Thursday, November 10, 2016

Stopping the “Slow-moving, Right-wing Coup”

The third episode in season four of Downton Abbey had an interesting moment. Card sharp Terence Sampson invites himself to Lord Grantham’s estate for a weekend party thrown by Lady Grantham. His goal is to fleece as much money from his upper-crust hosts as he can, and he succeeds, much to the embarrassment of the rest of the players. But Grantham’s daughter, Edith, is dating a man who was once a hustler in his early days and, in order to get in the good graces of her father, Michael Gregson agrees to play in the game the following evening with the sole objective of winning back the money that all of the other gentlemen lost to Sampson. In a telling moment during the game, Sampson loses a hand to Gregson and says, “I don’t understand how—” and Gregson cuts him off by saying, “Don’t understand what?” It’s clear in the context of the story that Sampson expected to win and the fact that Gregson cheated better than he did was incomprehensible. One of the things no one really stopped to consider prior to the election is a comment that the President-elect made a few days prior to November 8th to the effect that if Hillary Clinton won, then the election truly was rigged. It’s only in retrospect that his meaning was clear. He knew the election was rigged in his favor, and if Hillary won then it could only be because she managed to cheat better than he did.

Eight years ago right-wing windbags like Rush Limbaugh and others went on record as saying that they hoped the Obama administration would actually destroy the country just so they could have the pleasure of being proven right. Well, given those parameters, the fact that Barack Obama succeeded despite the considerable obstacles he faced in the form of an utterly obstructionist congress can only mean that the Republicans were absolutely wrong. But all that is over now. The recent election is proof of a pernicious and insidious evil at work in our country that threatens to topple the experiment that began when the founders made the decision to put the country into the hands of the people and “form a more perfect union,” one dedicated to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s what Bill Maher recently called the “slow-moving, right-wing coup.” The two-party system in this country, one that many of the founders actually worried about, has become an albatross around our necks. The division is simple. One party is interested in how we can help as many people as possible and thereby help everyone to prosper. The other party is only interested in how they can manipulate the system to benefit themselves and cut everyone else out in the process. One party is about hope, the other about hate. And yet it seems that half the people in the country are too dumb to understand the difference.

How is it possible that so many people in this country have become so incredibly stupid? It truly boggles the mind how a significant percentage of Americans were able to bring themselves to vote for a proven anti-intellectual, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, delusional, infantile, clown to be the leader of their country. The choice for president this year should not have been a choice at all, because there was no choice. There was only one candidate who had the skills and ability to be commander in chief and lead our country in a positive direction. The other candidate was a failed businessman who has the emotional and intellectual capacity of an eight-year-old. Seth Myers, on Late Night, said it best when he made this obvious observation last week.

          It’s a problem for a lot of Americans. They just don’t love the two choices. I mean, do you pick
          someone who’s under federal investigation for using a private email server, or do you pick some-
          one who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning
          an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn’t a
          war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, bragged about com-
          mitting sexual assault, was accused by twelve women of committing sexual assault, said some
          of those women weren’t attractive for him to sexually assault, said more countries should get
          nukes, said that he would force the military to commit war crimes, said a judge was biased be-
          cause his parents were Mexicans, said women should be punished for having abortions, incited
          violence at his rallies, called global warming a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, called for his
          opponent to be jailed, declared bankruptcy six times, bragged about not paying income taxes,
          stiffed his contractors and employees, lost a billion dollars in one year, scammed customers at
          his fake university, bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself with money from his fake foundation,
          has a trial for fraud coming up in November, insulted an opponent’s looks, insulted an opponent’s
          wife’s looks, and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy? How do you choose?

This is a classic example of a false equivalency, in which two very different and unequal things are being compared as if they are equal. In point of fact—facts, something Republicans now completely ignore—Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have broken no laws. Period. Not a single charge has been filed against them in any court. Her opponent, on the other hand, is facing a trial at the end of the month for fraud at his phony university. But there are plenty of other illegalities attached to the failed Republican candidate, including not paying contractors for work done on his construction projects, tax dodging, and sexual assault. But Trump has engaged in the most hyperbolic example of projection ever seen in a presidential campaign in the United States. Every—literally—every single negative criticism that Trump threw at Clinton during the campaign was something that he himself was guilty of. How can you tell if Donald Trump is lying? His lips are moving. The biggest lie of all is that the Republicans have any other agenda than helping the big business interests that control them. Fossil fuel producers, the Wall Street money industry, tobacco producers, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, agri-business, the gun lobby, polluters of all stripes and their investors are the only ones who benefit from Republican policies. They rich get richer under Republican rule and the poor get poorer. Basic rights and government services are stripped away with nothing to replace them. The earth and our children are left to suffer at the hands of those who simply don’t care about the future.

The whole thing puts me in mind of the title of one of Al Franken’s books: Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them. On Bill Maher’s show a week ago one of the members of his panel was Rick Lazio, who ran unsuccessfully against Hillary Clinton for one of the Senate seats from New York. Lazio proceeded to attempt to trash American’s economy yet again by blaming the Obama administration for it and Maher mercifully called him on his lie. The biggest lie during the past eight years is the implication that Obama had anything to do with the state of the economy in the first place. The credit for that belongs to George W. Bush, the true architect of the Great Recession. At the time of the recovery the Republicans fought Obama every step of the way, and the President succeeded in spite of them. The blowhards like Rush Limbaugh who wanted Obama to fail, to actually plunge the country into depression and economic chaos just to prove that they were right about him all along were wrong, and have always been wrong. Higher economic growth, lower unemployment, millions of jobs created, millions of uninsured with health care, and low interest rates, have all been the product of Obama’s sheer force of will against a Congress who opposed him at every turn. Everything that Republicans say about the sorry state of the economy is an absolute lie. All of this lying about an obvious truth continued throughout the primary season and into the general election. Republicans lie about everything, with the confidence that those who support them will believe their lies. Unfortunately, they do.

The most ludicrous thing about Trump’s message during the election was the notion of change, but it’s an argument that made absolutely no sense. The implication was that because Obama’s presidency was so ineffectual that the nation needed a change in the highest office. As usual, however, this was turning the facts on their head. Bush was the president who took the surplus of the Clinton presidency and squandered it on the war in Iraq. Then, he tanked the U.S. economy and promptly exited stage right leaving Obama with a complete and total mess in the country. The only reason we aren’t still suffering in the middle of a second Great Depression is because of President Obama. Which begs the questions, change to what? Back to a Republican controlled White House? That’s what the country had with Bush and Chaney and it was an unmitigated disaster. The only change that’s needed is to get Republicans out of power in Washington so that the country can actually move forward again and truly take the gains made after the abject failure of the Bush administration and fulfill the promise of the twenty-first century that is being threatened daily by Republican hatred of Americans.

But with gerrymandered districts in states all over the country, once again we find the winner of the popular vote in this country going down to defeat by a right-wing coup. The only question seems to be how badly this Republican president will destroy the country, and will we be able to come back from it yet again? While it may seem that right-wing radicals have been stoking the fires of hatred and separatism for decades, in actuality it has been centuries in the making. American anti-intellectualism didn’t just spring up in America overnight; it actually came to North America on the Mayflower in 1620. Puritans planted and nurtured a distrust of intellect because, as always, the act of thinking quite easily destroys blind adherence to any organized religion. The fertile ground that distrust, prejudice, hatred, rationalization and an unearned righteous superiority found on the new continent was mercifully tempered by a influx of rationalism that eventually resulted in the separation of the United States from Great Britain. But anti-intellectualism didn’t go away, as the great Richard Hofstadter made clear in his seminal work, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, in 1963. In a massive over-simplification of his thesis, it could be said that democratization of education in this country gave stupid people just enough intelligence to make them realize they hated smart people.

This idea actually goes back as far as Adam and Eve, who were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge, implying that their idyllic life in Eden was based on the fact that they were too dumb to know the difference. For the religious anti-intellectual, being deceived by the intelligence of Satan is what ultimately ruined their blissful ignorance. What’s different now is that the snakes in the grass aren’t trying to trick people into become self-aware, after all, they don’t have to be sneaky any more as they can just outright lie. And the only thing it’s doing to the electorate is helping them to remain stupid. But it all makes sense, in a way. As America moves at a glacial pace toward becoming a more inclusive society, a country that believes by helping those in need we create a place for all to prosper, those who formerly wielded all of the power have become resentful. This is something Michael Moore in his new film, Trumpland, tries to explain. As the white, moneyed, religious power structure in this country is eroding, it is fighting back in the only way it knows how: by using their hatred as a weapon to destroy the other side. It’s a ploy seemingly as old as civilization itself.

At the beginning of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the landed Patrician class who had formerly run the country through their elected Senate has been displaced by Caesar’s move toward dictatorship following the deaths of the other two members of the Triumvirate. A Tribune named Flavius, from the law-enforcement arms of the Senate, has this to say about their attempt to remove the support of the commoners from Caesar. “These growing feathers plucked from Caesar's wing will make him fly an ordinary pitch, who else would soar above the view of men and keep us all in servile fearfulness.” The way the Republicans in this country have attempted to pluck the feathers of the Democrats is by casting aspersions on every one of their elected representatives from Obama and Clinton all the way down to state congressmen and women. It’s a ploy that works easily on uneducated whites who don’t know they’re being lied to, or don’t care. But increasingly it’s having an effect on young people throughout the country who are coming out of high school and college and should know better, but prove themselves every bit as ignorant as those who never went to school at all. This can be seen in the alarmingly large numbers of young people who were energized by the campaign of Bernie Sanders and who then, inexplicably, transferred their loyalty to an absolute moron like Gary Johnson, who not only didn’t know a single thing about international relations but was willing to strip away all the legal gains made by Democrats in this country going back to the New Deal, under the anarchic guise of Libertarianism.

This trend toward anarchy is also something seized upon by Republicans, who want to blame the ineffectiveness of government in Washington on the Democrats. But it’s all lies. It’s clear to anyone with a working brain that it has been Republican obstructionism that has ground Washington to a halt in the last eight years. For that same amount of time under the George W. Bush, the Republicans led the country into two wars, costing taxpayers trillions of dollars in debt, and nearly bankrupt the country through limitations on Wall Street regulations. During the Obama administration the country has been able to claw its way back to lower unemployment, higher wages, better healthcare, reduced military presence in the world and a focus on improving education. And Republicans lie about all of it. They simply say that the country is in the worst shape it’s ever been in, and completely ignore that the opposite has happened. They want to take away health care, high wages, personal freedoms, constitutional rights, and regulation on runaway corporate greed, in order to plunge this country into an unbridgeable chasm between the oligarchical elite and a populace of minimum-wage serfs who have no political power. And half of the electorate is apparently fine with that. But they shouldn’t be.

On Bill Maher’s show last Friday he talked about what the real problem in America is going to be in the coming years: the attempted fascist takeover of the country by the radical Republican right that began immediately after President Obama was elected. What started out as obstructionism, a pernicious policy at the beginning, has now turned into a full-throated vow by those on the right advocating for nothing short of the complete destruction of democracy as we know it in this country. The radical right can’t stand the thought that the country is changing, that white dominance and control is passing to a new generation of Americans who believe in inclusiveness and the Jeffersonian mandate that all people are created equal. Again, it puts me in mind of an apt analogy. In the British TV film Double Helix, Juliet Stephenson has a great line in her role as Rosalind Franklin, the woman who essentially did the research that led to Crick and Watson’s brilliant guess about the structure of DNA. When Watson is in her lab trying to get a peek at her work she says, “What resources do you have to offer? You think this is a little game! You think this is playground and I’ve got the ball. Little boys! You’re all just little boys! Go and play with your little boy games. I am not a little boy. I don’t like your game and I won’t play.” The problem is that the radical right is going to try and blow up the playground now that they have the ball. The only answer is that the country needs to stop playing the game immediately. We need to get rid of the Republican controlled federal government as soon as possible in order to avert disaster.

Bernie Sanders wasn’t kidding when he said that this country needs a revolution. But it’s not the kind of hate-filled, segregationist, morality-imposing revolt from the anti-intellectual underclass that we need, designed to line the pockets of their duplicitous Republican masters. Instead, this country needs to do away with Republicanism all together. It’s time to make a stand and say that this is not a country we want to be run by the rich at the expense of the rest of us. It’s time to take a stand and say that we want a country that cares about people and realizes that by helping those at the bottom we can’t help but also help those at the top. It’s time to take a stand against Republicans who lie to our faces and are happy to do it because it works. It’s time to stand with the Democrats in this country who not only want to help every citizen but are working every day to do that very thing. The only thing standing in their way is Republican destructionism. We need to call these people what they are to their faces: liars. It’s certainly not going to be enough to stop a Republican machine bent on turning this country into an oligarchical wasteland. What we need to do is put Democracy in power again and remove Republicans in Washington and state legislative branches all over this country so that, at the end of the day, we’ll still have a country to call our own.