Politics & Stuff

[robsblubot 3,504]

On 17/04/2022 at 06:58, manpe said:

 

It is quite remarkable to see the intellectual decline of the USA, how increasingly more influenced the masses are by ever-growing blatant populism and demagoguery. Even their last few presidents mirror that decline in society, when Trump and Biden are the most popular candidates they can put out despite having way more competent people to choose from. Could it be attributed to the lack of free or affordable education? Or is it the quality of education - or both? This is one fundamental flaw in democracy - you can't trust the people to make the best choices, but the better educated they are, the more likely they are to collectively make the best choices. We are easily influenced and manipulated, some more than others, by people or entities with power, money and control over information, who will find ways to exploit our gullible hive minds for their gains. In such cases critical thinking is essential in societies, but you can't expect that from people who are uneducated, neglected and angry, which is what I believe to be the case in the States more than in many European countries, due to us having free/cheaper education and healthcare (but that makes us commies, doesn't it).

Are the people really making the choices in a democratic-capitalist system?
I have a thought, which is far from an original one, which is that corporations (as the economy itself) are like computer software; they've got their own "way of thinking" which is guided by a set of parameters and "goals", and their power (money) will find their way into the best investment, which often turns out to be politics.

incidentally, many of these "software" (companies), which have one purpose in "life," happen to also control information. 😉

just to not sound like I'm disagreeing with you, which I'm not, the poorly educated are more likely to believe absurd claims: "we win or they stole the election" or "everyone I know voted for Trump, so it must've been rigged"

Edited May 16, 2022 by robsblubot

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thank fuck

Emmanuel Macron est réélu président pour cinq ans 

https://www.tdg.ch/des-milliers-de-francais-de-suisse-appeles-aux-urnes-904006015940

 

[cosmicway 1,323]

1st OF MAY, 2nd OF MAY, 3d of MAY AND THE REST OF THE WORKING CLASS HOLIDAYS

It's the 1st of May today, the day of the working class and the communist party.
I will only tell you the old story, which some of the youngest amongst you may not know with all its details.
There was then once upon a time in the north, where is the sea of Luxembourg today a pretty and sunlit country named Holland. The Dutch had made many dams to hold the water so the tulips grow in the fields.
What happened then in the year 1878 ;
There was a little Dutch boy, Joop Neeskens was his name, walking in the forest with his dad. Suddenly the little Dutch boy sees a hole in the dam through which water was pouring in.
Little Joop says to his dad "daddy, daddy, if I put my finger in that hole I can stop the water and save the dam".
But what happened next is history. Little Joop gets slapped in the back of his head by his daddy who says "listen here boy, are we going to put our fingers in dams now without overtime pay ?". Joop hesitated for a while and his dad after a little thought says again "as well as that the two hour work to rule about Nicaragua is due to begin ten minutes from now".
The dam of the Dutch bourgeoisie was therefore allowed to collapse ...
In this way the race of the Dutch people drawned and we lived happily ever after.
 

 

Edited April 30, 2022 by cosmicway

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the batshit christofascist white nationalism is flowing think and fast in Murica

this fuckstick and hundreds of others like him are followed by millions of armed lunatics

[Fernando 6,455]

 

 

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18 hours ago, Fernando said:

 

 

he is a clown, lol

pure troll

Edited May 19, 2022 by Vesper

[manpe 10,861]

Peter Kalmus: ‘As a species, we’re on autopilot, not making the right decisions’ | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Shut down fossil fuel production sites early to avoid climate chaos, says study | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

Revealed: the ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

Some depressing reading there regarding the state of our climate. Horrendous stuff, psychopathic billionaires have taken over the world. I don't believe there is anything we can do anymore but just wait and see how everything goes to shit.

 

Edited May 22, 2022 by manpe

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Tax rises, handouts, law-breaking: what do the Tories stand for now?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/29/tax-rises-handouts-law-breaking-what-do-the-tories-stand-for-now

After a week in which Boris Johnson’s character has been at the heart of public debate, Conservative MPs worry about what has happened to their party

After yet another long and difficult week in the premiership of Boris Johnson, Conservative MPs returned to their constituencies on Thursday and Friday wondering what on earth they would say to voters back home.

“I just have to talk about what I have done for my area and try not to mention what is going on here [at Westminster],” said one former minister. “It is the only way I have any chance of winning next time.”

Wednesday had seen the senior civil servant Sue Gray publish her damning verdict on “Partygate”. Despite repeated denials from Johnson that any parties had taken place, Gray methodically laid out details of 16 events – several attended by the prime minister himself – with examples of excessive drinking, mistreatment of cleaning and other staff, and general Covid rule-breaking at the heart of power.

“The senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture,” she said. The prime minister responded initially by telling MPs he was “humbled”, before defiantly rewriting the ministerial code so that ministers would not always be expected to resign for breaking rules. To the astonishment of many in his own party he also removed a section from the code about the importance of ethics in government.

After Gray, the government was, however, desperate to “move on” from Partygate and address “the people’s priorities” in order to stop the flow of negative news and court some desperately needed popularity.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, obliged on Thursday with a £15bn package of help for those struggling with the cost of living, to be paid for in part by a windfall tax on the spiralling profits of oil and gas firms.

It mattered not to Johnson that Labour had been proposing such a tax for five months and that he had repeatedly rejected it for being too anti-business, and essentially unTory. Conservative whips had ordered Tory MPs three times to vote against Labour’s proposal over recent weeks in the Commons.

But as Sunak unveiled what he called the “temporary, targeted energy profits levy” – Labour’s plan renamed and repackaged – Johnson grinned across the dispatch box, seemingly delighted to have pulled off such a brazen theft of the opposition’s big idea for tackling the cost of living crisis.

These have been confusing and, for many, dispiriting times to be a Tory MP. Many confide privately that it is not just Johnson’s behaviour, the rule-breaking and misleading over parties that is difficult to defend and grinding them down. At the same time, they say, there is also a broader issue – a wider identity crisis – that his premiership has created.

The problem of the leader, they say, is one thing. The direction in which the party at large is heading ideologically under his stewardship, another. What does it stand for, what does it believe in?

Under Margaret Thatcher – certainly by the end of her premiership – the answer to those questions was abundantly clear. Conservatism meant rolling back the frontiers of the state, getting government off people’s backs and out of their lives as far as possible, lowering taxes and giving people a greater share of the money they earned. It was also about strong leadership and a respect for law and order.

Today, many Conservative MPs struggle to identify any of those as characteristics in the post-Covid administration of Boris Johnson. Rather Johnsonism, if it is anything, is defined by chaos, rule-breaking, U-turns and economic policies that are the reverse of Thatcherite. Rather than cut taxes to stimulate growth, as many Tory MPs would have wanted, Johnson’s team has raised them to heights not seen for decades.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said last week that in little over a year Sunak had imposed tax rises similar in scale to those introduced over 10 years of Gordon Brown’s chancellorship, leaving the UK with the highest overall tax burden since the 1960s.

Asked after Sunak’s statement what the Tories’ biggest problem was, one minister said: “It is that we don’t have a clear strategy. It is that we are not clear what we are.”

Even the most ardent Thatcherites on the Tory backbenches recognise that in exceptional times such as the present, pragmatism has to trump ideology. They know that a cost of living crisis needs big interventions by the centre.

But the increasing worry on the right, and in the Tory-supporting media, is that the entire Conservative brand – the offering – is now fuzzy and unclear, as well as contaminated by what has gone on in No 10.

Anxiety about a lack of identity is spreading. On Wednesday, as rumours spread that Sunak would adopt Labour’s windfall tax plan, the Tory MP for Carlisle, John Stevenson, rose at prime minister’s questions, seeking reassurance. “Labour and socialism have failed the country because their failed policies interfere too much in people’s lives, over-regulate, spend too much taxpayers’ money, borrow too much and raise taxes. Will the prime minister tell the House what policies his government will follow to ensure that we do not have a similar fate?” Johnson replied by focusing narrowly on reductions to national insurance but dodged the thrust of the question.

After Sunak’s announcement, Tory commentators despaired that the party seemed to have ditched its commitment to low taxation.

Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Friday: “After years banging on about the case for low taxation – the quaint idea that societies are fairer and stronger when people are allowed to keep more of the money they earn – the Tories have now given up.

“Handouts are preferred to general tax cuts, allowing the state to choose winners and losers. Ed Miliband’s old idea about good and bad companies (the ‘predators’) is now back. Taxation is spoken of in moral terms: a tool to service justice to stubborn companies making ‘excess’ profits.”

The Daily Mail described Sunak’s package as a “£21bn splurge” and asked “when will the Tories get back to just cutting taxes?”. In the Commons, the Conservative MP Richard Drax was one of several who questioned what was going on. Addressing Sunak, he said: “I warn my right honourable friend that throwing red meat to socialists, by raising taxes on businesses and telling them where to invest their money, is not the Conservative way of encouraging those who create our prosperity and jobs to do just that. Does he agree that, by setting this bar, we are in danger … of allowing the socialists to raise it, which they would do with relish again, again and again?”

The former Tory cabinet minister David Gauke said he felt for MPs who had to defend the prime minister and also make clear to voters what the current Conservative party stood for. “They have a broad coalition of voters to satisfy, a leader who does not have deep beliefs and an exceptional crisis. I completely see why Tory MPs are worried. All they have is cultural wedge issues like [sending asylum seekers to] Rwanda. But that does not amount to a strategy.”

As Gauke suggested, Johnson has a set of challenges that no Tory leader before him has had to address. One is the economic aftermath of the Covid pandemic, compounded by the effects of war in Ukraine.

But the other is the consequence of his own past success. By leading the Conservatives to an 80-seat majority at the 2019 general election, with promises to “get Brexit done”, and by exploiting fears of a Jeremy Corbyn government, Johnson broke through the red wall and inherited a complex and incoherent coalition of Tory voters with wildly differing priorities and needs.

Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, says the difficulties of serving this coalition help explain some of the discontent: “The ‘red wall’ seats gained in 2019 are deprived places where state intervention is sorely needed and very popular. Local MPs, even if they personally favour low taxes and a small state (and not all of them do), respond to the context they face, and therefore favour the big state interventionism of ‘levelling up’.

“But the money for that has to come from somewhere, and as the government faces growing economic pressure, Conservative MPs from wealthier bits of the south of England increasingly worry that ‘levelling up’ ultimately means taking money from their voters and giving it to voters elsewhere.

“MPs who don’t like big spending on principle like it even less when it is their voters paying the bills but seeing little of the benefit. This, I suspect, is the root cause of some of the disquiet.”

What is beyond doubt is that many Tory MPs are now very worried indeed that, after 12 years in government, the period of Conservative rule could be nearing an end. Sir Bob Neill, one of those who has demanded a leadership contest, told the Observer on Saturday that the mix of leadership issues over parties and the absence of clear direction was potentially lethal for his party. “When you put the trust issue and the identity issue together, you do have a pretty toxic mix as far as voters are concerned.”

Already there is evidence of support slipping away. A YouGov MRP poll for the Times on Friday found that the Conservatives face virtual wipeout behind the red wall, and severe losses in the south of England, with Johnson himself set to lose his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat along with the former leader Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green.

The poll suggests the Tories would lose all but three of 88 battleground seats they hold by a slim margin over Labour. The former Tory cabinet minister David Davis said his colleagues could “see their own seats disappearing” as his party’s popularity plunged and Johnson hung on to power without a wider sense of purpose. On Saturday, the former health minister Steve Brine became the latest MP to send a letter to the chairman of the 1922 committee, Sir Graham Brady, expressing no confidence in Johnson’s leadership. “I have said throughout this sorry saga I cannot and will not defend the indefensible. Rule-makers cannot be law-breakers.”

In the very short term, Johnson looks safe. But the number demanding a leadership contest is climbing daily towards the figure of 54 needed to trigger a contest. So far, 23 have gone public but others have put in letters without announcing they have done so. Brady refuses to reveal the figures.

After the Gray report and Sunak’s announcement, on Wednesday and Thursday respectively, there was said to be a celebratory mood in No 10 because the PM’s team felt he had pulled through. “They think they have won. They are in full bulldozer mood,” said a senior party official who used to work there.

In the wider parliamentary party, however, such optimism is not widely shared as Conservative MPs ponder not only whether to get rid of their leader but also, increasingly, what their party stands for with him in charge.

 

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What Would An American Fascist Government Look Like?

We can’t pretend we don’t know what’s happening and where it will lead if it’s not stopped - the question is what we will do about it

https://hartmannreport.com/p/what-would-an-american-fascist-government

 

It’s time to talk about what an American fascist government would look like. The word “fascism” gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out.

It’s critical to lay out what a fascist America would look like now because this is what is being envisioned right now by many in the Republican Party, and it might come to pass.

They don’t talk about it out loud very much, like Nixon’s man G. Gordon Liddy used to back in the day when he signed memos using Hitler’s SS symbol. But there is a model here and they do have something in mind.

What could it be? What would it look like? How will it most likely come about?

First, and essential to American fascism, Republicans envision a strong-man Leader who will hold power for as long as he (it’s always a “he”) chooses, with the transition to the next Leader determined by the Leader himself.

This has been the primary characteristic of every fascistic government to emerge in the 7000-year written history of the modern world.

When Trump was running for re-election, at rallies in both Nevada and Wisconsin, he came right out and said that not only would he win the 2020 election but that he’d also be re-elected again in 2024.  He was dead serious. 

Sure, our constitution says a president can only serve two terms: so did the Russian constitution, until Putin got it amended. Trump was planning the same, and his followers were — if the response at the rallies when he announced it is any indicator — ecstatic at the prospect.

That single strongman Leader is the key to understanding everything else that happens when a country flips from democracy to oligarchy to fascism.

For example, in a fascist state the way that you as an average citizen ensure your own advancement and economic, personal, and political security is by sucking up to that man. You either become an acolyte/follower or you find yourself on the outside looking in.

If you think this sounds extreme, just look at today’s Republican Party.

Liz Cheney spoke against Trump and the Wyoming GOP expelled her and Trump is supporting a primary challenger. Four Republicans who voted to impeach Trump have faced such a backlash that they’ve decided to retire at the end of this term: Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzalez, John Katko, and Fred Upton.

Republican freshman Congressman Chris Jacobs, representing a district including parts of Buffalo, NY, was forced to withdraw from this year’s primary (and, thus, he’ll be retiring from the House) because after the Buffalo massacre he spoke against Trump’s and his party’s embrace of assault weapons.

Not only is fealty to the Leader required for political advancement, it’s also a requirement for individual economic advancement.  Employers eager for state contracts or the Leader’s endorsements of their products or services demote or fire those insufficiently loyal to the Leader.

Psychologist Dr. Bandy Lee was fired from Yale University for tweeting that Trump was mentally ill. Schoolteacher Leah Kinyon was fired from her job for saying that “I hate Donald Trump. … He is a sexual predator. He’s a literal moron.” Juli Brisker was fired from her job with government contractor Akima for giving Trump’s motorcade the finger.

Rebekah Jones was fired by Ron DeSantis for telling the truth about his covering up Florida Covid statistics. Florida’s Orange County Health Director Dr. Raul Pino was removed for encouraging his staff to get vaccinated.

When companies defy the Leader they are brutally punished, as DeSantis is doing right now to Disney and the Tampa Bay Rays. Soon companies don’t even try to stand up to the Leader, including media companies.

And now DeSantis has signed legislation giving him the authority to “hold accountable” college professors, reviewing their politics every five years so those who aren’t totally on board with the agenda can lose tenure and be fired. The headline at Salon says it all:

“DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state: Universities may lose funding if staff and students' beliefs do not satisfy Florida's GOP-run legislature.”

You end up doing things on the Leader’s behalf, whether you’re supporting his party, working at a private corporation, or engaged in the nonprofit sector like teaching at a university or medical center.

Defying or challenging the Leader brings opprobrium; supporting the Leader is the path to career advancement.  The Trump White House and DeSantis Governor’s Office are filled with examples.

Everything is done for the Leader because the Leader is the state. The state and the Leader have become one.

If you challenge the Leader, you’re challenging the state, and that’s treason.

Whatever the Leader says becomes the law. This is called “rule by decree” and it’s where every fascist in history has ended up.

The power to rule by decree goes back to the days of kings and is also embedded in our laws about the president’s emergency powers. Trump came close to invoking it with an “emergency declaration” when he lost the election. General Flynn begged him to do it and “temporarily suspend the Constitution.”

Next time, he won’t be so restrained and he will have surrounded himself in advance with people like Flynn who will make it happen. While it will change how power is distributed in our government, things will still look much the same.

If a fascist like Trump rises to power again in the United States, there will still be all the trappings of democracy.

The House and Senate, state houses and governors, bureaucracies and political systems will remain intact. Everything looks normal on the surface.

But when you peel off the top layer, you discover that all of those people in all of those offices, whether elected or bureaucratic, are serving only one principle and one person and that is the Leader.

There will even be opposition parties and political candidacies in a Republican fascist America, although if any of them seriously challenge the Leader or show the ability to disrupt the status quo they’ll be discovered to have a secret drug habit or get imprisoned for corruption or other made-up charges.

The prosperity of the company you work for depends in part on how well it supports the politics of the Leader.

The Leader helps a few dozen oligarchs seize control of the nation’s major industries, and every smaller company in each of those industries must directly or indirectly answer to that oligarch.

Those who fail to are bought out, shut down, or simply cannot find customers or supplies because nobody will do business with them.

The industry where this is most visible at first is the media.

Some media organizations will be absorbed by the government itself, as Putin has done in Russia; others will be bought out and run by the Leader’s oligarch buddies, as is the case today in Hungary and Turkey (among others).

Soon opposition voices vanish from all but the most obscure media, and those few opposing voices that are tolerated are pointed to by the Leader as proof the nation is still an open democracy.

Jews and people of color may find a rougher time maintaining a job or staying safe from vigilantes, abuse, and discrimination but whites will be just fine, particularly white men.

There will still be Christmas parties, although people celebrating Hanukkah or Muslims praying may want to pull the shades closed.

Hate crimes and murders by vigilante groups start happening with such frequency that the media doesn’t bother to report them anymore.

Within a few years a little bit of every business activity in the country ends up in the Leader’s pocket. And the Leader uses that revenue to enrich himself, his inner circle, and those who are part of his military entourage, his private military.

That’s right: the Leader’s private military.

It’d be put together like what Ron DeSantis is organizing in Florida right now, a state-sanctioned militia that answers only to the Leader, in this case DeSantis. Trump tried the same, flying Customs and Border Protection officers into Portland where they hit the streets without identification on their uniforms to beat and kidnap people protesting George Floyd’s murder.

When the private militia is created at the federal level it’ll become a substantial national military force with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under the Leader’s direct command. Hitler’s was called the SS and answered only to the Leader himself. Mussolini had his, as do Putin, Erdoğan, el-Sisi, and others today.

Citing “national security,” the Leader’s private militia will have an undisclosed and therefore vast budget. Outside of times it’s called on to intimidate people or make a public display of power, it’ll largely operate in secret.

It’s members won’t have to obey the law because, as agents of the Leader who’s above the law, they are, too. If they have to kill somebody, there will be no investigation unless it’s to cover up the crime. If they need to make somebody disappear, that person disappears.

They, along with the Leader’s allies, promote a law-and-order crime ideology in public that results in high levels of incarceration, heavily militarized police, and a disregard for the general rights of the average citizen, particularly racial and religious minorities.

This is how the kind of government the Donald Trump was trying to establish in America has played out, over and over again, across the world and throughout history.

In our own time we’ve seen it in Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Cuba, Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela, and dozens of other countries around the world less well known for the nature of the government.

It may call itself left-wing or right-wing, but what really matters is that all power and authority rests with the Leader. Stalin was every bit the fascist that Hitler and Mussolini were; his fascism just had a different face and brand.

As dystopian as all this may sound, there are more governments in the world run this way today than there are democracies. It’s “normal.” Once established it’s almost impossible to dislodge without a crisis like the death of the Leader or an actual revolution.

Some of the governments around the world that are structured like this were democracies that turned fascist, like Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But many have been this way for centuries, like hereditary kingdoms in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

So, how do the democratic countries that make the transition to fascism allow that to happen? And what is life like in those countries, both during and after it’s happened?

After World War II, a Chicago reporter named Milton Mayer struggled to understand how Hitler was able to flip one of the world’s most stable democracies into fascism.

An American Jew of German ancestry and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany seven years after Hitler’s fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing what happened once the Leader seized power:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”

Did the German people realize they’d abandoned democracy? That they would soon become international pariahs? The college professor Mayer interviewed answered:

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.

“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.

“And one day it is over his head.”

Is it possible this could happen in America? That all these “small steps” would one day lead to a dictatorial form of government that has so cowed the people, the politicians, and even the business community and media that it can’t be challenged?

Doesn’t the nation rise up and protest the destruction of its own democracy? Don’t the people pour into the streets?

Mayer’s professor gave us the answer:

“You see, one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

“You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”

We can’t say we weren’t warned by our own people, our own politicians, the most senior members of our own institutional power structure. 

In a speech that was hysterically criticized by Republicans and Fox “News“ pundits, President Obama in December of 2017 came right out and said it:

“You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we've seen societies where that happens.”

Yes, the former President of the United States was invoked Nazi Germany five years ago while Donald Trump was President, adding:

“Now, presumably, there was a ballroom in Vienna in the late 1920s or ’30s that looked and seemed as if it ― filled with the music and art and literature and the science that was emerging ― would continue into perpetuity. 

“And then,” President Obama said, “60 million people died. And the entire world was plunged into chaos.”

The warnings have been there all along. I wrote of this in 2005, quoting Mayer and going off on Bush and the PATRIOT Act as the prequel to fascism. 

Americans have been shouting about it lately, in venues like The New York Times and Madeline Albright’s book and from legislators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But how do we know? Is there a sudden proclamation by the Leader that the nation is now “officially fascist”?

Back to Mayer’s German friend in 1954:

“But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

I thought about this quote yesterday when a caller to my radio/TV show told the story of his very progressive son who moved to Tennessee and married a local woman; now he’s a complete Trump-humper who uses the N-word at the slightest provocation and rails about Jews and communists. He obsessively watches Fox “News” and listens to right wing radio.

America is changing as you read these words. In this fall’s election many of us will no longer be able to know if our voices, our attempts to vote, will actually decide who leads our nation. 

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that you can be purged from the voting rolls on a whim. In most states Republicans can take over electoral precincts, install their people (as we just learned they are doing right now) and run them under whatever rules they want.

Already, when the GOP inflicts 10-hour lines to vote on a state’s people, for example, you go to jail if you bring them water. If you make a mistake on your voting registration or ballot they can choose to send you to prison for five years or more.

Somehow, of the many people from both parties who are busted for this, only the Democrats end up going to prison.

And yet everything seems “normal.” As Mayer’s professor friend told him, when the Leader finally seizes control of all the levers of power from political to economic to spiritual, everything changes but everything also stays the same:

“The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. 

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. 

“Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

We’re already quite a ways down this road, which is why our democracy has been rated by numerous international groups as being “at risk” or similar designations.

Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the proliferation of phony media selling rightwing propaganda as “news,” armed militias on our streets (and the GOP recruiting them for “election monitors”) are the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?” Mayer’s friend asked rhetorically. 

And, without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, Mayer had to candidly answer: “Frankly, I do not know.”

That was 1954; this is 2022. We now know.

We know how the poisonous hate that animates fascism seeps into a society because we’ve seen it ourselves in the 4 years of the Trump administration.

We know how easily a government can be toppled and how close we came in 2020: if just five Republicans had not refused to go along with Trump we’d be in this fascist dystopia today.

We can’t pretend we don’t know what’s happening and where it will lead if it’s not stopped.

The question is what we will do about it.

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Bombs Away

[Vesper 28,795]

delete

Edited June 11, 2022 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,795]