A Response to Ron Collins on Medium

Ron, your hatred of the liberal bogeyman is fully out in the open now but relax and be reassured--your side has been utterly victorious. No such thing as a viable liberal politics exists in America today. The overlords and backers of the Republican Party have seen to that. Enjoy their hegemony and if you don't like any of it blame them, not us. 

You see, I am a proud progressive, an inheritor of the true traditions of America--moderation, inclusion, respect and rationality. America has historically been as divided as any of the countries derided by us for their religious and tribal insanity such as Iraq, Yugoslavia (once) and Northern Ireland but we can't see it because it's OUR baggage. 

A third of the country, the American South, was a terrorist substate for most of our existence, a haven for bigots, braggarts, losers, degenerates and bullies. Even after having had their balls handed to them in dramatic fashion in the Civil War, during which much of the decent genetic material was removed from the white population leaving us with the likes of Jeff Sessions, they did not give up and remained a racist refuge into the 1960s. 

With desegregation the real, final battle for the conscience of America began. Republicans, whose party was always the repository of privilege, sold their souls for votes using the Southern Strategy. The results are observable, rife and revealing. Their success has been complete. We have had one Yankee president since Kennedy, Barack Obama. Every other intervening president has been either a Republican--and, therefore, since desegregation, an honorary Southerner--or an actual Southerner: Johnson, Carter and Clinton. 

The racist South, having held the country hostage forever, has taken control and founded a new country on their terms, the supremacy of property and privilege. Injustice is deeply entrenched. Deprivation is endemic. Sit back, Ron, and feel the love. Scumbags, thugs and greedy assholes are in charge. We wage illegitimate wars, screw working people, torture and bomb anyone we want, and imprison our own citizens like a banana republic. 

Your President openly defends racists. The middle class is disappearing. Hypocrites occupy the moral high ground. I allow you your victory but, please--out of respect for the people who did in fact fight and die for an ideal and not some hideous, tribal, racist ideology--when you finally get the constitutional convention your oligarchic leaders desire, rename the country The Confederate States of America or Boca Raton or whatever you want. 

The United States of America is dead. It exists no more, our ersatz Camelot, in the age of Trump and his army and coalition of self-serving pigs and racist sociopaths.