The Fascists are planning a Second Coup in Plain Sight
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln
The Revolution is being televised.
Today (Monday Feb. 1, 2021) the New York Times narrates and summarizes in an extraordinary piece of journalism, the recent Trumpian campaign’s extended conspiratorial coup aimed at depriving voters of democracy in an effort to reward wealthy backers with power and the base with raw meat.
Despite the failed coup on Jan. 6, Trump republicans, senators, representatives, and state legislators are passing laws and fighting back against the forces of decency and democracy by gerrymandering and passing more repressive voting laws to protect and preserve white supremacy.
In fact, these 21st Century Rebels are using the weapons of democracy, free speech and right to bear arms, as weapon to deceive and/or intimidate democrats. Fascist fellow travelers in the U.S. Senate. Cruz, and Hawley, elite Ivy-League thugs, carry the water for Trump, while House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy plays the barking dog for his beloved leader, carried on the shoulders of the hoi polloi. Q leader, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the cross-fit trainer, has become the image of Lady Liberty on the right. New Mexico’s No. 1 Cowboy, Couy Griffin in his black hat, an Otero County Commissioner, continues to proclaim his right to fight from a cell in Washington D.C.
American fascism isn’t going away.
Below Taos Friction summarizes excerpts from Vox, an explanatory journalism site, for your edification. Journalist Sean Illing and Yale’s Jason Stanley update and analyze the fascism Timothy Snyder has written about in his On Tyranny or Anne Applebaum in Twilight of Democracy. (This writer first read about the demise of democracy in Plato’s Republic to which Stanley refers.) I numbered the salient points, excerpting them from the conversation about “the latent pathologies in American politics.”
(See Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Jan 29, 2021. A Friction reader brought the piece to my attention.) Here’s Stanley:
1. “Fascism is usually a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, and leftists.”
2. “You can have a regime that’s a democracy and economic system that’s capitalist, but if you have massive racial injustice and massive inequality, then you’re going to have fascist social and political forces. You’re going to need a militarized police force to deal with potential uprisings from its impoverished minority neighborhoods that protect its fancy neighborhoods. “
3. Nostalgia: “We can’t retrieve some lost golden age. So, his voters were always condemned to live in disappointment, which keeps that wheel of resentment spinning.”
4. “Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness is really good on this idea that people crave to see their opponents punished in fascist politics. Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny) calls this sadopopulism. States like West Virginia or Kansas or Tennessee, to take just a few examples, reject billions of dollars from the federal government to expand Medicaid. They cut taxes for the wealthy to destroy their public schools. All of this harms the very white people who are voting. And they’re doing it, interview after interview shows, because they believe that Medicaid expansion would help Black people, or what they consider the undeserved.”
5. “So this kind of politics, that revenge and retribution for stealing your past, is far more important than material benefits to yourself. This is the heart of fascist politics.”
In a nutshell, Stanley elucidates the reasons above why Trump and the Red States protest against actions, masks and ppe gear, aimed at controlling the Pandemic or curbing guns that serial killers aim at school children. The threat to white people diminishes as more democrats die.
(The above may surprise some but is common knowledge among Native Americans, Hispanic natives, and African Americans.)
Local readers in Taos will recognize the insidious effects of “envidia” in the above that affects local politicos or remember when the last demo boss once declared an election invalid because Anglos voted (1999). You can see the effects of El Patron’s failed local politics in the barrio he developed on Straight Arrow Road or in the politics of fascism in the Town of Taos. In that precocious art and history community, the dear leader refuses to allow public rest rooms because he wants to remind merchants, visitors, and residents, whose bowels and urinary tracts cry out for relief, that he’s “Bellis the Bossman” and you’ll “do it” and pass gas on his say so.