Coop Scoop: Six Months After Jan 6 It's Worse Than Ever

Yes, It Could Happen Here

July 7, 2021

By Marc Cooper

Six months after the violent assault on the Capitol, the United States stands more threatened by internal anti-democratic forces than at any time previous. It’s getting worse, not better.

Only one paramount issue faces the American people today: Defense of the democratic vote and free elections. Period. No other issue has any resonance, any significance if we succumb to the anti-democratic and autocratic threat that looms so directly in front of us.

I have no desire to be a Cassandra, nor am I much excited to be somewhat repeating myself. But, yes, my hair is on fire and all the while hoping I am wrong.

You Must Consider This:

Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him continues to spread faster than the Delta variant.

Not so much symmetrical polarization but rather the uneven separation between Two Americas seems to intensify by the hour.

Political alignment now includes changing one’s personal behavior and even directly risking one’s life (and that of others) in order to conform with one’s Tribe. While something like 86% of adult Democrats are vaccinated, that number drops in half among Republicans. Anti-vaxxing has become the new Kool-Aid as more than 99% of the recent Delta-related deaths are among those who did not get jabbed.

There is no civil war in the Republican Party. The Trump faction has taken over at every level including and perhaps most importantly they have seized control of local and state levels of GOP organization. Whatever you think of Liz Cheney, she is on a political suicide mission and she stands very, very alone inside the party and among its voters.

Denial of any importance to January 6, a refusal to investigate the siege, and acceptance of the “stolen election” narrative has become the table stakes, better, the ante to play in any Republican Party activities.

Nancy Pelosi has moved ahead with the formation of a House Select Committee to investigate January 6 but House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has threatened any of his caucus members with exile if they cooperate. The committee will have full subpoena power. The big question here is if Democrats will use that power and ENFORCE it or will they wuss out like they did during the First Impeachment. Republicans like McCarthy and Trump and their co-conspirators will certainly refuse to comply with any subpoenas from the committee. Will they be met with contempt of congress arrest orders or just allowed to continue obfuscating via court challenges?

To date, nobody has been held responsible for planning, organizing or inciting the violent attempt to stop the counting of presidential electoral votes.

Already two dozen voting modification laws, either suppressing the vote and/or making it easy for Republican led state legislatures to over-rule popular voting and send presidential electors of their own choosing, have been enacted. Another barrage of 389 similar bills are pending making this cycle the greatest assault on democratic institutions since the Compromise of 1877.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now endorsed the fiction that Trump was defrauded, issuing a decision last week to further cripple the Voting Rights Act and thereby flashing a green light to the states to continue with their legislation to remake America elections – in a negative way. Writing for the uber-conservative majority, Justice Scalia basically said no measure was too radical if it stopped voter fraud ( the new invisible Bogeyman). The decision renders corrective action by the Department of Justice to be many times more difficult if not impossible,

A few days ago, several hundred masked and uniformly dressed neofascist white supremacists marched through the streets of Philadelphia until local residents chased them away. This, while law enforcement officials predict more right extremist violence over the summer.

Over July 4th weekend there were a staggering 400 multiple victim shootings (cashed in on by the media as “mass shootings”) that left 150 people dead. The overwhelming majority of the victims are low income Blacks and Latinos taken down in their own neighborhoods with hand guns — not assault rifles. Democrats, meanwhile, are still in denial about the horrendous spike in homicides while the Right is constructing a new Law and Order electoral narrative.

Most disturbing, with midterm elections approaching next year, incipient campaigns show a marked level of radical Republican intensity around several strategic state level posts. Stop The Steal candidates are positioning themselves to grab under-the-radar seats as Secretary of State on down the chain of officials who oversee elections and election vote counts in numerous swing states.

Meanwhile, the Fraudit site in Maricopa County, Arizona has become a new Mecca for radical Republicans who now come to worship the Qanon event in their own personal Haj. Within a few weeks, similar staged events are scheduled to open in Pennsylvania and Georgia and maybe Wisconsin. We all know how this ends: sometime soon the “auditors” announce Trump really won and start demanding his “re-instatement.” How do you suppose that will play out?

Let’s be clear about this. No mealy-mouthed pussy-footing-around a la MSM. We are watching in broad daylight the formation, growth and consolidation of an insurrectionary fascist movement slipping its way into mainstream American politics. And, frankly, the popular and political response seems to be lacking in, um…clarity and vigor,

I have said it before but I am forced to repeat myself: The radicalized Republican Party today stands as the above ground, legal arm of a broader social movement that would overthrow the current social order in favor of an authoritarian model, It is the face, the front, for an insurrectionary movement.

And here’s the really ugly party: this movement is not really dependent on Donald Trump or Fox News (though they are top level accelerants), nor is it really being led by a Republican Party that has so morally compromised itself, that has so besotted itself with its alliance with fascists, that it could hardly provide adequate leadership on anything.

No, the drive of this movement rests inside the American electorate itself. They built Trump, he did not conjure them.

In an Economist poll last week, more than half of Americans said they were at lest partially dissatisfied with democracy. some 75% of Republicans agreed. And more than 80% of Trump voters registered as skeptical, or worse. Almost half of Trump voters said they were “completely” dissatisfied with American democracy. And a fifth of Trump voters argue that democracy is not the best form of government.

Take all the accumulated racism of the last couple hundred of years, the resentment engendered by the advance of women and minorities in the economy and politics, the disorientation and job loss wrought from globalization, the deepening cultural divide often made even more ominous by liberal speech codes, decades of alarmist rhetoric about immigration, the ideological crapola spread by too many churches, the economic insecurity in a society with no real safety net, the health care crunch and all the other disruptive and deeply alienating aspects of modern late-stage capitalism and you have a populace, at least a significant part of it, ready-made for demagogy.

Trump could and might disappear tomorrow (along with Hannity and Carlson) and it would change very little as their replacements would be handily and quickly found. Trumpism has been with us as far back as I can remember in some form or another and on some scale or another. Americans flatter themselves when they say he is an aberration in American history? Without even leaving the 20th Century, have we forgotten about J. Edgar Hoover, the Palmer Raids and Deportations, Father Coughlin, McCarthy, George Wallace, David Duke, Nixon, and so on.

This nihilistic movement is stronger, much stronger than before, more virulent, it has a new name and a new figure to rally around, no matter if he is in the White House, Mar-a-Lago, state prison, or even when he planted in the dirt. He’s a symbol, not a man. And Trumpism, like COVID, has become endemic. It is here to stay for decades ahead of us. Move over, Juan Peron.

That’s the hard part for liberals, Democrats and other anti-Trumpers to grasp. It was a good idea to get him out of the White House and we did accomplish that, barely. But you don’t confront this movement only by hoping that he winds up in jail. You confront it by resolving the social issues that created such a fertile base for grifters like Trump in the first place.

In the short run, however, even that challenge must be postponed to make room for the fight against the anti-democratic movement. To date, that has been a dismal affair. The sclerotic nature of the Democratic Party is preventing it from implementing its own agenda even though it controls the White House, the Senate and the House,

Now, more than ever before, we need bold, decisive federal legislation from the US Congress to protect our fundamental right to vote and to select a governing majority. That has yet to happen. Wait a little longer and it will make no difference as it will be too late.++

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