Some fourteen years ago, back when we were starting the great pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq and people were talking about the next smoking gun being a mushroom cloud, a phrase that ricocheted around the echo chambers of the American right was “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” In other words, we should be prepared to shitcan large chunks of the Bill of Rights – not least the first, fourth, fifth and eight amendments almost in total – because the threat to our national survival was too great for things like enumerated rights and freedoms.
Today, December 19, those same people will argue that the Electoral College formula created in 1787 to gain the assent of slaveholders to the new Constitution is so sacred in 2016 that we must elect the embodiment of weaponized ignorance because the formula says so. This bit must be slavishly followed, because…well, let’s not mince words: because as in 2000, it means partisan advantage in the face of contrary popular will. And if there’s one thing the GOP worships in 2016, it’s partisan advantage.
This is the Southernization of American politics, because the GOP long ago adopted that most critical of Southern framing: us versus them. US is right, forever and always, and THEM is always irredeemably evil. There is no coherence or cohesion to what US believes; the notion of government as jackbooted thugs coexists side by side with Blue Lives Matter police worship. The exact same policies become anathema as soon as the other side adopts them (such as the Heritage health plan from 1994, aka Romneycare, aka Obamacare).
That, and you’re entitled to your own facts. Belief, if you like, because beliefs are stronger than opinions. Conspiracy nonsense is believable, which makes it true, whether it’s the CIA cocaine operation at Mena or the murder of Vince Foster or the fake birth certificate for a Kenyan baby or the pedophile ring run out of a DC pizza joint. No amount of proof is sufficient to demonstrate it’s not true, especially if you believe hard enough.
And that’s the risk. The enemy, as was said so many years ago, isn’t conservatism or liberalism. The enemy is bullshit. Bullshit too plentiful and overwhelming to refute. Bullshit that wins out on volume because it’s too much to beat down every single individual packet of bullshit. The bullshit will always get through, and people who don’t know better – or won’t know better – will fall before it.
Actually, there is coherence and cohesion to the modern GOP belief system: it’s called bullying, and it’s how “Blue Lives Matter” can coexist with the open carry of firearms and how the admiration for a Russian totalitarian can launder the exposure of classified information. The Trumpets who are now trying to read California out of the Union as somehow not really America have it all wrong. Silicon Valley is full of natural Trumpists: people who aren’t aware there are other people who aren’t like them, who are the embodiment of I GOT MINE FUCK YOU, who don’t care that we live in a society. That should have been warning enough for anyone that this was possible. As Uber, so Trump: do what you like and the facts and the law be damned, because your sycophants and worshippers will laud you for it.
And there are plenty of those. The GOP has spent the last 25 years powered by weaponized ignorance fueled with bullshit. It started in the Clinton years with exaggerations, misrepresentations, things that could be explained but if you’re explaining you’re losing. Then it got progressively worse, with lies about things that could be disproved but were complicated to demonstrate. And the bar just kept getting lower and lower until 2016, when the GOP lied constantly about things that could be instantly and trivially disproven – knowing that their base would reject the proof. And because our system can’t cope with shamelessness, we got burned. Badly. The problem is, if you can’t have truth, you can’t have a society. We have to be able to interact truthfully. If we can’t, we don’t have a society.
Donald Trump managed to seize the office of President with a minority of the vote, enabled by foreign powers and the willing collusion of an enabling political party. His win is compromised, his legitimacy is incomplete, and he is owed no more respect than he himself offered his predecessor. In the meantime, we need something we haven’t had before: an Opposition of National Unity, with Democrats and those Republicans willing to disavow their man joining forces to try to limit the damage in the name of what we at least used to think of as our shared values – at a minimum, experience and professionalism and not letting a foreign nuclear power drag us around by the dick. It’s a weak person in charge. You can smell the weakness in every tweet, every lashing out. And weakness in high office usually ends badly.
Because that’s what it’s based on – weakness rooted in fear. Since 2001, fear worship has become the sole organizing principle of the GOP, and their sole pitch is “We can make things go back like they used to be.” Which is a lie, but one that lets them deliver a never-ending series of things preventing that. Until we get rid of all the brown people, all the gay people, all the working women – until then, they’ll always have someone to blame. Someone else, of course, because the hallmark of the Southern GOP is the idea that our side should be immune from the consequences of our actions.
But if we survive this, there must be a reckoning this time. No more kumbaya, no more let-us-reason-together, no more we-want-to-look-forward. A completely unqualified person has been made President. Republicans let this happen and made this happen. This time, we have to correct those who made the mistake. No forgiveness. No forgetting. You fucked up. You pay. You bear the consequences of your actions. For two decades, the GOP has been the party of scaring the shit out of Ed Earl Brown so the one percent can live a life without consequence. If there is to be one mission for the Democrats, let it be this: actions have consequences. Those who did this must be held to account for it.
And in the meantime, I’ll be here, in the most populous state of the Union, the largest economy in the Union, the state that I so often described for better or worse as “where the future comes from”. The state which – but that’s another post.