I’ve been writing on this blog now for 17 years or so. When it all started there were a lot of us lefty bloggers here in Connecticut, and most of them have gone on to other things, but I’ve stuck to it, though the posts come daily no more.
A lot has changed during all those years, though a lot has stayed the same. As I’ve reminded my readers every Good Friday, we should always look on the bright side, but that side has gotten a good deal dimmer over the years.
I think we’ve always known where the Republican Party wanted to bring us, but at least at first we didn’t believe it could get us there. There were a lot of reasons for that. For instance, even though I was using the internet to spread my own ideas (to the extent anyone read the blog) I didn’t understand at first how the internet had changed the way in which information was spread, and how easily it could be used to spread propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that wouldn’t otherwise make it into the mainstream.
That became evident over the years, as did the failure of that very mainstream media to recognize the reality in which we found ourselves. As the forces of fascism became more and more both organized and obvious, the media by and large insisted on both siding everything. Just yesterday, for instance, the lead article in the New York Times Magazine was about the “vanishing Democratic moderate”, when in reality the most leftist of elected Democrats is little more than slightly to the left of the typical 60s liberal. I’ve written many times about the media’s penchant for moving the definition of the ever elusive “center” further and further right. I saw a tweet yesterday from a progressive to the effect that being in favor of legalized abortion is a centrist position, given the fact that a huge majority of people in this country are in the legalization camp. The point is well taken, but you won’t see that basic fact recognized in the media.
The Democratic Party establishment hasn’t helped any, given its refusal to call a fascist a fascist, and its reflexive protection of those within its own ranks (e.g., Henry Cuellar) who enable the fascists.
Over the years the Supreme Court has gone in exactly the direction we knew it would if the Republicans got their way. I was never a judge, but I was a lawyer, and I know how to interpret legal language. I know with a certainty that the present court has disregarded basic grammar, logic and history to implement a simple agenda:creating a one party state in which elections are really beside the point. Is there anyone who believes that the court will not, when it rules next year, give Republican legislatures the absolute power to disregard the will of the majority of people in their states, not to mention the equal protection clause and the tattered remnants of the Voting Rights Act, to fix federal and state elections so that only Republicans and some token Democrats (to maintain the facade) get elected. At the same time we can only watch in despair as the court establishes a state religion by constantly ruling that those religionists it favors can impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us in the name of religious liberty.
I have two young grandchildren now, and I fear that they will grow up to live in a fascist state. Perhaps their experience will be all the worse since they are in Northern States. The education system in the South is being transformed into a propaganda factory. Witness, for example, Texas deciding that it wasn’t slavery, it was simply “involuntary relocation”.The kids in Texas will grow up simply thinking that fascism is the norm, while the kids up here may get a whiff of the truth before the transition to fascism is complete.
It’s the Fourth of July, and we’re supposed to be celebrating the birth of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal. Lincoln asked whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated could long endure. We gave it a go, but it isn’t looking good.
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