Friday, July 5, 2024

While America Slept

The battle that's shaping up, which the head of Heritage, Kevin Roberts, says might be bloodless if liberals behave, has nothing to do with liberals -- 'the radical left,' as Kevin calls them. The fight is internal to some wackos who call themselves conservatives. Apocalyptic evangelicals on one side. 

Authoritarian Catholics on the other. Both decry declining standards and permissiveness but, guess what, those social problems are worse in red states or trace back to 'conservative' policies. The problems are not due to social deregulation and an assault on standards. Who deregulated that shit? No one, really. 

The problems resulted from despair and deprivation put on average people in the richest country ever by asshole Republicans who, when it came down to it, stood for nothing but cutting taxes on the rich and allowing corporations to plunder at will. That's it. That's all. Though there's an interesting aspect.

Those rich people. 

Where do they fit in? Nowhere. Not among the combatants. The great manipulators are elsewhere. Money speaks for them, powerfully if imperfectly. Do they care about abortion and D.E.I. and that shit? Maybe a little. But not for reasons other than money and power. Money and power are it for them. 

I've heard populist murmurs from both evangelicals and reactionary Catholics. That could get interesting -- if their dupes begin to turn on the rich. But for now it's scapegoating. Of lefties. Who have nothing to do with all the stuff they hate. They created their own problems, like their racist forebears.

Like the southerners who couldn't bring themselves to let up on black people, the fucking racist asshole morons, and put the country through hell and got exactly what they didn't want, compensatory damages. Forced racial intimacy. Black guys with big dicks scoring on their pretty little daughters. 

Trust me on that one, if you don't see it. I live in a college town in the south. But that's the kind of sick animus and fear we're looking at. Coming from sick fucking people who will take us all down. Ultimately because they can't handle their own imperfection. Their shittiness and carnal desires and mortality. 

So I say pray for a real populist on one or other side of that mess to succeed. One who will go after the rich, which a true populist would have to do. Trump made such noises. Evangelicals are apocalyptic individualists and incoherent. Nobody tells them what to do. Or that they're not 'saved.'

The Catholics are institutionalists. Radical authoritarian institutionalists. Fascists, that is. And incoherent. Sane, sustainable social structures and policies result from balance and compromise. The people making out on this mess are the rich. We might have to kill them. They're already killing us.

Kill them just enough to get their attention. Not that I believe in this but to minimize the damage. Because they will stop at nothing. Their greed and lust for power know no bounds. They did the classic thing and played the little people off against one another. They were unbelievably successful.

Meantime we're spectators in our own destruction, with Democrats several layers into irrelevance dating to the implementation of the Southern Strategy and the rise of bad faith, notably under Gingrich. So Democrats been hostages for decades, as have we all. But the schismatics must schism. 

Always. Their lives aren't livable without conflict. Modern Republicans were an unstable coalition dating to the sixties. Now the voters to whom the Republican elite sold their souls for votes have risen up and are fragmenting. I say again, this could get interesting. The rich might finally have fucked this up. 

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