Never have so many shown their true political colors in such a short space of time. In the one week — from the Constitutionally mandated opening of the new Congress Jan. 3 through the following Saturday — the nation’s entire political spectrum revealed itself in rapid succession.
First left, then right and finally center laid themselves bare for all to see. And for those hoping for a happy ending, only profound disappointment awaited, if not depression.
First in line to disappoint were the progressives - The Squad, in marketing-speak.
For a brief and rare moment at the dawn of the 117th Congress, alleged “firebrands” like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar et al had a real bargaining chip. Multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi wanted to extend her speakership and, with her majority actually (and incredibly) narrowing during an election if which Donald Trump led the other team, progressive representatives actually had leverage.
It took Jimmy Dore, a comedian, fittingly, to point this out, but that was the reality: If a mere handful of the most “radical” members of Congress temporarily withheld their votes from Ms. Pelosi, a promise of a floor vote for Medicare For All could have been wheedled out of the “leader.” The math was simple: The Dems had a margin of only 11 votes propping up their majority, and there are 100 alleged members of the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives.
You would think our defenders of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free (or, frankly, yearning to breathe at all) would have leapt at this chance to force every member of Congress — all of them — to go on the record on the immensely popular idea of extending health to the entire population during a pandemic. The fieriest of the fiery had, after all, vowed to stare power in the face and demand a vote!
“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare for All,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had lamented last January. “Not even a floor vote that gets voted down. We can’t even get a vote on it.”
True.
Not with AOC leading the “charge.”
Yes, there were holdouts on giving Pelosi another two years in which to do nothing.
Five Dems declined to vote for the octogenarian, but (get this) they were “moderates,” not progressives.
That’s right, folks, Democratic moderates — a virtual synonym for lack of courage and principle-had more backbone than our supposed Marxist revolutionaries.
So the week began ominously, with the progressives proving themselves worthless.
How could things get worse?
Easily, it turns out.
The whiff of Wintergreen had barely dissipated from the hallowed halls of democracy, where plots are supposed to arise to overthrow FOREIGN governments, not the domestic one, before the hyperbole began.
The dada coup de deplorables was Kristallnacht redux, claimed some former body-builder.
No, no, no it was all about sending a gift to that greater bogeyman Putin, insisted Pelosi.
The riot at mid-week was a tragedy which cost several lives and unquestionably further damaged the fabric of American democracy.
But not in the way most people now self-servingly claim.
It was not an attempted coup.
Real coup plotters would have brought guns along, and if there is one thing we can say confidently about the men who showed up for this thing it is that they own plenty of weapons.
But what did we get?
Zeroes with zip ties.
The danger here, I argue, is not an imminent threat but rather a gestating one.
Democracy requires first a relatively sane populace (d’oh!) and second a dedication to principle, not personage.
That a sizeable enough bloc of Trump’s supporters can persuade themselves that the election was stolen casts the first proposition in serious doubt (though the continuing insistence by centrist Dems that Trump was a Manchurian candidate hardly exonerates the other half of the electorate).
That enough of these people apparently thought it a good idea to go storm Congress to keep it from certifying the vote suggests the second rube-icon has been crossed.
To be clear: These people are dedicated to one man — an egomaniac and nothing else-not to the principles of their self-avowed patriotism.
This is the classic hallmark of a society getting ready for dictatorship.
But the danger for now is not life-threatening.
Enough voters in America saw Trump for what he was and voted to remove him.
And our institutions — even odious Mike Pence- were still up to the job of seeing off this joke of a president.
So the question now becomes: What happens if a skilled and intelligent fascist — not one who just plays one on Twitter- comes along next?
What happens, in short, if nothing is done to change the trajectory of American economics, society and politics?
Doing nothing is of course where our ruling “centrist” Democrats come in, as they, too, showed by the end of the week.
Actually, that’s not accurate.
If the Democrats only did nothing, harm to the Republic would be minimized.
Act indeed they did, but in ways destructive to democracy.
Their response to the crazy-uncle coup, of course, was a rush to censorship.
“It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.”
Replace “press” here with “Twitter” or “Social Media” or “Facebook” and many of today’s Democrats would heartily concur.
Even (or especially) those who would call themselves “liberals.”
Unfortunately for them, the quotation is not from the Federalist Papers but rather Mein Kampf.
According to Democrats, social media is little more than a mouthpiece for Putin or white supremacists or Trumpists or whatever, all being pretty much the same in their imagination. It must therefor be muzzled so that evil goes away. That, anyway, seems to be the sum total of their response to the “coup.”
No reckoning is to be had with economic decay, social dissolution, regional disparity or any of the other very real forces which made Trump’s rise possible in the first place.
And it quickly became clear that reprisal-not reconciliation-would be the order of the day.
Abraham Lincoln, just a month before his murder, thought ahead to the formidable task of bringing back together a victorious North and a humiliated South in the aftermath of the US Civil War. That he did not survive to pursue his vision of “ malice toward none, with charity for all” laid out in his second inaugural unquestionably redounded to the great damage of the national geographic and sectarian divide which persists so disastrously to this day.
Today, there are no such statesmen or stateswomen big enough — moral enough-to put aside blood lust for revenge and petty thirst for factional advancement based on this petty fiasco, which comes nowhere near the gravity of the divide Lincoln was trying to bridge. Lincoln faced outright rebellion-a civil war costing 600,000 lives, fought in the name of preserving slavery. Last week? Tragic deaths worthy of punishment to the full extent of the law. But was the outrage so great to take the deep divisions in American society and make them permanent through acts of revenge, opportunism and petty political gain?
It is amazing that the response to a riot dedicated to blind authoritarianism is . . . authoritarian.
Bowing to immense pressure, Twitter and Facebook of course banned Trump outright, and a nearly unanimous chorus instantly grew among the rest of our enlightened “liberals” to erase alternate social media sites from our collective consciousness.
It fell to a slightly more enlightened Teutonic voice, that of Angela Merkel, to raise even the slightest doubt about the wisdom of ceding to our high-tech wizards/billionaires the right to silence the elected president of the United States. “Problematic,” understated a woman who knows all too well the dangers of Stalinist AND Nazi extremism.
Depressing, certainly, for anyone hoping the spirit of civil society could survive such an onslaught.
But even that was not all for the week.
Amidst all the insistence that the response to the attack was all about opposing violence — especially against violence on the Internet!-the man who actually used the Internet to reveal violence of the most brutal, anti-democratic kind was told that he would have to remain in jail for doing so.
Julian Assange rots in prison, while the US press, whose rights to print the truth he now faces being thrown permanently down a rathole for defending, basically ignores the case.
This is the pass to which we have come.
A progressive movement which cowers from even symbolic fights, a right wing all too ready to fight for all of the ugliness a declining America can dream up, a “centrist” party of corporate power interested only in sneering at its foes while consolidating its own prerogatives, and a press incapable even of recognizing the threat to its own existence.
We live in dangerous times indeed.
Unbeknown to most.
I
