After They Stormed The Capitol
After They Stormed The Capitol
I am going to comment on the status of the United States of America and the path forward, so if you don’t want to read about it, now is the time to click on out of here.
We’re in a civil war.
Trump’s an authoritarian fascist, alright. But he is not alone. This country has plenty of them.
We see elected propagandists who vehemently assert things that are not true, on the Senate and House floors. See Sen. Josh Hawley, R. Missouri, Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas. Rep. Devin Nunes, R- California, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-California. See 147 GOP representatives who voted to not accept the electoral college results from Pennsylvania, Arizona.
We see the orcs who invaded the Capitol, the proverbial peasants with pitchforks. Some of them seriously believe the propaganda they utter — the election was stolen from them. Democrats want to take their guns and vaccines will put chips in their brains to track them and control their behavior. Democrats are cannibal child slavers. Vaccines cause autism. The Navy is controlling the weather from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Water fluoridation is just a way to get rid of unused uranium left over from World War II. Microwaves cause brain cancer. The United States is a white nation and that’s God’s will. Everyone who isn’t white is subordinate and should be disenfranchised.
The orcs are armed and dangerous. The elected officials are funded and dangerous. The people who fund them are the most dangerous of all.
What is the path forward?
We have to understand authoritarians and fascism. In today’s Daily Poster, https://tinyurl.com/y2enluy9, Walker Bragman interviews New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism. In her new book, “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” she puts Donald Trump in the same cell as other authoritarian leaders from the 20th century.
Let’s look at some past authoritarian dictators. Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet come easily to mind. There’s an authoritarian playbook, and now it’s metastasized with social media and cable TV. It starts with propaganda that plays on people’s grievances and blames somebody Other, and declares that the Leader Can Fix It For Them. The Guy uses rallies, lots of rallies. Also in the authoritarian playbook are corruption involving family members, personal enrichment, censorship, usurpation of powers, ousting and criminalization of “disloyal” employees, bullying, using The Guy’s loyal outraged entitled aggrieved mob as Brown Shirts, and then, incitement to violence. And don’t forget the loyalty of police departments whose members around the country feel comradeship and kinship with those mobs. It’s cultural. So Trump and his adherents are following the playbook. Now we need to know how to successfully fight that playbook.
What do we do?
Well, for one thing, we voted him out of office, that’s an excellent start. (Pinochet was also voted out of office, and for details on his regime, check the concise Wikipedia article.) And we voted in a Democratic House and a just barely Democratic Senate. But authoritarian attempts to capture a nation don’t just drown and die like a forest fire. The funders, the elected officials, the cops and the orcs have a lot invested in their goals.
Trump needs to be removed from the White House and removed from access to presidential powers. And we need an independent fact finding commission to report within 1 year to the public of what happened, whom to prosecute, and how to prevent further attempted coups.
Funders: We can identify the C-level corporate executives and PACs who fund the GOP.. The GOP congressmembers are complicit in this attempted coup and therefore, so are their funders. We need to see the mainstream media interview each of them and demand their on-the-record responses to the questions Why do you fund authoritarian candidates? Why do you fund propaganda? Why should we invest in your companies? Name and shame and boycott. Rinse and repeat. Try and convict those who have violated law. This should go on for a few decades. These are people who in the name of profit and deregulation are destroying both the planet and democracy.
Elected officials — see Funders. Also, there is no cost, financial or moral or in terms of power, to a private citizen or an elected official spouting disinformation. They aren’t likely to be ostracized from a group or groups that matter to them. They aren’t obliged to testify in court under oath. So there needs to be a correction here. Do you have a family member or a friend who spouts bullshit? Avoid them. Ostracize them. Step away.
Election reform — we need to do everything necessary to ensure and facilitate One Person One Vote. As Joe Stalin once said, it doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes. We just learned that again. We need to forestall, prevent, and punish efforts to disenfranchise voters. And we need to increase representation. Washington, D.C. must have statehood. So must all the “possessions and territories” of the United States, such as Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.
Social media and cable tv — we need to restore the Fairness Doctrine.
We need to arrest, try, and convict the perpetrators of violence, of course.
There’s a lot more, of course. Mostly We Need To Honor Our Heroes Who Work For Democracy and The Planet. The fact is quite a few of our heroes are black people. We need to create a mainstream media, public radio, tv, social media presence of honoring our heroes more than football. More than war.
Meanwhile, we need to get those vaccines rolling. We need to pay attention to the needs of our towns and cities, where people need rent moratoria and stabilization, an end to evictions, more funding, health care, jobs. We need to deal with racist cops and local punks who hurt our communities with their swastikas, bombs, shooting up churches, synagogues, schools, veterans’ homes, night clubs, military bases, disabled people’s facilities, state capitals.
We have to increase government regulation of polluting industries. We have to prepare for serious shortages of food, water, and access to wealth and resources. We need to restore jobs, good jobs, to the parts of the country that have been left behind by corporate wealth since the 1960’s. We need to fund job training and public education, with an emphasis on critical thinking. We need universal health care. We need family planning. We need a Restore The Earth Corps.
Our To-Do list is going to take some time and effort. We need to start building the best of us. We need to look at our racism, sexism, classism, and neo liberal capitalism, our waste of the earth, and put it behind us. We need to see ourselves becoming a nation with a purpose and morality in which we can believe and of which we can feel proud. We might, maybe, overcome.
