“From chaos to monarchy,” is the GOP’s rallying cry. They don’t want anarchy. Exactly the opposite. They want a king, a permanent tyrant. Authoritarianism is their addiction.
Most GOP followers or supporters don’t care if the strong man is conservative or liberal, just so he’s strong, decisive, and defiant toward anyone or anything cited as an enemy. Dems could learn this and begin posturing in positions of strength that would have the added lure of being defensible with rationality and fact. They wouldn’t need to rely on insanity and delusion, manipulation and lies as the GOP must.
FDR, Truman, and others demonstrated strong Democratic leadership rooted in rational, factual stances. Democratic Socialism is the key — strong democracy with clear communication between government and governed with a constant striving to improve lives, all of them, not just white ones.
It isn’t even that difficult a thing to grasp, or to do. Finding a charismatic leader who takes a strong stance against fascism and racism shouldn’t be so hard, yet these days it feels impossible.
Even the despotic, Nazi GOP is crammed with mediocrity, idiocy, and incompetence. Their only advantages are psychopathy — a willingness to do literally anything for wealth and power — and their crimes, such as gerrymandering, vote suppression, voter purges, lying, cheating, swindling, extortion, death threats, even outright assassination. (Hello, Paul Wellstone, et alia.) These clowns and perverts are not powerful individually. Only by goose-stepping in lock-step do they become democracy’s and mankind’s worst existential threat.
To solve the problem of right wing echo chambers hammering lies into heads and politicizing such measures as mask-wearing in pandemic times, and to rid us of the infection of zero-sum psychopathic capitalism, which sacrifices lives for every quarter penny of profit, to do these things we need leaders at all levels who will stand against such cancer and defy it sternly, loudly, and consistently when it says or does anything inhuman.
Could it be angry comedians should be giving anti-heckler lessons to this imaginary new breed of Democratic politician?
When Obama allowed SC Congress member Joe Wilson’s shout of, “You lie,” to pass unremarked, with no consequences, it was considered a sign of maturity and adult strength by Democrats. Republicans and their spawn saw it as cowardice, weakness. He failed to defy the shout, failed to point at Wilson and have security remove him, failed to press charges, etc.
This kind of inaction defines Democratic Presidents, alas, in the post-Truman era. One can’t imagine Truman or FDR or JFK or others allowing a Joe Wilson shout to pass. JFK would have dropped a witticism to unman Wilson, then had him escorted out until he learns to behave like an adult. FDR might have had him arrested. It’s easy to imagine Truman wading into the crowd to punch Wilson. Putting up with open defiance or shows of weakness disgusted Truman, such as when he was sickened by Oppenheimer crying about the atomic bomb in the Oval Office.
Point is, allowing shenanigans to escalate to ignoring subpoena, crimes, and death threats, not to mention planning and executing a coup via an insurrection and continuing subversions of voting laws and ballot counts, does not make the Democrats look better. It simply lets the disease run rampant, untreated and even fed.
It won’t stop. It must be stopped. That’s the fact about authoritarianism, tyranny, fascism, racism, white supremacy, and all the other horrors embraced and now defining the GOP. It’s mental illness and delusion unfettered by even an attempt at reason or logic.
Creating a fog of chaos to obscure their endgame goals of “a permanent minority rule” — tyranny — should not baffle us, nor its echoes drown us out. Democrats must portray the fact that they are strongly representative of the majority of Americans. They must embody actual democracy with a proud posture of power, intelligence, and graceful equanimity.
This means refusing any longer to tolerate the extreme politics of the GOP, and remembering that adults don’t let infants slap them around.
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