Dystopia or Oblivion: a discursive fantasy reply to Heather Cox Richardson

 I've touted Heather Cox Richardson frequently and today, I'm touting her again. This is not one of her commentaries/analsyes on how a current move by the administration developed out of historical antecedent, nor is it a look at the evolution of Movement Conservatism into the Republican Party as we know it today.

Before reading my post any further, read hers:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-15-2020-saturday

It is a warning, though. It reads as hypothetical, but I detect a tone of agitation that  is typically foreign to the writer's voice. As I read it and reread it, I am struck by its starkness and how it supports a worst-case scenario, one that I've wondered about in my more apocalyptic moments.

I wish I could say that there's little to support her post today. However, that's not the case. We have seen the systematic "deconstruction" as Steve Bannon put it, of the functionality of the Federal Government over the past almost four years. Cabinet posts have been filled by career industry heads driven by self-interest or people who frankly, have no clue what their agencies' (that they're in charge of) purposes are. 

We have seen and continue to see bills passed by Congress stalled in the Senate under the Death Watch - to put it dramatically - of Mitch McConnell. We have seen escalation in racial tensions and divisive political rhetoric; at least, on this front, people are fighting back. BLM is not just a knee-jerk reaction to systemic racism; it's a movement that is sending notice to the country and the world that racism is unacceptable. It is at the forefront of speaking truth to power.

We have seen and continue to see the ratcheted-up rhetoric of the Alt-right characterizing the Democratic Party as "radical leftists" (which makes me laugh - that's such old sixties phrasing, but also, these people have no idea what a radical left really looks like.) We have seen the president of the United States act like a booby, babble like an infant, and show a complete lack of understanding of resposibility. I believe this last is by design.

Not that Trump does have a sense of responsibility, but he's a master at misdirection and saying "I don't know" when it suits him to no longer be a "stable genius"; additionally, I suspect he knows very well what the results of his actions and inaction are going to be. Thus, the next two points.

The inaction on the part of the White House's response to Covid-19 is perfect; they take no responsibility for devastation, pain, and death it is causing and will continue to cause. Therefore, by fobbing off that responsibility onto the states, they absolve themselves - so they think - of any blame. My suspicion is that the Republicans who have touted "states' rights" all this time are employing this "philosophy" as a motive force in dealing/not dealing with the pandemic.

In any case, the breakdown of the Obama era's pandemic response team was probably as much a case of the conservative movement's desire to reduce what it saw as unimportant as it was to dismantle Obama era policies and structures. We know Trump's antipathy toward his predecessor is immense, but he's not the only one. The concerted effort to dismantle the ACA is another exhibit for the argument that Movement Conservatism is reaching its goal of bringing the country back to its vision of a pre-New Deal United States. This is a foolish goal; the world has changed drastically since the 1920s and the forces that led to the Crash of 1929 are just as pernicious. 

I recognize that what the Conservatives are signaling isn't just a return to the days when corporations had all the power and when Hoovernomics dictated that government be run like a business (something Reagan would bring back half a century later), but they are looking forward to a class system based on a wider division of haves versus have-nots. The irony is that many who would support this are have-nots. In this case, irony is tragedy.

The last or most current piece of strategy is the hobbling of the United States Postal Service. I recommend people take time to familiarize themselves with the origins of USPS and try to understand that it is a service, not a for-profit product. It was built to ensure the privacy of the people in the free-flow of information of news (at a time when newspaper subscriptions and distribution were highly important to the dissemination of what was going on in the nascent Republic), and has since proved indispensible for inexpensive distribution of Social Security payments and medicines. 

That the Republican Party is intent on manipulating the election to ensure a Trump win in November has been clearly stated. This, in itself, is treasonous; but it is also rooted in the playbook of tin-pot dictators across history. That the Republican Party is willing to continue its program to not just hobble but probably privatize the postal service and further disenfranchise retirees, often elderly and with no other resources than their Social Security, the disabled and chronically ill in need of timely dispensed medicines, and essentially remove from lower income people the least expensive method of parcel delivery is heinous.

It is not enough to "vote blue" in November. The Republican Party is doing what they and their ilk have been attempting to do for decades and they are doing it. The Democratic Party has been ineffectual because, even during years when there has been Democratic Presidential leadership, it has taken on the role of the "underdog" or "the opposition party" even when it wasn't. For better, in some ways, and worse, in many others, Democrats have never wielded power with the imperial fiat that the GOP has. There are reasons for this, but it's in this and other aspects of the party platform that do, in fact, render the Democratic Party different from its Republican counterpart. They are not the same. 

Has the Democratic Party been run by career politicians beholden to business interests like the Republicans? Sure. But consider the policies that the Democrats have pushed forward during their ascendancies here and there. Consider the New Deal, the Great Society. Hell, consider Obamacare. All of these were built with an eye toward how government can serve the people who, in a democracy, are both its true leaders and beneficiaries, speaking idealistically. 

Has the Democratic Party been subject to corruption like the Republican Party? Yes. Of course. And in many cases, those who perpetrated that corruption are lost to time. Not so the Roy Cohns, the Dick Cheneys, the Kissingers, and the Trumps. Josephe McCarthy may have died from alcoholism after the failure of his witch hunt in the fifties to root out a Communist infestation that wasn't there. But he succeeded in another way. His fear of the Other (oh, if only he'd known his buddy Roy was gay) and hatred of an equitable society has leeched deeply into his conservative descendants today. 

We see the fruits of the McCarthy Era in QAnon conspiracy theories to the fear and hatred of the disenfranchised, the LGBTQ community, the poor, the immigrant, and people of color, particularly Black people. What I don't think even McCarthy would have grasped is the degree to which his paranoid fantasies would have informed a near-anarchic destruction of the government of the United States. 

However, to be sure, it's not all paranoia. Make no mistake that the Republican Party is driven by will for more power, for complete hegemony over all those groups just mentioned above. The adage of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely exists for a reason. The Republican Party of the twentieth century and now the twenty-first is driven by greed. It is characterized by a predominantly white population, though, yes, yes, I am aware of Black Republicans and Black Voters for Trump. That doesn't exclude the very people who would be first to be vilified by their white cohorts from some degree of acceptance by the party, both for their money but also - naturally - for the optics.

Do I think that the current state of affairs was perfectly engineered for this purpose? Not completely. But certainly, as Republicans saw how much the Democrats would capitulate and dither, they saw openings. This was obvious during the second Bush administration but even more so during the Obama years when they saw how easily legislation and procedural norms could be stalled or outright ignored. It's how you get a quisling little man like Ted Cruz be able to shut down government. It's how you get a human viper like Mitch McConnell to kill bills on his desk and how, in the face of legal procedure, he is able to stall and ignore your Supreme Court nominees. 

Is the two-party system perfect? No, of course not. Too many voices are excluded and regardless of how many of the goals of the "other" party are to maintain and buttress the social contract, there are still going to be powerful self-interested lobbyists in place to muck up the works. Is another party the answer? I'm not swayed. A Green Party or a Labor Party often sound as though they have a great deal of merit. But if I'm being honest, it's a no-Party system I have in mind, something that Washington would have been familiar with and that I've written about previously. (https://dimensionallybarrett.blogspot.com/2020/05/no-party.html)

Heather's "Letter" today rattles me. It brings into sharp focus where we are and the very real possiblity that any hope for the survival of the Republic as we knew it is misplaced. 

If we become a one-party system, then we fall into the same category as the People's Republic of China. Our economy is failing, though, and despair courses across our communities in ways we don't quite understand. The increase in Covid-19 is not going to abate, whether the numbers are fixed or not. People will die and because most of those people will be the elderly, the poor, and people of color, it is unlikely that the party of a one-party, state system is going to do anything at all. 

No one has said much about what would happen in the event that the election is deligitmized by the Republican Party. Will there be a military purge from Senatorial and Congressional chambers of Democrats? Will the Supreme Court rule against such a move and if so, would there then be a forced removal of this Administration from the White House? 

Knowing how ill-informed the average American is, the Republicans might even arrange that last scenario as a galvanizing point for its base and use it to foment further division in the country. At the very least, and this may be the most likely and less thrilling result, if the Republicans claim a crooked election and resolve to keep the administration in power and the Democrats sue in the high court, the litigation could continue for months while government freezes and the spin becomes "The Democrats are Trying to Forcibly Take Over the Government!" The Republicans could continue to hang back, stall legislation now more than ever because it is "illegitimate" and the country would continue its spin into darkness. 

None of this obviates the possibility of dissident populations willing to enter the fray, nor does it avoid something else that I'm not sure is even on the table; but what would happen if Blue States seceded? Some have thriving economies and if nothing else, if there was a Blue Secession, it would serve notice to the Republicans that they can't have it all. I'm not even thinking of a "secession" in terms of setting up a unique country like the Confederacy. I'm thinking of a specifically economic secession and then, in a second part, a legislative one that doesn't recognize Republican governance. 

Here we can wind up going into some pretty dystopian scenarios...

Treatment for a Post-Election Movie?

The Republicans could threaten military intervention, but how would you employ the military on U.S. soil against its citizens (because no one has renounced citizenship here; this is economic and legislative "states' rights" maneuvering)? And on that broad a scale? This is all the stuff of a second rate thriller novel but the gist of it, it seems to me may be worth considering post-election. 

If we take Heather's post as a warning and one that comes to pass, the subsequent months post-election will be fraught with lawsuits, a stalled government, currency devaluation because the market will destabilize when consumer confidence and spending is rocked by post-election results and the growing pandemic that will continue to eviscerate the population. No, I don't have high hopes for a vaccine that will be approved and deployed widely in the U.S. and for that matter, under a Republican administration freely or without strings attached.

Even if the litigation is short, even if a vaccine is developed, the stench of the past three and a half years will hover over this country for generations. It is entirely possible that Republican machinery will win but it will be at a vast cost to them. Should they achieve their monocultural hegemony, the main result will be increased litigation in courts across environmental and civil lines. It's entirely possible that the Party will attempt to control media in more ham-fisted ways, but it's unlikely that they'll be able to squash all dissent and information. 

It is likely that the country will see more civil unrest and that the Party will play the same strategy of demonizing its opposition, arresting thousands for dissent, and so on. Does this sound like what's going on in Hong Kong? Well, why yes. Yes, it does. Welcome to The Republican United States of America. 

If this happens, the country will be ruined in a way not many tend to think about. There will be, make no mistake about it, infrastructural collapse in states the Party has deemed insufficiently supportive or antagonistic, the quid pro quo of the Ukraine Affair will increasingly be how business is transacted. Social Security will be dismantled and those of us who can work will probably find low paying jobs that might not cover livng expenses while those who can't will be forced into homelessness or living with relatives. Perhaps we will see the rise of communes of the elderly. 

Social unrest will manifest as protests that will be put down with increasing violence and incarceration. The military will not be beholden to supporting the Constitution as we know it because the Constitution will be either rendered obsolete or re-interpreted by the Party in such a way that the military is now seen as the exclusive support of the Party. 

On the world stage, the United States will be seen as worse than a pariah state; we will be considered an existential threat. As our environmental laws are erased, regulations on corporate malfeasance lifted, and as the military becomes increasingly aligned with the Party, the rest of the world is going to have to make some decisions.

The U.S. at that point, will be the world's greatest polluter, because it will have climbed higher than ever in global corruption indexes, fewer governments will want to do business with it, and foreign investment will tank. Over time, this isolation will result in a fractured society and debased economy such that societal support will be reduced to pockets of independent groups probably operating illegally. Once the dollar drops in value, there's a good chance that the Party would resort to hard, as opposed to soft power and begina belligerent war of words and saber-rattling with other countries, principally China, who is alreayd en route to displacing the U.S. in world markets and leveraging soft power around the globe. In other words, the U.S. becomes the former Soviet Union.

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End of Treatment

How do I think all of this is going to pan out, really? I don't know. No one really does, though I hate to say that I think there are kernels of probability in what I've just written here. 

Essentially, for now, we need to keep the conversation going, be attentive to what the Republicans are doing and bear in mind that history is process. The result of what happens now is predicated on events and processes that began long ago. We may not be able to alter immediately or effect immediate change right now, but how we conduct ourselves presently and do so in the coming days, is crucial. We need to be properly motivated, not out of fear or trepidation (thought understandable), but with the desire to serve each other and help out where and when and as we can.

If the Republican Party becomes The Party, then we will have some dark days ahead. To be sure, in any event, the United States as we've known it, is at an end. Even if the election goes in another way, where we have a Biden-Harris administration, a tough re-examination of how to avoid events like the last election needs to be brough forward and a genuine realignment with the founding principles of this very flawed nation needs to begin to take place.