So it looks like Hulu is making a series out of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s landmark novel of religious-patriarchial dystopia. It was written in the 1980s, if memory serves, and was an obvious reaction to a Reagan presidency and the rise of the Religious Right in a world where Roe v. Wade was only ten years old or so and restricted access to legal abortion was living memory. So you would think it’d be kind of dated now…except that in 2016, we have not only states attempting abortion restrictions by a thousand cuts but prominent businesses and Republicans fighting against birth control on the grounds that a corporation’s religious liberty is infringed if they’re forced to pay for their employees’ slutty slutty slut pills.
This is where I pull another block quote from a prior post on this very blog:
…The House returned to a Democratic majority, the Senate to an essentially Democratic majority, and then both majorities were expanded as a Democrat was elected President. The GOP, as constituted for the last two decades, has been taking it square in the face for two electoral cycles.
So how is it possible that the Republicans are steadily becoming ever more conservative, ever more redneck, ever more extreme? How is it possible that we can have Republican candidates for Senate openly talking about “second amendment solutions” to “domestic enemies” in Congress? Or saying “climate change doesn’t exist” as decades of data pile up and the average temps rise? Or saying that rape and incest exceptions for abortion aren’t permissible? Or turning over Social Security to some sort of privatization plan – less than three years after the stock market implosion wiped out billions of retirement dollars in 401(k) accounts? Or talking about all the bits of the Consitution they’d like done away with – things like entire amendments like the 16th and 17th? Or doing away with the entire principle that if you’re born here, you’re a citizen?
I’m not talking about message board wingnuts or isolated basement bloggers, I’m talking about duly-elected GOP nominees for high Congressional office. How – when a “liberal” President is pushing things that were the GOP alternative to Democratic plans twenty years ago – how is it possible that they can keep going further off the crazy end?
And since the economy is still stalled, and the wind is at their back – what’s going to happen if they win? What’s going to happen when you get a bunch of Birchers, birthers, tenthers, and other assorted teabag lunatics actually placed in office, convinced they have a popular mandate to do everything they’ve yowled about?…
That was almost six years ago. Since then, the GOP has gotten its Congressional majority, shitcanned its Speaker of the House for insufficient conservative fealty, shut down the government twice, almost defaulted on the national debt while breaking the USA’s AAA credit rating in the process, refused to allow a vote on or even meet with a Supreme Court nominee so they can run out the clock, and is now on the verge of nominating for President a blowhard, self-contradicting, delusional reality-TV windbag with no political background, multiple bankruptcies and divorces, and an openly and avowedly racist fanbase. And here’s the thing: even if Hillary does get elected and kicks Trump’s ass up between his shoulderblades a la 1964 or 1972 or 1984, what’s going to prevent the GOP from saying that Trump was a mistake, Trump was a fluke, Trump wasn’t a real conservative, and now we have to double down and get even more conservative to fight that harridan in the White House? Well, I’ll tell you what’s going to prevent them: Nothing. At. All.
This is the dream scenario for the modern GOP; putting their A-number-one-gold-medal-super-bitch-empress-devil in the Oval Office will let them raise hell and raise money for at least four years. They know what every wrestling promoter knows: the money isn’t in the good guy winning the belt, it’s in the chase. Nothing but good times ahead for the usual Beltway Bandits and their amen corner in the Very Serious Sorrowful Evenhanded Press. Meanwhile, you can expect a lot more suffering from real people, and not the “real people” strawmen of Thomas Friedman or David Brooks. Real people with real needs who are struggling to get by in a world where every effort at recovery for people making less than $200,000 a year got killed by Republican obstruction.
This is the inevitable result of the GOP’s mainlining of Southern-ness for fifty years. They’ve graduated from prescription pills to morphine to heroin, and after decades of courting Wallace voters and rebranding their base as the Tea Party and engaging in a systematic dismantling of things like political norms, basic logic and empirical fact, they’re finally on to the last stage. Donald Trump as their presidential candidate is the krokodil stage; they’ve smoked so many cleaning chemicals out of foil that the party’s very body is decaying and sloughing off dead tissue.
The risk is that the stupid has finally metastasized beyond any opportunity to heal. Maybe we get Hillary, and maybe we flip one house of Congress on the way, and maybe we stop the bleeding and maybe what’s left of the non-mental-defective GOP comes to its senses and we go on somehow. But maybe we don’t, and this is the beginning of the end. But it does make you wonder who’s the more stupid: the Trump voter, or the self-righteous prick who insists there’s no difference between Trump and Clinton.
Either way, well, it won’t be my problem anymore in forty years or so, assuming we don’t get nuked before then.