the avidly right wing SCOTUS incubator known as The Federalist Society, have issued a hair-raising, ‘radical’ (their word) manifesto which brooks no dissent. Conservatives must adhere chapter and verse to this fire-breathing diktat or they are simply aiding and abetting the left’s wholesale destruction of Western Civilization.
What’s in a name, you might ask? Well, the article by John Daniel Davidson admits that these Trumpified incinerators of the 246 year old American experiment in democracy should not be in the business of conserving. The article is entitled “We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.” As Davidson so adamantly suggests:
“So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.”
Long time observers of Trumpworld know that Trump’s resident svengali and Rasputin, the subpoena defying Steve Bannon, once boasted “I am a Leninist.” When asked to elaborate on exactly what that meant, Bannon averred “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
In this new call to arms, Davidson is no doubt borrowing from Bannon’s playbook of disruption and destruction. But Davidson is also taking a page from Lenin himself when it comes to inventing enemies. In view of his argument that the left is attempting to transform Western society into a “woke dystopia,” this counterrevolution is a merciless counter-response, no longer in service to the Constitution, but rather to a vengeful Christian populism. Lenin railed against “enemies of the people.’ He castigated rich farmers, bankers who were “war profiteering,” and of course, Lenin spoke derisively of “the elite.” Assuredly, Davidson has his enemies list, too:
“Conservatives had better be ready for it, and Republican politicians, if they want to stay in office, had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder.
On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.”
Abortion with no exceptions? Parents who choose to bring their children to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse? Doctors who perform gender-affirming surgeries should be imprisoned? As for the ‘transgender question,’ it’s certainly not accidental that Davidson employs such menacing historical language. The Nazi war machine proposed the systematic mass genocide of Europe’s Jews which they envisioned as “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” After all, Hitler contended, the Jews were an inferior race whose existence consigned them not only to second class status, but necessitated their extermination. Wink, wink.
To describe this historical moment as existential is neither hyperbole nor melodrama. An understanding of history isn’t only essential because its shedded skin is regularly regenerated like that of a snake. It’s because the echoes of a not so distant past so loudly reverberate in our own time. As William Faulkner famously wrote “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”
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