Coop Scoop: Into the Abyss (Resend)
American democracy is unraveling at warp speed
September 10, 2021
By Marc Cooper
Now that Joe Biden has delivered his somewhat tardy but nevertheless sweeping reset of national COVID policy, he and the entire herd of congressional Democrats will spend the rest of September totally obsessed with nailing down and trying to pass the administration’s dual infrastructure plans — the same issue that has dominated the Biden agenda for some months now.
Well, it would be nice if the Dems could actually agree on something substantial despite the dogged disruption of the Manchin/Sinema Axis.
But if both parties, and the electorate, stay their current courses, an implemented infrastructure upgrade might only serve to get the trains running on time during what appears, at least to me, as the coming authoritarian regime.
What? Wasn’t I among the loudest voices on the Left in 2016 insisting that Trump’s ascension would not lead to fascism? Yes. And I was right. I was also right in saying he was bound to do himself in. And he did.
What I could not foresee, what almost nobody predicted, and what millions today are still in denial about, is that once Trump was out of office, the illiberal, authoritarian, and outright fascist elements among us would gain rather than lose strength.
Today, ten months after Trump’s defeat and eight months after the capitol siege of January 6, the alliance of the Republican Party with alt-right factions including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Qanon and tens of millions of voters who have detached themselves from all reality, threaten not only any ongoing reform from the Biden admin, but are also blocking life and death public health measures, and also directly threatening constitutional rule and the democratic process itself.
I begin this argument by transporting you back three weeks ago to the forgettable town of Callum, Alabama where Donald Trump delivered his sweaty list of grievances to a rally of his supporters. The media thought it would play it cute by mostly ignoring the event and highlighting only the few seconds when Trump was lightly booed for a when he encouraged vaccination.
The bigger, much more consequential story was completely missed. The event, held on nondescript farm land on a rainy evening, drew somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 enthusiastic followers.
Stop right there. Tell me, please, exactly which Democrat, which liberal leader, could attract that many people at a rural rally in the middle of nowhere, in the rain, in the first year of a four year presidential cycle? if you have an answer, I guarantee you it is wrong.
Biden or Harris might draw a few thousand. Bernie maybe a few thousand more. Maybe. But 40,000? or 50,000?
I am not going to rehearse it here line by line, you can look at the video, but Trump’s speech was no call to action. There were no specific to do’s. He had not yet declared so there wasn’t even a call to vote.
What Trump did was to merely stoke and confirm the sizzling anger and resentment of the crowd, and he accomplished it with a gut-level “blood and soil” appeal — to use a phrase from 1930’s Europe.
I never use the term loosely, but sorry, this was a an open Nazi-like appeal to a crowd that was more than ready to lap it up. If anything, it was obvious that Trump needed this crowd much more than they needed him, a fact that was indeed underlined when they booed him.
Trump, did, however, validate their hating. And there was plenty of it.
Most alarming, the message of Trumpism has moved significantly since 2016. The emphasis is no longer on external enemies (China, Mexico, etc). Now there is a call to war against internal enemies: Radical Democrats. Communist Democrats. Woke Liberal Socialists. Not that the rally goers can tell one from another,
And that makes it more chilling. Some people still ask, why do these mostly modest and even poor people vote for a man, and a party who offer them no real material benefits? They don’t care about benefits. They gave up on the government doing anything for them years ago.
They want only a leader, a president, who will Own the Liberals, who will shit all over them, much the way some January 6 rioters urinated on the floors of the Capitol while others splattered feces on the walls.
Railing against an internal but non-existent enemy might be an exercise in futility. Or it might not. Keep in mind that when Hitler came to power, Jews constituted less than one percent of the German population — yet the defeat in World War One, the chaos of Weimar, the Big Crash and just about every other social problem in Germany was successfully and disastrously placed on their shoulders.
Just exactly how, then, should we differentiate between the racist howls of Der Stürmer in 1932 and Tucker Carlson (among others) in 2021 insisting that the pandemic is being prolonged only by diseased immigrants sneaking across the border with Democrat complicity, other than Carlson is much more photogenic than Julius Streicher?
Do not misunderstand me. I intend no criminalization of those I disagree with, nor a priori damnation of just anybody who (stupidly) voted for Trump.
What I am talking about is a movement, better organized and more militant every day, that has criminal and rather openly seditious intentions. You might not be at war with them, or you might write them off as the Usual Deplorables, but they are definitely at war with you, with me, and with what’s left of our democratic institutions.
This insurgent movement is also building social and community networks that completely normalize and strengthen their views. They live in the same communities, they go to the same churches, they read the same takes on the web, they even have their own TV networks.
The local, community ties they have give them enormous resonance that is lacking among liberals.
Indeed, the hothouse atmosphere of the insurgent right evokes memories of pre World War One Germany and the leftist Social Democrat Party (SPD). That was a time when if you were a German worker, you probably spent most of your social life in activities and organizations affiliated with the party or an allied trade union. That was your world. And it wa all wiped out by the German defeat in WWI, the failure of the Socialist government that followed it and ultimately by the meteoric rise of National Socialism and Hitler (who once again re-created the all immersive experience of political culture and solidarity, even if it was imposed top down by the dictatorship).
American liberals have no such thing, other than maybe a once a month nod to a familiar face among the season ticket holders at the local playhouse or down at the Yoga studio.
Not so with the emerging insurrectionary right whose off-the-wall views are legitimized by everything that surrounds them.
INTO THE MAELSTROM
With American liberals and moderates clustered together in America’s urban centers, the rise of this insurgent movement is too frequently ignored, overlooked, or underestimated and only see in TV news excerpts.
I have spent the last two years in my new home of Vancouver, Washington — a small city of 200,000 just across the Columbia River and five miles north of Portland. This city is “purple,” slightly leaning center-right. It is one of the more relatively conservative areas along the Pacific Coast illuminated by the Blue beacons of Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area.
Compared to my previous life in the Democratic burbs of Los Angeles, Vancouver seemed a pretty radical change. Up here, it’s no big deal to see a Trump bumpersticker, a block full of American flags, and the look-alike F-150 pickups streaming Gadsden and Trump banners off their back ends, driven by thirtysomething men all adorned in the de rigeur short cropped beards and baseball caps. Even an occasional street appearance by small groups of Proud Boys.
Yet, I was not fully prepared for my photo safari journey during the last week of August into the eastern enclaves of Washington and Oregon near the Idaho border. Cross the Cascades going east and, boom, you are in the heart of Rural America, a place that makes my new hometown feel like Berkeley.
What you see, at least in that part of the world, is breath taking scenery dotted with mostly declining towns and hamlets and lots of older white people. And what you find yourself in is a veritable sea of Trumpism. Really, it could be any “ism” so long as it reflects the decades-long ingrained resentment, alienation and anger of those Americans who feel betrayed by the their past abandonment and scared to death of a liberal, mutli-racial future.
These folks are dug in and not about to be moved. Roll down any back road up there and you will see the yard signs and billboards among Washington and Oregon residents who demand their counties be ceded to ruby red Idaho.
There are also plenty of American flags, here, almost as many as the Thin Blue Line flags. And it’s not hard to find Old Glory being flown upside down in a signal of distress. At breakfast in a diner near the Idaho border, not an eyebrow is raised when a small group of uniformed militia sit down for chow. In fact, they are warmly greeted by the waitress. A few hours down the road near Baker City, Oregon, folks are equally non-plussed by the guys walking the sidewalks with 45’s strapped on in open carry. I am not at all squeamish about guns, I own some, but I had to wonder just exactly what the think they are going to have to shoot out there in the Boonies, other than each other.
The locals are very friendly. At least if you look like them. Much more so than in stressed-out big cities. And they are not shy about their near universal rejection of just about everything that makes sense. No need to really debate anything as Fox News has all the right answers.
I am an experienced reporter who can talk to just about anybody and I was with some other folks who have similar backgrounds. Yet, I tell the truth when I say we felt very very careful in what we said out loud, especially in a crowded cafe or bar.
It was to enter another country. Rural America. Red America.
Across the country, these are the folks that fueled Trump and that will do it again if he runs again, as he is threatening.
When I got back home last week, my town was immediately confronted by a Proud Boys disruption. Three local public schools shut down when word came that a group of these Brown Shirt brawlers were planning to go protest or break into a school where a students was reportedly resisting a mask order. Just another Wednesday.
THE NEW AMERICAN DEATH CULT
Of all the faces of the growing insurgency, the most chilling for me are those embedded in and leading the anti-mask and anti-vax movement and those who are now swarming local school board meetings and schools to defeat masking and vax mandates.
They are the scariest among the Trumplicans as they are egregiously willing to risk their own health, their own lives, those of their children and ours to make their asinine points.
You think maybe I am crazy? Or paranoid?
Let me ask you: when did you ever imagine that we would have state governors, direct descendents of Orangutans, who would openly interfere with the health of school children? Who would pass laws preventing others from helping them?
When did you imagine fascist gangs showing up at school board meetings and trying to punch out school doctors and others parents who want a mask mandate? Or trying to rip off the masks of school children? How about death threats against election workers with an intensity that has caused massive resignations? Is there a big difference between that and Kristallnacht?
If you think Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida’s Ron Desantis are bizarre one-offs, note that Abbott is implementing the anti-mask, the voter suppression and sweeping anti-abortion measures precisely because he believes he is not Trumpy enough for his hysterical, frothing base. DeSantis for his part, aims to replace Trump by being Trumpier than The Boss.
When did you ever think, until maybe two years ago, that a massive 80 million Americans, deep into a killer pandemic, would actively refuse miracle vaccines that cost nothing except a few minutes of one’s time? And did you guess that a chunk of them would favor instead some paste you shove up a horse’s ass? Or that millions of them want to expose your kid to COVID at school?
I see no way there will be a truce between the two Americas, now neatly delineated and defined by COVID heat maps in the New York Times. They will grow farther apart in the immediate future as more stringent public health measures are enacted and likewise resisted.
No need to worry about what the New Normal will look like. We are already in it. The only change on the horizon will be the relative number of masks seen here or there. The underlying division will only grow. Especially toward and after the mid terms.
Prepare for years of bullshit and disinformation as the Trumplicans claim every election henceforth is “rigged,” as they are already claiming about the California Recall.
After some fifty years of radical journalism and activism, I find myself today in the odd position of defending a whole lost of institutions that I have protested for decades. I do so as it is the only thing we have left.
What exactly, then, are we up against? What is to be done?
As a starting point, consider that the Democrats holding the White House and both chambers of congress is a fleeting cosmic confluence that, according to serious analysts on all sides, will not come again for as much as two decades from now. There is, for sure, a younger, more liberal. more diverse electorate emerging. But the unjust structure of the American electoral system, and the disproportionate presence of rural and older voters, will hinder the dominance of this younger lot for many many years to come.
Consider the current menu of American crises:
The Pandemic: Biden’s public health measures need to be even stronger but he is afraid of alienating “moderates.”
Economic inequality? 51 Senate votes needed to raise taxes on the wealthy and redistribute wealth via social programs.
Runaway military spending: House Democrats just voted to increase Pentagon spending.
Police Reform: 51 Senate votes is all this is needed.
Immigration reform: 51 Senate votes is all that is needed.
Defense of Abortion Rights: 51 Senate votes needed to codify Roe V. Wade into law.
Crappy Medical Care: 51 Senate votes needed to expand it.
Defense of Voting Rights: 51 votes needed to pass a new Voting Right Act.
Climate Change: 51 votes needed to pass stiffer laws.
Internal subversion: A fearless Justice Department (which we do not have) and real economic attention to working class and rural voters.
I’ve said it before and will not tire of repeating it over and over again. Salvation only begins, I repeat, begins with knocking down the filibuster and using the 51 votes that are transiently available.
Keep in mind that even if the DINOS agreed and decided to actually legislate before the GOP takes back the House, the Supreme Court awaits with daggers drawn. Having also detached itself from the American people, that totally biased and unrepresentative court will certainly strike down any reform legislation that Prime Minister Manchin might eventually agree to.
That is also a surmountable problem, on paper. Remember way back to a year ago, before the 2020 election when some Democrats actually talked about expanding the court? Another 51 vote deal.
Biden took care of that right away, creating a lifeless “commission” that will “study” the court question but make no recommendations. Pretty darn cynical. And yet, Democrats who today are understandably railing against the court, said nothing when that went down.
Conclusion: Unless the Democrats do what I now believe they will never do by abolishing the filibuster and immediately expanding the court, ain’t nothing good and lasting gonna happen.
The insurgency I see will commit acts of violence, but it will come to power gradually, and “legally.” That long march into the abyss will begin with the House falling next year, and perhaps the Senate. Trump will run in 2024 and while he is quite obviously a madman and a gangster, who says that will stop him? Will an ancient Biden stop him? Or a seriously lame Kamala Harris? Maybe. But the Congress will, odds-on, be Republican.
Before the deluge, Biden will get some sort of reduced infrastructure bill (that he mistakenly messages in congressional gobbly gook instead of highlighting its social welfare content). There will be some improvements in the social safety net (until a Republican congress guts them). And the trains will run on time on some nice new bridges. ++
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