Ronald Reagan had a wonderful line with a hopeful and optimistic image: “Morning in America.” It was an image of freshness, possibilities, and great expectations—a GOP vision that even skeptical Democrats could like. But that GOP is now in the morgue, displaced by a new generation of the GOP, one disdainful of that optimism and driven more by “American carnage” and violence as “legitimate public discourse.” With some two-thirds of Republicans still believing that the 2020 election was stolen from them, the party has degenerated into grievance, fear, and willing marks for disinformation. It is increasingly clear that one of the two major political parties in the United States has disqualified itself from leading a country purporting to be a democracy. The question is whether or not America’s current decline—despite a two-year window of Democratic control of the presidency, the House, and, ever so barely, the Senate—is permanent or just a massive wave in the ebb and flow of our history.
(It is worth noting that the Senate is virtually in Republican hands since Joe Manchin is a DINO, a Democrat in name only. He was the only Democrat to vote against the Democratic effort to legalize abortion after the Supreme Court has made clear, as everyone knew, that it would revoke the past fifty years of nationwide legal abortion—this after he earlier this year torpedoed Biden’s Build Back Better bill. Meanwhile Republicans Murkowski and Collins also voted against the abortion bill, despite having pointedly accused Trump’s last two Supreme Court nominees of about-faces from their support of “established law” during their interviews preceding their hearings, to their almost certain support of revoking Roe v. Wade this coming fall. So Murkowski and Collins had effectively hinted they would support the Democrats on this but then voted their party line.)
But back to the issue of decline. Democrats are poised to lose the House and Senate this fall, and I would put $1000 on their losing the presidency in 2024, quite possibly to Donald Trump. Fox News and conspiracy-oriented social media are both the harbingers and the cause, along with Trump and the politics of fear and grievance he embodies, of American decline. A woman who refuses to get a covid vaccine despite the covid deaths of family members makes all kinds of claims about the vaccine’s dangers and “government control,” then says that she’s done her “research” and with palpable contempt insists that “I’m NOT an idiot.” By this she means falling for government disinformation when the truth is available to her with some digging on 4chan and other forums for the credulous, now even including some churches. Any honest American history written in, say, 2150 will inevitably dissect the current dumbing down of America instigated by the revenue-generating, fear-driven politics of Fox News, along with the viral capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, and the darker corners of the internet. These forums, that future historian will tell our descendants, were pivotal in stoking Trumpist outrage among uncritical believers where people like Ms. “I’m NOT an idiot” spend hours per day doing their “research” and sharing that so-called research with other gulled inhabitants of Plato’s cave.
Between gerrymandering and the Electoral College—both fixable—American democracy’s structural flaws will continue to make their own contributions to American decline. Gerrymandering allows even a purple state, one with rough parity between the parties that can go either way in a presidential election, to end up with a grossly disproportionate number of its House seats going to one party, typically Republican, due to politically motivated drawing of the districts. As for the Electoral College, as I am informed that I never tire of saying, twice now in just five elections (2000, 2016) it has given us a president who lost the election based on the number of votes received, with the consequence that we had the most ignorant and authoritarian man ever to hold the White House damaging the country and accelerating and feeding the decline. Exhibit One, of course, was January 6, with the Republican National Committee actually defending it by calling it “legitimate political discourse.” Nor do I need add that the Electoral College gave us at least three and possibly five conservative Supreme Court Justices who would have been instead Democratic-appointed moderate to liberal justices had the candidate whom most Americans voted for in those two elections become president. I read yesterday that by some mathematical calculation—presumably a few large blue states electing or re-electing their Democratic senators by wide margins and several small red states electing or re-electing Republicans—it would be possible for senate Democrats to win 51% of the total Senate votes cast in 2022 and still lose eight seats.
There is still a range of Republicanism, from the few remaining moderates and strong conservatives who nevertheless despise Trumpism, to the expanding, increasingly Trumpist neo-fascism of the far-right fringe—a fringe metastasizing throughout the body politic of the GOP. But the day of Reaganism and small-government, business-oriented, conventional-moral-precepts-Republicanism is over. Today’s Republicans are all about big government, but a certain kind of big government—the kind that seeks to airbrush our racial history, peek into bedrooms and medical exam rooms, embrace creeping autocracy, substitute their members’ “research” for reality, demonize liberal democracy, call treason patriotism, invert lies as truth, reject inconvenient election outcomes, and generally re-make society in ways to make authoritarians the world over happy.
John Rachal's Blog
Decline
May 16, 2022 at 6:15 pm (Political Commentary)
Ronald Reagan had a wonderful line with a hopeful and optimistic image: “Morning in America.” It was an image of freshness, possibilities, and great expectations—a GOP vision that even skeptical Democrats could like. But that GOP is now in the morgue, displaced by a new generation of the GOP, one disdainful of that optimism and driven more by “American carnage” and violence as “legitimate public discourse.” With some two-thirds of Republicans still believing that the 2020 election was stolen from them, the party has degenerated into grievance, fear, and willing marks for disinformation. It is increasingly clear that one of the two major political parties in the United States has disqualified itself from leading a country purporting to be a democracy. The question is whether or not America’s current decline—despite a two-year window of Democratic control of the presidency, the House, and, ever so barely, the Senate—is permanent or just a massive wave in the ebb and flow of our history.
(It is worth noting that the Senate is virtually in Republican hands since Joe Manchin is a DINO, a Democrat in name only. He was the only Democrat to vote against the Democratic effort to legalize abortion after the Supreme Court has made clear, as everyone knew, that it would revoke the past fifty years of nationwide legal abortion—this after he earlier this year torpedoed Biden’s Build Back Better bill. Meanwhile Republicans Murkowski and Collins also voted against the abortion bill, despite having pointedly accused Trump’s last two Supreme Court nominees of about-faces from their support of “established law” during their interviews preceding their hearings, to their almost certain support of revoking Roe v. Wade this coming fall. So Murkowski and Collins had effectively hinted they would support the Democrats on this but then voted their party line.)
But back to the issue of decline. Democrats are poised to lose the House and Senate this fall, and I would put $1000 on their losing the presidency in 2024, quite possibly to Donald Trump. Fox News and conspiracy-oriented social media are both the harbingers and the cause, along with Trump and the politics of fear and grievance he embodies, of American decline. A woman who refuses to get a covid vaccine despite the covid deaths of family members makes all kinds of claims about the vaccine’s dangers and “government control,” then says that she’s done her “research” and with palpable contempt insists that “I’m NOT an idiot.” By this she means falling for government disinformation when the truth is available to her with some digging on 4chan and other forums for the credulous, now even including some churches. Any honest American history written in, say, 2150 will inevitably dissect the current dumbing down of America instigated by the revenue-generating, fear-driven politics of Fox News, along with the viral capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, and the darker corners of the internet. These forums, that future historian will tell our descendants, were pivotal in stoking Trumpist outrage among uncritical believers where people like Ms. “I’m NOT an idiot” spend hours per day doing their “research” and sharing that so-called research with other gulled inhabitants of Plato’s cave.
Between gerrymandering and the Electoral College—both fixable—American democracy’s structural flaws will continue to make their own contributions to American decline. Gerrymandering allows even a purple state, one with rough parity between the parties that can go either way in a presidential election, to end up with a grossly disproportionate number of its House seats going to one party, typically Republican, due to politically motivated drawing of the districts. As for the Electoral College, as I am informed that I never tire of saying, twice now in just five elections (2000, 2016) it has given us a president who lost the election based on the number of votes received, with the consequence that we had the most ignorant and authoritarian man ever to hold the White House damaging the country and accelerating and feeding the decline. Exhibit One, of course, was January 6, with the Republican National Committee actually defending it by calling it “legitimate political discourse.” Nor do I need add that the Electoral College gave us at least three and possibly five conservative Supreme Court Justices who would have been instead Democratic-appointed moderate to liberal justices had the candidate whom most Americans voted for in those two elections become president. I read yesterday that by some mathematical calculation—presumably a few large blue states electing or re-electing their Democratic senators by wide margins and several small red states electing or re-electing Republicans—it would be possible for senate Democrats to win 51% of the total Senate votes cast in 2022 and still lose eight seats.
There is still a range of Republicanism, from the few remaining moderates and strong conservatives who nevertheless despise Trumpism, to the expanding, increasingly Trumpist neo-fascism of the far-right fringe—a fringe metastasizing throughout the body politic of the GOP. But the day of Reaganism and small-government, business-oriented, conventional-moral-precepts-Republicanism is over. Today’s Republicans are all about big government, but a certain kind of big government—the kind that seeks to airbrush our racial history, peek into bedrooms and medical exam rooms, embrace creeping autocracy, substitute their members’ “research” for reality, demonize liberal democracy, call treason patriotism, invert lies as truth, reject inconvenient election outcomes, and generally re-make society in ways to make authoritarians the world over happy.
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