“Arizona is clearly the meth lab of
democracy” - Kyrsten Sinema, 2018
At least Sinema knows from whence she came.
Today’s Republican Party has caused us to view America as a
tenuous civilization – one that blossomed and thrived for a
brief moment and then succumbed to the forces of human nature –
a nature “red in tooth and claw”.
This party is largely controlled by fanatics who have succeeded
in overtaking an American political party – a party that had
risen to power by utilizing a “divide and rule” tactic against
the fundamental tenet of American democracy: unity. The use of
“divide and rule” in politics is historically recognized as the
road to tyranny. Countering this tactic was the centerpiece of
James Madison’s, Federalist #10, written in 1787.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/.../1787%20Federalist%20No...
Here, Madison addresses the need for our republic to balance the
conflicts arising from an inherently pluralistic society such as
ours, a society comprised of disparate groups organized around
cultural, racial, and religious interests. He argued for the
establishment of political mechanisms intended to maintain a
balance between these competing interests. It was the
intellectual author of our national motto: E pluribus unum –
“Out of many, one”.
Preserving the Union was the quintessence of America’s social
contract with its citizens. It was the critical success factor
that gave America its competitive advantage in the world. Had
pluralism not been endemic to its founding documents, America
would have become ossified and corrupted by autocratic rulers
balkanizing its territory and occupying the niches of power that
would inevitably develop.
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do
it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do
it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others
alone, I would also do that.” – Abraham Lincoln, 1862, written
while the Emancipation Proclamation sat upon his desk awaiting
his signature.
But today we are faced with what appears to be an
incomprehensible attempt to remove this hallmark of our liberal
democracy and replace it with a kind of tyranny not unlike that
of the Taliban or al-Qaida, both are species of political
fanaticism that, as John Gray of The Nation writes, are
unrecognizable to us because:
“The liberal West understands fanaticism as the result of
ignorance and error; as human beings grow smarter, they will be
less cruel and repressive. It is a dangerous delusion... Nothing
is more prototypically modern than fundamentalism – the attempt
to recreate a crudely simplified version of an irretrievable
past.”
What should be recognizable to all at this point is that the
Republican Party is now a full-throated terrorist organization
itself - much like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Its tactics can be
defined similarly as using: fundamentalist religion, political
sabotage, domestic terrorism, the exploitation of vulnerable
state institutions, and in the last 2 years, bioterrorism in the
form criminal negligence in its refusal to utilize and deploy
CDC recommendations to reduce the impact of Covid -19.
The Republican Party has more in common with Jim Jones in
Georgetown, Guyana than it does with James Madison in
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
H.P. Lovecraft said it best:
“As for the Republicans - how can one regard seriously a
frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky
idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their
emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and
provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning
artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly
and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded
phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone
agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or
unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that
real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of
unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of
resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical
'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the
slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the
Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to
the dead.” - H.P. Lovecraft letter C. L. Moore, 1936
H.P. Lovecraft knew precisely what America faced in 1936. And he
knew what the world faced as this kind of Republican thinking
was blossoming into the fascism of World War II.
Donald Trump is a Lovecraftian style character. He is Cthulhu –
symbol of Lovecraft’s “Great Old Ones”. They are the
mythological characters of Greek mythology that occupy both the
land and the underworld – disinterested in the suffering of man,
wedded to the notion of personal power, deeply invested in the
fostering of cult-like worship by humans. A description of
Cthulhu includes the fact that humans who view him are rendered
insane.
The hope for a stronger democracy is a rock that we have all
been collectively pushing uphill for 5 years. We are losing
America. Even if the Democrats win by a hair in 2022 and 2024,
the other half of America will see their defeat as the last
train to Calvary. The cry of the Confederacy – “The South Shall
Rise Again!” - will remain the call to action for these
present-day martyrs. They knowingly and unknowingly believe that
they have fought and suffered - not for the preservation of
slavery and the eminence of white supremacy as in the Civil War
- but for the perpetuation of wage slavery, and the Conservative
notion that wealth correlates with worth. They are the rats in
the walls of democracy. |
