Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum
Killing always follows dehumanization. Always. There are many examples of this immutable fact that litter history, and will continue to do so. The loss of national memory around what happens after dehumanization begins is an astonishment of this era.
American society is careening towards an abyss, caused by a series of profound ruptures that are all rooted in a betrayal of trust and a breach of faith. The simple truth of the matter is that vast geographies of America are unseen, unheard, invisible and voiceless. Many of these places were once vibrant and joyful. Today, they are barely surviving. They have been hollowed out and left behind.
What does toughness look like? Great movies always stand as monuments and reflections around deep truths of their era. Let’s use the iconic performance of Michael Douglas as Wall Street vulture Gordon Gekko competing for the soul of Charlie Sheen, whose father Martin Sheen, is cast as a union man and airline mechanic.
“Greed is good. Greed is right.”
This became the ethos of an era during which toughness became associated with economic predation.
The tough guy wasn’t the steel worker. The tough guy was the junk bond scammer.
The tough guy wasn’t someone who got knocked down and kept getting back up, it became the man who stepped on the man who kept trying to get back up.
What lifted that man or woman back up was toughness. What pushed them back down was meanness and cruelty. Only a sick society can’t tell the difference between meanness and toughness.
The economic predator was mythologized, and became an avatar of a type of transgressive, soft guy toughness in which the suit became armor and the MBA a sword.
The union jacket became a mark of loss — and Americans don’t like loss. They look away from it.
Toughness isn’t associated with loss in America. It’s associated with winning.
It was beyond true that one group of people was winning, while another group of Americans was losing.
The losers became increasingly disdained by the winners, who treated them with contempt and mockery — before forgetting about them all together.
What grew out of the collapse of the American social compact was a great taker class of elites. They sit atop a grotesque concentration of power across the whole of the economy — from agriculture to technology.
The sum result of the collapse of America’s manufacturing economy was the destruction of the American middle class and the concept of upward mobility. The pursuit of happiness was wiped out for tens of millions of people.
The strength of the country is not derivative of its hedge fund billionaires, tech moguls, media moguls, or the prosperity of five per cent of the population. It is rooted in the American middle class.
The economic destabilization of the American middle class has destabilized the whole of the nation.
It has created the conditions for a demagogue to ignite an extremist movement grounded in malice, scapegoating, lies, dehumanization and ultimately violence.
We stand at that hour, and it is the responsibility of one man above all others in America.
This hour has been indisputably abetted by a relatively small pack of billionaire predators who have stoked and incited insanity for power and money. Today, a cabal of constitutional miscreants, political extremists, religious fanatics, and rapacious billionaires sit comfortably in the White House. They are flush with unbridled arrogance and a sense that they are kings and we are serfs. They are revolutionaries who have outpaced the necessities of restraint or the wisdom of the Constitution.
Elon Musk hasn’t come to Washington, DC, to perfect the Union, but instead to shatter it and create something new.
Are you ready for what that might be?
Me either.
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Over and over again, the American people have been told that things are fine and are going to be okay.
They are not.
We are at the edge of a terrible season in this country. Before long, it will be the one thing we can all recognize as being true. The era of make-believe will end the hard way before reality resets the clock.
Regardless of what the algorithm says, or the White House liars claim, or the cowed anchorman or woman asserts, the simple truths of misery tend to overwhelm the delights of looking at pictures of the curated lives of oligarchs from aboard $500,000,000.00 yachts.
Misery is coming to America because the government has fallen into the hands of the greatest assemblage of wack jobs, weirdos, extremists, incompetents, bullies, liars, criminals, drunks and sexual predators that have ever come together outside the walls of either a prison or asylum.
They have immense power that they intend to use and abuse to take as much as they can get for as long as they can get it.
What these people are doing demands opposition. In Washington, DC, it should come from more than Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, but if he is going to be the opposition, then he should be the opposition leader — which is obviously a different job than being minority leader of the US Senate.
The Senate minority leader thinks he is winning:
Elon Musk knows that he is winning:
The opposition leader thus far — Chris Murphy — knows that we are losing and cannot be defeated, lest we lose the republic. Yesterday, in an interview on ABC News' "This Week,” he said the following:
I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly since Watergate. The president is attempting to seize control of power, and for corrupt purposes.
[For the record, it is infinitely more serious than Watergate.]
The president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can reward his political friends, he can punish his political enemies. That is the evisceration of democracy.
You can't just rely on the courts. Ultimately, you've got to bring the American public into this conversation, because we need our Republican colleagues in the House and in the Senate, ultimately, to put a stop to this. You cannot just rely on the court system when the challenge to the Constitution and the billionaire takeover is so acute and so urgent.
This is a fundamental corruption, and democracies don't last forever, and what those who are trying to destroy democracies want is for everyone to stay quiet, for everyone to believe that the moment isn't urgent.
Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. There are Democrats in Washington, DC, with titles, but those titles do not make them leaders — and certainly not national leaders.
Who will step up? Who will meet the moment and rise to the occasion? Who can see the crisis clearly, articulate its dimensions, chart a path through it, and inspire people to follow? These are the most important questions in the months ahead.
Who will it be?
True enough history, but you neglect to include the fact that the modern Republican Party, starting with Reagan, started all of this. The cruel cutting- remember de-funding mental hospitals? Demonizing “welfare queens,” and shredding social safety nets? Remember when Reagan broke the unions, starting with the air traffic controllers? And the teachers’ union? And running up the deficit by cutting taxes for the rich? And he was senile and addled by Alzheimer’s during at least the last two years of his second term. Every single Republican president does it, and every democratic president is left to clean it up.
How about Jamie Raskin? I saw him on TV over the weekend & he thinks outside the box. He proposed a class action suit that includes all Americans vs Elon Musk for violating privacy laws. He's definitely a fighter. We need new ideas & somebody aggressive. I also think general strikes by federal workers as opposed to public protests might work better. Give people a taste of what life will be like with a drastically diminished government workforce.