Delusion

There are a myriad of reasons why America has degenerated into a fascist state. Part of the blame lies in shockingly high levels of inequality driven by decades of stagnating wages and enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, compounded by the failure to fulfill the promise that the gains of globalization that primarily went to the executive and investor class would at least be partially redistributed to the losers of globalization who had seen their jobs offshored. Part of the blame lies with the decision to not criminally prosecute white collar crime both in the economic and political sphere, as well as the abandonment of antitrust law to restrict monopoly and oligarchic power. Part of the blame lies with the judicial decisions that gutted voting rights, legalized political bribery, and allowed unconscionable amounts of money from unaccountable sources to influence our elections. But perhaps the largest driver is one that is so difficult to see, namely, that the country is filled with people who live in apparently willful denial and delusion.

The most damaging of those delusions is that the Republican party was and is some sort of normal center-right party. The modern Republican party was born in the self-avowed extremism of Barry Goldwater and the disdain for democracy itself in its opposition to voting and civil rights in furtherance of continued white supremacy. Goldwater may have lost in a landslide, but every successful Republican presidential candidate since then has used the same combination of racism and subversion of democracy at ever increasing levels. Nixon had the “Southern Strategy” and worked to scuttle LBJ’s peace process with the North Vietnamese prior to the 1968 election. It’s easy to forget amidst all of Nixon’s other criminality and assaults on our constitutional order – the secret and illegal war in Cambodia, the spying, harassment, and actual murder of his “enemies” by the FBI, CIA, and even IRS – that the point of the Watergate break-in was to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters to gain some kind of advantage in the 1972 election, a brazen assault on democracy itself.

Reagan launched the stretch run of his 1980 campaign with a “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, notorious for where the Klan had murdered three civil rights workers. Like Nixon, there is significant evidence Reagan at least tried to make a deal with Iran to scuttle Carter’s attempts to release the hostages. Again, like Nixon in Cambodia, the Iran-Contra scheme was an illegal end-run around Congress and its constitutional authority over funding. G.H.W. Bush arguably ran the most racist ad of any modern presidential campaign until Trump with his Willie Horton smear of Dukakis. In addition, he was the man who oversaw the Iran-Contra operation and pardoned those who could implicate him, effectively neutering the independent counsel’s investigation.

Bush Junior would probably not have won the GOP nomination in 2000 if not for his campaign planting the racist rumor that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child in order to win the South Carolina primary. Whatever its ultimate impact on the final result, it is clear that Bush’s team actively organized the “Brooks Brothers riot” that prevented the legal recounting of votes from continuing, yet another frontal attack on democracy by Republicans. In 2016, Trump continued the Republican electoral tradition of conspiring with foreign governments by colluding with the Russians and expanded the racism angle by extending it to all non-white immigrants. He ended his first term by trying to extort Ukraine to help him win re-election and leading a nearly successful insurrection, the most serious attack on American democracy since the Civil War.

The Republican disdain for democracy is deeply ingrained in the party. They refuse to accept electoral defeat, attempting to overturn the results in court and, in doing so, deny Democrats from governing as long as possible. Norm Coleman used this tactic to deny Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for nearly 5 months. A similar effort is now underway in the North Carolina Supreme Court race. And, of course, there is 2020 Trump with the endless court cases and finally an insurrection. Newt Gingrich turned the process of actual funding the programs the government had previously committed to into an extortion opportunity. He pulled a similar stunt with the “debt ceiling”, refusing to pay the bills that government had already incurred. Republicans continue to use both tactics to this day. Tom DeLay began in-decade gerrymanders in order to ensure Republican control of the House. GOP controlled states like Wisconsin employed gerrymanders so extreme they nearly maintained a legislative supermajority even when losing the popular vote. In states like Michigan and North Carolina, GOP controlled legislatures strip governors of power when a Democrat gets elected and expand those gubernatorial powers when a Republican wins. Lastly, Senate Republicans have packed the Supreme Court with justices who simply do not believe in voting rights, exemplified by almost the entirety of the Chief Justice’s legal career, or really even democracy itself. At the same time, they refuse to adhere to their constitutional duty to advise and consent and simply deny confirmation votes and even hearings to judges appointed by Democrats.

There is this illusion that Trump is some kind of sui generis figure who has “taken over” the Republican party. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, Trump is an unusual politician, but he is the culmination of decades of the Republican approach to politics. In fact, so much of Junior Bush’s administration presaged Trump and his tactics. The 1/6 coup attempt was just an extension of the Brooks Brothers riot. Rove’s strong-arming US Attorneys about mythical voter fraud and firing them if they refused to fabricate investigations was merely a prelude to Trump’s eternal lie of election fraud, the firing of FBI Director Comey, the fraudulent investigations into the Russian collusion investigators, and the current attacks on law firms that opposed Trump in his first term. The Bush-era kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, torture, and use of Guantanamo to avoid the protections of US legal system for supposed “terrorists” set the stage for the family separation policy that literally kidnapped children from their parents in Trump’s first term as well as the illegal roundup of legal aliens and US citizens to be transferred to both the brutal Salvadoran prison and Guantanamo of the current administration. The lies about weapons of mass destruction, the “Mission Accomplished” photo op, and Rove’s boast that the administration could “create its own reality” were the model for Trump’s constant bullshit, bilge, and bloviating.

There was no Trumpian “takeover” or new “populist” wave. The Republican party got exactly what it wanted. By the end of Trump’s first term, experts in extremism rated the GOP farther to the right than virtually every far-right party in Europe – farther right than France’s National Front and closer to Alternative for Germany – although US media coverage would make you think the opposite. In fact, the GOP was closer to Hungary’s Fidesz (the party of Orban’s virtual dictatorship) and Poland’s Law and Justice Party (the party of the recently overthrown autocratic government of the Kaczyński brothers in Poland). Today, the GOP is even more extreme, acting as a rubber stamp for open dictatorship and the most unqualified cabinet in history and more resembles the Chinese Communist Party or Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey.

The myths that surround the GOP are so at odds with reality that it seems inconceivable they can actually exist. Republicans are portrayed as the party of business and “job creation”, yet every GOP president since Reagan has overseen a recession, including the two worst since the Great Depression, and they have produced millions fewer jobs than their Democratic counterparts. The GOP is the party of “fiscal responsibility”, yet every Republican president since Jimmy Carter has increased the deficit, often massively, while their Democrats counterparts have either held it steady or decreased it massively. The GOP is perceived as “strong on defense”, yet three times as many active military have died in hostile action under Republican presidents than Democratic ones since the end of the Vietnam War. The GOP supposedly represents “real America”, but 70% of GDP is produced in Democratic counties and blue states subsidize red states on the whole. Yet Mitt Romney can insinuate that those who don’t make enough money to pay income tax, primarily Democratic voters, are the “freeloaders”. Those same “real Americans” apparently have no problem with denying civil and voting rights to other fellow citizens. The Republican platform, when they even bother to have one, is often so extreme that voters refuse to believe it is real when it is explained to them.

Considering that this country really only became something close to a full democracy with the implementation of the Voting and Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, the Republican party has essentially always been opposed to real American democracy. Under Trump 47, it has become the anti-constitutional party as well, fully supporting him as he refuses to execute the programs and spending authorized by Congress under its Artice 1 powers; ignores the 5th Amendment’s guarantee of due process; disappears lawful residents for expressing 1st Amendment rights; simply negates the 14th Amendment with his order to end birthright citizenship; destroys the separation of powers by violating judicial orders and declaring he alone is the law; seeks to unilaterally override the states’ responsibility to manage elections; talks of flaunting the 22nd Amendment’s restrictions on presidential terms; floats the idea of denaturalization; and more. The GOP has finally evolved into the fascist party that they have been building toward for the last 50 years.

Keeping these grand delusions about the Republican party alive for so many, many years requires enormous resources and numerous collaborators. The right-wing billionaires funded the propaganda platforms like Fox and the think tanks like the Heritage and Federalist Societies that put an intellectual gloss on the party’s anti-democratic ideas and maintains a stable of pseudo-scholars like the Claremont Institute with its wingnut welfare. Business leaders, when not openly supportive, tolerated the racism and the attacks on democracy in order to pocket even more dollars via massive tax breaks. More depressing is the largest voting bloc in nearly every election, those that simply don’t vote at all either out of ignorance, an unwillingness to understand how government actually works, or, worst of all, in the belief that the constancies of post New Deal governance indicates there is no real difference between the two parties.

The most infuriating enablers, however, lie within the two groups that theoretically have the most incentive to accurately describe the current Republican party – the media and Democrats themselves. Instead, members of the corporate-controlled media, especially those within the clubby world of national politics, consistently choose access over accuracy, sources over substance, mind-reading over materiality, and euphemism over truth. Their obsessive need for useless “both-sides” objectivity continually creates the impression of some kind of central equilibrium between the two parties that simply does not exist. Centrist Democrats are even worse, constantly avoiding the reality that the Republican party is the problem, and that Trump is merely the symptom. Obama, Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, and many others continue the delusion that the GOP “fever” will break when Trump is gone from the scene and wishcast the emergence or reemergence of a sane Republican party. It is not going to happen. Either out of professional courtesy or willful obtuseness, it appears that both the media and far too many Democrats can’t fathom that some seemingly normal people they spend countless hours with every day in legislative and governmental positions might actually be raging racists, foaming-at-the-mouth fascists, or power-hungry psychos who need to be called out and stopped.

Whether American democracy survives the next four years, or the years beyond that, is an open question. The level of lawlessness and clearly unconstitutional acts committed in the last two months alone should give plenty of worry. But it is clear that our democracy will remain under threat as long as we continue with our delusions about the Republican party. The party is anti-democracy, anti-constitutional, and frankly anti-American in its essential values, and is in the process of destroying the governmental, economic, scientific, educational, and strategic capabilities that have allowed the country to thrive. We will not be safe until the Republican party is in the dustbin of history like Hitler’s Nazi Socialists, Mussolini’s Republican Fascists, Franco’s Falangists, or the Soviet Communists.