Americans in Paris

The time has come to employ the Nazi analogy. Everybody says you are screwed if you do but I don't care. No rational, national observer can doubt that it would mean nothing to Donald Trump if he got millions of people killed. Hell, George Bush got millions of people killed, destroyed the world economy, and he still thinks history will remember him well.

Behind the scenes, economic voodoo and racist and eugenic attitudes prevail. Trump's most enduring and apparently effective close adviser, his resident racist Stephen Miller, is a professional troll and a wealthy young parasite. These "principles" of economic atrocity--parasitism--and racial oppression, exclusion and indecency inspire fanatical devotion. 

No matter that they are observably false, treasonous, inconsistent with our actual laws and traditions, and unsustainable. Hate is presupposed. Resentment is a given. The practitioners of Republican politics have a grudge. How can they have a grudge? Where is our Versailles? There it is, out in the open, an enormous insult and crippling, post-war conclusion.

The Civil War left a huge wound from which the United States has never recovered. I can't in some compelling way argue this view into acceptance, syllogistically or by dialectic, but Reconstruction is our Versailles, the injury and abominable insult requiring retribution. Witness it in the loathsome, reptilian, treasonous spectacle of Mitch McConnell. 

Mitch's distortions of reality have an underlying, unifying drive and cohesion--projection. Mitch accuses others, typically Democrats, of doing what he does. He gets reelected because he is sticking it to the Yankees. He is a purified vehicle of southern revenge--the homespun, folksy, but cunning guy having it over on and outwitting the smart people.

We were all at Versailles in spirit but ours is deeper, more chronic and enduring. American southerners--the older generation, anyway--will die before they will abandon their racism and resentment, vital components of their psyches. Republicans gave their party over to these insane, destructive individuals. It is now the party of the Confederacy.