After The Harvest The Thresher Rolled Merrily Along

Y'know, I've been writing about the Republican Doomsday Machine for long time now.  

Here's a quick sampling.  

From "Ain't no Party Like a Whig Party" (2014):

You will find no mention of the terrible wingnut Doomsday Machine that Conservatives like David Brooks eagerly helped construct and set in motion -- a machine built to create precisely the havoc which Mr. Brooks now weeps over.

From "Joe Scarborough Uses Up His Question Mark Quota For The Decade" (2018):

[Addressing Joe Scarborough] Your party ignored decades of dire warnings from people like me and went ahead and built a political Doomsday machine to fuck over people like me.  And in November of 2016, your good friend Donald Trump and his Russian handler Vladimir Putin took it away from you and are currently using it to blow shit up that you actually care about.

From "Adam Kinzinger's SuperPAC to Hang Out if You Ever Want to Rap or Just Get Weird With Somebody" (2021)

So Conservatives like you [Charlie Sykes] spent decades wrecking the country and creating a Republican doomsday machine with no "off" switch.  And now that that doomsday machine has run out of your control, you think it is mean and unfair that the people you spent decades ignoring, reviling and generally fucking over don't trust you because you won't deal on the square with the fact that You.  Built.  This.

From "John Boehner Lines Up For His Shot of Cheap Grace" (2021):

Cheap Grace Republicans like Weepin' John [Boehner] want to be remembered for having heroically said spicy things about the state of their party long, long after it was too late.  And would very much like America not to remember the role they played in building that party in the first place and in mocking and slandering anyone trying to warn them that they were building a democracy-destroying doomsday machine.  In this case, what Weepin' John would very much like America to refrain from remembering that, for all of his boozy bluster, he voted for Trump.

Twice

And the electoral Doomsday Machine which I wrote about was one that arrogant Conservative elites thought they could control because they always believed there was a magic switch.  A magic AZ-5 switch (see the video) -- a Dubya switch or a Jeb! switch or a Chris Christie switch -- that would cool things down if the machine started to run out of control.

But there wasn't.

From "The Doomsday Machine" (2022):

For decades, while the establishment media masturbated itself blind in their Platonic Cave, the GOP has been worked diligently to create an unstoppable Gingrich/Limbaugh political Doomsday Machine.

A Doomsday Machine that could not be reasoned with or bargained with.

A Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch.

And they succeeded.  

What really depresses me, dear reader, is the fact that I wrote about exactly this accelerating phenomenon on the Right using exactly this same metaphor long before Trump was anything but a skeevy New York real estate scumbag, and long before Barack Obama was a blip on the presidential radar.  The year was 2006.  The month was September.  The post was "Reactionary".  Here's the graphic.

And here's a short snip:

Because if the entire Right Wing understands anything it is this – as frustrating and degrading as it is to men like Trent Lott, Tom Tancredo, G. Felix Allen and Rick Santorum who really, really want to shout their love for all things Segregated and/or Despotic from the rooftops, it is still not socially acceptable to publicly embrace and celebrate your Inner Klansman.

Thus they must commune with their Swine Army in code.

They must use lightly encrypting hatespeech to manipulate the Rove Rods to get the Electoral Reactor Core seething hot enough to activate the base...but always keep the Bobo Koolant level of soothing denial, spin and outright lies juuust high enough to keep the Moderates from being directly exposed to and freaked out by the unshielded Core of the GOP.

The only thing that changed in 2015/2016 was that the  Electoral Reactor Core had been kept running so hot and openly racist during the GOP's Fake Tea Party phase that by the time 2015 rolled around the base was hungry for someone who would go all the way.  Yank the rods out, dump all the coolant and stop speaking in code.  

It is a lie that somehow Trump hijacked the Republican base.  Quite the opposite: they happily tossed him the keys and begged him to drive.  Because after being flattered and pandered to by party bosses and Conservative elites for decades -- party bosses and Conservative elites who always promised them the moon and stars to get 'em to the polls but left the high and dry and scurried away back the respectable side of town once the election was over -- the racist base finally figured out that they had all the power.

That they were the party, not the party bosses and Conservative elites.

And once they figured that out, they manifested the candidate of their heart's deepest, most racist desire.  A candidate who would speak to them in their own language.  Not the perfumed code-talk of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but the language of Gingrich and Hate Radio and Fox News.  A candidate who would take the party bosses and Conservative elites by the throat and make 'em squeal and cry and bend the knee to the mob instead of the other way around.

And what further depresses me, dear reader, is the fact that I also wrote about this exact dynamic long before Trump was anything but a skeevy New York real estate scumbag, and long before Barack Obama was a blip on the presidential radar.  This time the year was 2005.  The month was April.  The post was "Little Red State Fundy sez...".  

So how did we arrive at where we are now?

Well, imagine you had an objectively grotesque idea that was going to make you a lot of money, but was also going to kill and injure a lot of people.  How could you make it palatable enough so that once you put it into action, the rest of humanity would not rise up and destroy you?  

Marketing!

For example, claiming that the objectively evil institution of human chattel slavery was actually ordained by God, and clad in scripture.  From the March 21, 1861 "Cornerstone Speech" by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens.

They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal...

The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory." The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

Then claiming that, since God had obviously ordained that white men should rule over all creation, opposition to this law of nature was obviously insane:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics.

Which is why the objectively horrifying concept of white supremacy not only survived the complete the annihilation of the Confederacy and the destruction of the South, but sprang right back into power all over the South the minute the Union army was withdrawn, and stayed in power until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  It's why it also survived the Civil Rights movement and went on to become the bedrock of Nixon's Southern Strategy, the rocket fuel of the Reagan Revolution, and the rage that drives the reliable base of the Republican party to this very day.  

Because once the monstrous economic system of human chattel slavery had built a virtuous Christian shield around itself, the ideology of white supremacy -- an ideology of divinely authorized hatred and racism -- became self-sustaining.   Slavery could be eliminated.  Jim Crow could be defeated.  But the ideology of white supremacy rolled merrily along, because there was always going to be trouble and strife in the world.  And for unscrupulous men, trouble and strife were always going to be opportunities to advance their own agendas by finding scapegoats to blame, then rallying the meatheads to hate the scapegoats, then conning the meatheads into believing that only way to save the nation from the wicked schemes of scapegoats was by elevating these unscrupulous men to positions of political power.  

And that is exactly what the modern Conservative movement did.  It took the building blocks of white supremacy and built a bigger, broader coalition of hate out of them by adding gays and immigrants and unions and non-Christians and mouthy women and dirty, commie Liberals and the media and on and on and on.

And they had a name for this new nemesis of all that was good and holy.  And that name was Big Gummint!

Big Gummint was the Enemy of Freedom!

Big Gummint's dirty, commie social programs were stealing your tax dollars, Mr. and Mrs. Hardworking Murrican, and give them to moochers and takers and Welfare Queens.  

Big Gummint was stealing your job and your future and giving it to you-know-who.  

And the only way to defeat Evil Big Gummint and its cabal of blacks and women and gays and liberals and so forth, was to smash it!  Slash it!  Shrink it!

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." -- Lobbyist Grover Norquist.

And obviously the only way to do that was to cut off it's funding through massive tax cuts for the wealthy and across the board deregulation of powerful corporations.  But don't worry about cuts to any of the stuff that matters to you, Mr. and Mrs. Hardworking Murrican.  These sweeping tax cuts will pay for themselves!  Just ask respected Conservative haver-of-opinions and managing editor of The Weekly Standard, David Fucking Brooks.  (From 2001, but the link to The Weekly Standard article died when The Weekly Standard died.)

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime,

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund."

By now, the new machinery was fully in place.  Thanks to Reagan bringing Conservative Evangelicals into the Republican coalition of  monsters, the ancient evil of white supremacy and it's sweeping contempt for all "others" and anyone allied with those "others" now had a religious shield to hide behind.  And in September of 2001, the reactionary faith-based defense system of Modern Conservatism was suddenly right there, out in the open, with its poisonous, bigoted fangs bared for all to see.

  

A few years ago when I wrote -- 

...we are not in the fourth year of the Trump Administration.

We are in the fortieth year of the Reagan Revolution. 

-- I wasn't kidding.  

Just as the ideology of white supremacy outlasted the depraved economic system it was created to justify, so too has the Right's unhinged hatred of Big Gummint (and its evil cabal George Soros, Bill Clinton's kill-list, Hillary Clinton's email, Obama's birth certificate, Pizzagate, Hunter Biden's laptop and whatever) outlasted the crackpot economic dogma of Tax Cuts Will Solve Everything which that hatred was deployed to enact.  

And the thing is, all your bestest Never Trump pals knew all this.  Knew that the base was racist and nuts and getting worse.  Knew that pandering to that base was the price their favorite candidates had to pay to get through a Republican primary.  

After all, how could they not know?  How could professional political operatives working inside the Republican party not see what was happening right in front of them, and how could the highly paid, widely respected cream of the Conservative public intellectual pundit class not see the trajectory their party was on, when dirty commie nobody Libtards like me with no access to anyone "inside" could see it so clearly and write about so passionately long before Trump was anything more than a skeevy New York real estate developer?

They knew all of it, but were willing to go right on cashing those checks and chalked it up to "political sophistication" until the moment when it was very much too late to undo the damage they had done and unmake the monster they had created.  

And while it's great and all that recently-former Republicans like Miller and Longwell are now building lucrative media careers out of exactly the same materials and observations that made us Liberal into media pariahs not so many years ago, it would be nice if some Never Trumper somewhere would admit just once that, by Jove, the Left really were right about the Right all along.  

Instead of, y'know, blocking us any time we bring up the inconvenient past.

I Am The Liberal Media