This day of days begins with a preamble, what Keith Olberman has labeled Trump’s numerous Fatwas: calls for his most violent and deranged followers to kill his political and criminal-justice “enemies.” This is criminal behavior, and the direct result of it being left unchecked has made things infinitely worse by allowing him feel that there are no consequences for his actions. Trump believes, justifiably, that this country lacks the political and moral will to do whatever is necessary to save democracy from a demagogue in waiting. And so he behaves accordingly, and we are left to suffer the consequences. From the moment he stepped out of office and was not ushered immediately into a jail cell, the government and justice system in this country has been negligent in its duty to its citizens, and we continue to pay the price. Olberman stated the desperate need to put Trump behind bars in order to stop his calls for political violence and murder this way:
If it makes us look for a time like a third-world country, or it makes the current president look like
he is prosecuting a political rival, or if it makes it seem as if one political party is trying to put another
political party behind bars . . . so be it! Because what happens if we do not act against Trump now,
now, now, is far worse! . . . We continue to head down a road to utter disaster in this country, where
Trump’s belief that he and everything connected to him is more important than the entirety of the
lives and welfare of every other citizen of the United States of America, where that belief is going to
lead to open systemic violence here. And it is his fault. And he must be . . . Well, let me just use his
words, from that post about Judge Engoron: “This political hack must be stopped.”
Tangential to this, but still decidedly on-brand, is the failed former president’s promise—right out of the dictator playbook—to arrest those in the media who have the temerity to tell the truth about his undemocratic, un-American, unethical and criminal behavior. And yet the sad truth is that the news media has been entirely unwilling to tell the truth about Trump, or call for accountability, as the media itself serves the corporate power structure in this country that Trump is helping to enrich, not the people it purports to serve. MSNBC, which certainly has its flaws, has been the only major news outlet to consistently label Trump’s lies as lies, and to point out the avalanche of attempts by Republicans to normalize his behavior through false equivalences on the left. CNN, which has failed utterly in its attempt to be balanced by refusing to acknowledge the incredible imbalance in what the right-wing is claiming, has by now been fully discredited in the eyes of anyone who can see the truth. And network news has been no better. But beyond that, what uneducated whites in this country are left with, is what I call the Fake-News-Industrial Complex. It’s one thing to call Fox News a propaganda network—which it is, a right-wing disinformation arm of the capitalist oligarchy—but no one until now has been quite as precise as Keith Olberman in explaining exactly how that system really works.
The extraordinary sweep of right-wing television news networks and streaming services and pod-
casts and radio and conspiracy theorists and publishers, the whole complex running the gamut from
Alex Jones to Fox News to [Joe] Rogan . . . is bankrolled by one or more conservative billionaires
who are delighted if they invest fifty million dollars and get back, ah, buck ninety-seven. Because
the rest of the money, the other forty-nine million plus has been well-spent buying and creating
public opinion, and fomenting an environment of stupidity and hate and rage that makes a trans-
parent, two-bit con man like Trump seem like George Washington . . . The machine is well-oiled
and perfected. At the fringes the John Solomons and the gateway pundits and people like that,
make stuff up. And then places like One America News quote them. By the end of the week Fox
has taken the story, suitably washed, with lots of places they can quote so they don’t have to claim
they made it up, and Fox is taking that story and devoting seven shows a day to it.
As bad as Fox News was before, it was Trump who really opened the door to a way of talking to the right-wing base that is based not just on inuendo and rumor as it used to be, but on complete lies. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trump’s counter-programming against the most recent Republican debate. The event spurred left-wing podcaster David Pakman to opine, “Failed former president Donald Trump, yesterday engaged in the closest thing I recall he or any American politician doing that is this close to overt Russian- or North Korean-style propaganda.” It seems natural to feel this statement must be hyperbolic in some way, but unfortunately it’s not. Trump was refused an audience with the United Auto Workers, who are presently on strike, and instead was offered a podium before a group of non-union workers at which he pretended to be pro-union, and lied about his support for union workers. But beyond that, he had people in the audience holding up signs reading “Union Members for Trump,” who when questioned later admitted that they weren’t union members at all. The best summation of his blatant deception came from Pod Save America host, Dan Pfeiffer: “Trump doesn’t mention that he was the most anti-worker president in history, who passed a tax cut that most of the benefits went to the rich and encouraged and led to more offshoring of American jobs, who got rid of overtime pay for eight million Americans, costing them more than a billion dollars in wages.” Ask Trump any policy question and he will gush about how great he is, how he has done more than anyone else on the topic, and done it better . . . without giving one, single specific. The reason for that is he can’t, because all of his bluster is a lie.
The question that has haunted me since the Insurrection is, why do his followers believe his lies? But the simple answer is, they don’t. Their agenda—one that Trump offered them, and they accepted—has nothing to do with the truth. And the reason why they don’t care about the truth, is what has led at last to an explanation for the lurch toward fascism that a sizeable portion of the electorate now seems eager to embrace. It was Rachel Maddow, in a post-debate roundtable, who finally articulated what the entirety of the political left has been unable to fathom thus far, a genuine explanation for this inexplicable behavior:
I feel like what’s happening in this Republican primary, and what’s happening in Republican
politics right now, is that the Republican party, the Republican base, the Republican electorate,
has effectively decided that they don’t really want to do politics anymore. And they’re not all that
interested in what politics is, and governing and political campaigning and policy competition
and all that stuff. They’re not interested in it. They would prefer to have a strong man, a particular
strong man who they already know and who they like, and they would prefer to have that . . .
a strong man who is going to end politics.
That, in a nutshell, explains the desire for fascism. It’s one-party rule for people who are fed up with politics. What’s so fascinating is that they’re not altogether wrong. Politics, as I’ve said many times before, is theater. It’s not real. It’s the outward manifestation of a capitalist control structure that uses wealth and power to manipulate the country from behind a curtain. Just as they do in media, they control the political process through money and influence to essentially purchase the policies they want enacted from their employees in Congress and the White House who are paid to do their bidding. Where the real disconnect comes is that the people can feel it but they don’t have the education and the rational facility to truly understand why they feel that way. They hate politics, but instead of trying to understanding why they hate it in order to do something productive to change it, they would rather destroy it all together.
But where Maddow was able to finally articulate this point, it was Joy Reid who took the idea to its logical conclusion.
The Republican party exists in a world in which, demographically, six out of the seven last
presidential elections, they can’t win the popular vote. Because the dispersion of [inclusive]
communities [and ideas] makes it very hard for them to win through conventional politics . . .
Voter suppression is the only way; gerrymandering is the only way they can actually get what
they want because what they want is so unpopular that when you put their ideas through the
political process, they can’t win . . . So when you think about it, all of politics has enraged a
certain group of Americans who can not win through politics. So what do you go to? You go
to autocracy. What do you do when something like forty percent of American adults have
given up on politics, and say, politics isn’t the answer, give me a strong man who can impose
my minority position on the rest of you?
And that is the real question. What do we do? Because this is where the parallels with Nazi Germany finally do come into play. There were no politics in Nazi Germany, no political arguments, no debates, no Reichstag intrigue, because they had done away with political parties altogether. With only one party in control of everything the populace never had to be bombarded with political wrangling, and this is what the followers of Trump apparently want, because the result of all that is that Nazi Germany also had no need for elections. But people need to be careful what they wish for, because there are other less savory aspects of fascist rule. Again, on this same post-debate coverage, it was former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele who, in talking to Maddow, expressed the fundamental problem with fascism, a dangerous and deadly problem that the vast majority of its proponents are completely unequipped to understand.
They want a strong man. They want to own the libs. They want to take out their opponents.
They don’t want to hang out with people who look like me [black]. They don’t want to talk to
people who look like you, and act like you [homosexual], and live where you live. And this
is the America they’re trying to set up, because they think they’ll feel safer in it. They think
they will be safer in it. And the reality of it is, no, you won’t, because at a certain point it comes
back on you, too, [when] you suddenly become “other” to someone else in that group.
It’s an old saw, but it was never truer than in this moment: when people put in place mechanisms to discriminate, disenfranchise, and destroy people they don’t like, they unwittingly put themselves in a position where those mechanisms can be used against them as well.
As notable as this day was for left-wing media in finally making sense of the fascist motivation of the right-wing electorate, they have all failed miserably in their obligation to move beyond politics and expose the true force behind the chaos. Corporations and wealthy individuals have been poisoning our country for hundreds of years. Their all-consuming quest to acquire ever more, at the expense of the rest of us, has led to an economic imbalance the likes of which threaten to return this country to a horrifying version of its past in which wage slavery in the north was nearly indistinguishable from the chattel slavery in the south, a past in which people were forced to work for starvation wages, living and dying in tenements and slums, unable to afford health care, unable to clothe and feed their children, afforded not even the most basic of human rights in a country that was one of the richest in the world. But even that is not the end game. What the capitalist oligarchy really wants is to turn this country into an anarchist hell-hole in which lawlessness reigns and people are encouraged to hate and harm each other instead of those responsible for their plight, where the only rights are the rights afforded by wealth and position, an autocracy kept in power through intimidation and death, in which the people are disenfranchised and downtrodden and pitted against each other, and where the rich are given a free hand to abuse the people and the land in any way they see fit in order to acquire even more. The day that is on the evening news, is the day this country will have finally turned the corner. But until that day comes it is incumbent upon the rest of us to use the political and legal avenues we still have available to us, and to resist the urge to give up and allow the fascist takeover of a country that is still very much worth saving.
No comments:
Post a Comment