How did we end up here, where citizens of the same country, living and working side by side, are occupying two very different Americas? The RNC felt like ‘Nuremberg on the Cuyahoga.’ After a bumpy start, the DNC convention ended as the ‘Philly Festival of Optimism.’ The contrast in tone and vitality was so striking that it prompted me to explore the trajectory of the parties in recent years for the answer.
Despite the histrionic claims from his opponents, Obama has actually governed modestly and collegially, like an old-school Rockefeller Republican. His deeply held faith that America has a heart that is the wellspring of the civic good-will required to have a functioning democracy has been tested again and again. Since 2010, when they captured the House, the Republican mode of governance has been nihilistic obstruction and endless witch-hunt investigations. Congress is deadlocked in a dysfunctional and rancor.
The decision by the Republican leadership from Day One (literally) to de-legitimize the Obama Administration, with a constant rhetoric of insurrection and hyperbolic conspiracy theories fanned by conservative media, has inflamed the base of the party to such a degree that the Founding Father’s assumptions of common purpose, social respect and civic duty necessary for democratic governance have been unilaterally suspended.
That has paved the path for the rise of a demagogic figure like Trump, who promises to bull-doze through the political stalemate by breaking the back of the constitutional system of checks and balances through sheer force of personality. Trump is not an aberration in the contemporary Republican Party; he is the culmination of their 25 year devolution from a political party into a dangerous cult.
The base of the Republican Party has been fed a steady diet of fear and loathing based on manufactured lies and deliberate distortions by the operators of the vast right-wing Fox media apparatus. The failure of the establishment Republicans to end the ‘illegitimate reign of the Kenyan Usurper’ has spawned the new Trump base. The Republican political class has not delivered on their campaign promises, like the repeal of Obamacare. This has driven the base to crave an autocratic strongman who guarantees results by abandoning the niceties of civic conventions, social decorum, legal precedent, and constitutional separation of powers.
The Trump base lives in an imagined America that is a five-alarm fire and crime scene hellhole. In the dystopic America that Trump described in his 70-odd minute speech (which may have sounded better in the original German), the country is on the verge of collapse, beset by unchecked swarms of criminal illegal immigrants waved in by treasonous liberals and negligently unprotected by Obama’s refusal to use the magic mantra “Radical Islamic Terrorism” to dispel a dark army of demonic Islamic terrorists seeking the death of every man, woman and child in the U.S. Their world is on fire.
Fox News, right-wing radio, and online sites like Drudge and Breitbart have skillfully conditioned the Republican base to live in fear and to openly rage against their designated enemies. The textbook political science term for the political project of systematically stoking irrational fear and social division in order to consolidate power in the hands of an authoritarian figure in the service of an oligarchy is ‘fascism.’
The Tea Party political strategy of motivating the base by ginning up a constant state of emergency by pounding their amygdala with a sledgehammer relentlessly has formed the psychological pre-conditions for the rise of home grown fascism. The Republican base has now thrown in its lot with an unstable and ill-informed authoritarian figure that has no real plans or strategy other than “Believe Me!” He will make America Great Again, somehow. The party establishment’s chickens have come home to roost in the form of one Donald J. Trump, a man unlike any major party candidate in American history. Frankenstein has escaped the lab and is headed for their village.
That’s what’s at stake. Will we live in a tolerant, multi-cultural open society or in a mean-spirited and socially alienated police state, ruled with an iron fist with little respect for the rule of law? That’s the choice in this election.
Back on the local front, the race for 5th District Supervisor between progressive Democrat Noreen Evans, former Santa Rosa City Council Member, Assembly Member and, most recently, State Senator and Lynda Hopkins, organic farmer and former Director of Sonoma County Farm Trails, is turning out to be hotly contested. This is the marquee political race in the county this cycle. The Board governs public sector worker standards and development policy. I encourage anyone who cares about how the County will be developed to get involved and donate to support Noreen Evans to ensure a progressive majority on the Board.
Great writing as always. Thanks Ben!