There are none so blind as they who will not see. — Proverb

A house divided against itself cannot stand. — Proverb

I have an image of historians of the future, assuming there is some kind of a future where educated people still gather and talk, pointing in horror to a timeline on a chalk board and saying, “Look. These people came unraveled in a mere five years.” Now in all reality, we know full well that the forces which led to the 2016 election of Donald Trump were present in our society well before he came on the scene. That’s why he was successful. Like the Howard Beal character in Network, “he was a jeremiad articulating the rage of the common man.”

Just like the Beal character, Trump was an original on the political scene. He was telling people things that they had never heard a candidate say before. He was an instant carnival hit. The candidate from television, the all powerful executive who took charge and roared “You’re fired” was going to fix everything. Life was imitating art and wasn’t it grand? Too bad he didn’t tell people the truth, “I’m not a success, I just play one on TV.”

That was how it started, but like so many things in life, where a little is harmless a lot can kill. Trumpism as a cult flourished and now, over a year after the man was soundly defeated and two days from the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol, the tribal drums are beating and right-wing media is bleating. Passions are high, so high that journalists from Canada and the UK are looking at this and posing the idea that America is on the brink of a second Civil War, yet not able to see it.

They’ll get no argument from me. What I see is that the Republican party is splintered. The far-right faction  of the GOP is a group of traitors and performance artists, pure and simple. The establishment Republicans are too scared to take a stance and get the rest of the party in line. The few Republicans that do speak up are threatened with losing their seats and are vilified. You recall Mitt Romney being booed in Utah.

This fractured state of affairs isn’t going to just go away or magically go back to normal. The question is, how bad is it going to get? The Guardian:

The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible.

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls.

The consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. The Capitol police have seen threats against members of Congress increase by 107%. Fred Upton, Republican representative from Michigan, recently shared a message he had received: “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your family dies.” And it’s not just politicians but anyone involved in the running of the electoral system. Death threats have become a standard aspect of the work life of election supervisors and school board members. A third of poll workers, in the aftermath of 2020, said they felt unsafe.

America is a democracy less and less as the years go by. Democracy depends upon the rule of the majority. The antiquated electoral college perpetuates the tyranny of the minority. Yet any discussion of abolishing it is framed as a coup d’etat by leftist elites.

Two things are happening at the same time. Most of the American right have abandoned faith in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of the name every year.

An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.

The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.” The watchlists are among the most effective techniques of counter-terrorism, but the FBI cannot use them. The white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.

This is sobering to say the very least. It is no secret that white supremacists are in both police departments and in the military. This is not news. In 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times.

We found out recently that the Oath Keepers were stashing guns in Virginia waiting for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. While the far right-wing arms itself to the hilt, what are the Democrats doing about it?

At this supreme moment of crisis, the left has divided into warring factions completely incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment. There are liberals who retain an unjustifiable faith that their institutions can save them when it is utterly clear that they cannot. Then there are the woke, educational and political elites dedicated to a discourse of willed impotence. Any institution founded by the woke simply eats itself – see TimesUp, the Women’s March, etc – becoming irrelevant to any but a diminishing cadre of insiders who spend most of their time figuring out how to shred whoever’s left. They render themselves powerless faster than their enemies can.

What the American left needs now is allegiance, not allyship. It must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.

The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.

There will be those who say that warnings of a new civil war is alarmist. All I can say is that reality has outpaced even the most alarmist predictions. Imagine going back just 10 years and explaining that a Republican president would openly support the dictatorship of North Korea. No conspiracy theorist would have dared to dream it. Anyone who foresaw, foresaw dimly. The trends were apparent; their ends were not.

Zoomers, you have one assignment for today. Click the link and read this piece in its entirety. This is a brilliant piece of journalism, well researched and spot on in its analysis. You won’t learn anything you didn’t already know here, most likely. But maybe you will finally understand the need for the left to mobilize and fight as the right is, if you had any doubts. The people who come here to read are not the ones who need to be persuaded. But the Democratic party as a whole is far too complacent. We believe, wrongly, that things will work out.

When the 2020 election was over I got an email from a reader here, a well intentioned gentleman, and he said, “I guess you’ll be going out of business now?” meaning that since Trump had lost, everything was going to go back to normal, like a rubber band resuming its original shape. I said, “Are you kidding? There is no way we will ever be the same nation we were pre-Trump. A pickle doesn’t go back to being a cucumber. The same forces that elected him in 2016 are still out there and they are doubly pissed now. We have not yet begun to fight.”

Again, I will quote Lincoln*, “America will never be destroyed by outside forces. If we falter and lose our freedoms it will be because we have destroyed ourselves from within.”

We are in the process of destroying ourselves as a nation. There is one functioning political party in this country, the Democratic party. The Republican party is a shattered mess. It is up to us to save democracy.

* Check this link to PolitiFact. The “quote” is actually a paraphrase of thoughts Lincoln expressed.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. Coming from a media outlet situated in a country with a better chance of self-destructing than us, I find the above hilarious. Never forget that for most of our existence, the UK has been wanting the US to fail and miserably at that. For the upper crust types, it feeds their insatiable ego to find someone else abroad stumble worse than they currently are.

    Do we have problems? Goddamn right we do, as any stats on the Omicron wave remind me. Do we have large swaths of people who have given up democracy here in our borders? Newsflash: that didn’t start with Trump, as my upbringing could tell you. But our central government is currently run by sane people as opposed to nepotistic kleptocrats like Boris Johnson, our undemocratic opposition is in total disarray vis-a-vis us (a state of affairs sadly mirrored by UK’s democratic opposition to Johnson’s government at present) and we can actually make Russia blink these days. So, in summary, I’m willing to bet the UK will devolve back into its four base nations of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland before WE do anything like that.

    • There’s some truth to that but the author is a Canadian and he’s written a book about it. He also publishes in Atlantic and Esquire. I think what he’s saying is sound.

  2. “What I see is that the Republican party is splintered. The far-right faction of the GOP is a group of traitors and performance artists, pure and simple. The establishment Republicans are too scared to take a stance and get the rest of the party in line. The few Republicans that do speak up are threatened with losing their seats and are vilified. You recall Mitt Romney being booed in Utah.”

    We saw the EXACT SAME THING happen in 2010 when the “establishment Republicans” didn’t dump all the far-right Teabaggers but, instead, embraced them and their beliefs for the sole purpose of trying to keep power. The “establishment” was so afraid of the Party’s possibly becoming a permanent “party of opposition” that it kept the nuts who were “threatening” to bolt the Party if the GOP didn’t become even more “conservative” (despite the Party’s managing to keep Obama’s “radical” agenda from coming anywhere close to being fulfilled and enacted). Many of the “establishment” were so frightened at the prospect of facing actual primary challenges that they started trying to “out-conservative” their opponents.
    And now, we’re largely seeing George Santayana’s famous aphorism come to life. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seems to sum up the whole GOP mindset.

  3. The quoted material lost me at the whole “Senate malapportionment” bit. Once again, you’ve got a bunch of IDIOTS who don’t understand how our government works. At one point, it complains about how so few states will control a sizable majority of the population but overlooks the fact that the “Senate malapportionment” only comes into play with regard to the Electoral College and that “malapportionment” only comes into play with regards to states with very small populations.
    Yes, Wyoming with its half-million people gets the same Senate representation as California with its 40 million. But, both states also give their electoral votes to whichever party’s candidate wins a bare majority of the state’s whole vote. California gave Donald Trump 31 times as many actual popular votes as Wyoming did (6,006,429 compared to just 193,559;) and, believe it or not, but, of the total 74,216,154 popular votes cast for Donald Trump, a total of 37,660,185 (50.74%) of them came from just 10 states, only 4 of which awarded Trump their electoral votes. Those 10 states, however, combined for only 256 electoral votes with Trump winning only 100 electoral votes (excluding the “Senate component”, they’d only comprise 236 votes with Trump winning just 92–hardly representative of his “popular vote” total, correct?).
    To have a FAIR AND ACCURATE Electoral College, we need to change the House of Representatives which was set at 435 *permanent* representatives nearly 100 years ago. Preferably, we need to expand the size of the House. The House originally increased in size with the increase of the country’s population. The Constitution initially set the size of the House at 69 members with the apportionment spelled out exactly in the document BUT with the understanding that the number would be changed following the results of the Census–and it did just that. After the very first Census in 1790, the size of the House increased to 105 members effective in 1793, and it generally increased following every census until 1910 (there was a change in methodology that applied after the 1840 Census which resulted in an overall loss of 17 seats from the 1840 election to the 1842 election).
    If the House had continued increasing as it had done, it’s estimated there’d be more than 1100 members in the House and while that does seem very unseemly–not to mention pretty difficult given the Capitol doesn’t have the TARDIS-like ability of being larger on the inside than it is on the outside* so there would seem a need to limit the number of people working there–given modern technology, the idea of having all our House members being in just one single building to do all the work is a bit quaint. If a large multinational corporation can have board members in locations all over the world at any given moment when a “board meeting” has to be held and still manage to achieve their goals, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched that the US with an 1100 member House could have 3 or 4 or 5 “hub Capitol” buildings spread over the country with each hub hosting members from certain states:
    DC could host members from New England down to Virginia and maybe Ohio; a hub in St Louis could host members from the Midwest; a hub in Memphis could host members from the Gulf Coast region; a hub in Salt Lake City could host members from the Rocky Mountain states; a hub in San Francisco could host members from the Pacific Coast states; it would seem the number of states in each “hub” would be “unbalanced” but it would sort of keep the overall number of members balanced since California would have nearly 70% of all the representatives in the region (with 1100 total members, CA would have roughly 129 members and the six states in the region–I’m including Nevada with the usual 5 “Pacific states”–would have roughly 190 members; obviously, I haven’t done a full calculation but for a hypothetical starting point, let’s just take it).
    Increasing the size of the House would do much more to offset the Electoral College’s “unfairness” than abolishing the institution (which, after all, would have to be done via constitutional amendment whereas the size of the House needs only be changed by regular legislative action). Also, ending the “winner takes all” idea for awarding the College’s total votes and only giving the “Senate” component to the winner of the State’s total vote to the candidate winning the most statewide votes would do much more (this is also a matter which currently doesn’t require a Constitutional amendment as how to award electoral votes is a STATE matter).

    • I agree the House should be expanded. I’ve seen proposals that would bring it up to anywhere from around six hundred to seven hundred members that are fine with me. You idea is an interesting one I hadn’t seen before and I will give it quite a bit of thought. I agree with you that even a lesser expansion of a hundred or so members would take care of the EC problem, and your proposal would mean it would be damn near impossible for a conservative, at least one from the Reagan era on to become President.

      Where you are I believe wrong is that the problem of malapportionment stops with the EC. Legislation must be passed by both chambers of Congress before moving on to the President’s desk, and those handful of people could and have proven they damn well will put the screws to the rest of the country. Not to mention the Constitution gives the Senate the power to approve Presidential appointments and approve treaties. And judges and Justices! Again, that small minority can impose an outsize influence via the Senate and conservatives have proven the ability to enact long-term (decades) projects to achieve their goals. SCOTUS and the judiciary are but one example. There have been rumblings for a while now of a new Constitutional Convention by hard-core conservatives, and I wouldn’t dismiss it as crazy talk. With so many normal (as in non-conservatives) in so few states opening up that can of worms, especially with their penchant for violence would be the end of the American Experiment. And even in a country with a House of Representatives such as you envision they can easily muck things up to the point where there is so much discontent that the masses (or enough of them) will become desperate for something, ANYTHING to break the logjam. Just how do you think Trump was able to storm through the GOP primary and sneak through the EC to the WH? And the scary thing is, he was as bad or even worse than the majority had feared and twelve million MORE people voted for him in 2020! Yes, we outworked and outvoted them but they are busy changing the rules so that won’t matter next time. And thanks to that good ole Senate and its “traditions” (the filibuster in its current form is only fifty years old!) we can’t even count on our own fucking Senators when it matters most.

      So from where I sit the Senate is, and since it would require a Constitutional Amendment which would never be ratified by enough states to change it remain a huge problem, and allow not just a minority but a fairly small minority to impose far too much of its will on the rest of us.

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