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Thoughts and prayers for a great awakening

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Ben Boyce
   
The dark clouds on the periphery of my progressive political stronghold are drawing nearer. We see the full extent of the successful 40-year drive of the cultural conservatives, backed by unlimited right-wing oligarch money, politicized prosperity gospel evangelicals, and ruthless Republican political operatives to systematically seize the high points of power within the structure of the U.S. government.
We are politically checkmated.

That’s why the Trump Supreme Court will very likely announce the effective end of the 50-year-old Roe court ruling, which affirmed the ‘right to privacy’ as a constitutionally grounded civil right, and gave women legal agency over their own bodies. Roe is expected to be rescinded this summer. The only prior significant withdrawal of a federally mandated civil right was the rise of Jim Crow laws in the former Confederate states, effectively ending black suffrage for a century after a couple of decades.

What my liberal and progressive friends need to assimilate psychologically is that the Kavanaugh Court will steadily reverse all the major legal social freedoms over the last 40 years. Gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, hate speech protections, union rights are all in their sights for elimination. The reactionaries will not stop until they achieve the long-planned project of reversing the law to the Lochner era: pre-civil rights, women’s rights, renters and workers rights. That will be the new law of the land.

The Republican Party has cracked the code to permanent minority rule. The key is control of the courts, defunding the electoral apparatus, gerrymandering, and suppression of poor and minority voters. They did it. They won. They have constructed a constitutional headlock that guarantees minority party veto, regardless of election outcomes. No wonder young people are disengaged from politics. They see that their inputs have no effect on the operating system.

It just stays the same and is somehow worse every day. That’s the dominant nihilist millennial mindset.

As if the loss of the basic civil right of reproductive freedom to the Federalist Society court cabal was not bad enough, we are trapped in a news cycle dominated by ever more frequent grotesque mass shootings. We have become listless in the face of deep social evil, because of our certain knowledge that the political representatives of about a quarter of this country will not let us as a society enact commonsense gun safety measures. We are held hostage to the madness of the gun zealots embedded in the GOP.

More than money animates the Republican base, unlike their corporate overlords. They want public payback for 40 years of striving politically as conservative activists to achieve the final solution to cleanse America, god’s chosen land, from the filth of modernity. The burning lump of coal in their gut will not cease tormenting them until sin has been sanctioned by law and hard justice meted out to the guilty.

The rest of the crypto-pirates, direct mail grifters, small business tyrants, Wall Street hedge fund ballers, and libertarian tech bros who live on barges in international waters are all good with this aboard the SS GOP ship. To their credit, the Republican base votes religiously, every two years.

I have faith in the spirit of the American people to resist this oligarchic theocratic tyranny. The shock of getting stripped of an established civil right to family planning, which has made it possible for citizens to plan their lives, careers, and families, should arouse enough righteous rage that average Democrats finally discover that there’s an important election every two years, in between the big top tent quadrennial spectacle of presidential politics.



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