Millions of Americans breathed a sigh of relief when Donald Trump lost the presidential election. But many forget Trump is the shameful symptom of the disease that has infected the Republican Party. 73 million votes for Trump show the pus remains below the surface.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia Election Official:
“It has all gone too far. All of it… Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
The United States of America has come to this. That comment by Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling, a Republican, underscores that our second civil war is teetering on the edge of violence. The Republican Party has declared War on democracy and America.
It doesn’t matter that the Electoral College has certified Joe Biden is the new President.
It doesn’t matter that the Supreme Court flatly refused to consider an attempted coup to overthrow the will of the American people, filed by a shady attorney general in Texas.
It does matter that 17 state attorneys general supported the attempted coup and 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives ignored their oath of office to defend the U.S. Constitution. They signed on to support the Texas lawsuit, too.
Treason and Sedition
We are witnessing multi-state treason in support of a President who is doing all he can to destroy our system of government. It’s as if he’s following orders from Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump is a career criminal. He may be the greatest con man, flim-flam man and grifter the nation has ever known.
Trump-the-loser’s “Save America” Political Action Committee is raking in millions in donations to overturn the vote of America. This shows he agrees with W.C. Fields that it’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.
Trump, the Lord of the Locusts, has tens of millions of brain-washed cult followers, but his wealthy neighbors in Florida don’t want him to move there after he leaves the Oval Office.
It’s time decent Americans start calling the Trumpers what they truly are: democracy-hating un-Americans. These willfully ignorant people, who some say are suffering from “Truth Decay”, are trying to destroy the United States of America. They want a fascist dictatorship based on White Supremacy.
Do you think I’m wrong? That I’m exaggerating? This is part of a recent diatribe by the paid propaganda windbag Rush Limbaugh:
“I’ve referenced this, I’ve alluded to this a couple of times. ‘Cause I’ve seen others allude to this. I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. | I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people in, say, New York.”
If Limbaugh doesn’t know the answer to that, he’s as ignorant as the people who listen to him. Limbaugh was talking about mostly white rural America separating itself from urban, multi-ethnic big-city America.
The Divided States of America
Face it. We’ve become the Divided States of America. Again. What started 159 years ago with the attack on Ft. Sumpter has never really ended.
Racism and segregation, the key drivers of Trumpism, have been with us since the first Civil War.
That war was about blacks as property, which was the foundation of the Southern economy.
The hatred which erupted in the original Civil War has never gone away.
Steve Schmidt is a former Republican political consultant. He’s now one of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans strongly opposed to the presidency of Donald Trump:
“We used to say in this country, ‘excepting Vietnam, that the country had never lost a war.’ Well, if you live in the Southern states, that’s not true. Not only did you lose a war, or your ancestors lost a war; you were occupied. You were humiliated and that grievance, through George Wallace to Sarah Palin, has always been part of American politics.” :28
Over the last 50 years, the Republican Party has been taken over by racists, White Supremacists, immigration bigots, fake Christians, neo-Nazis and women-fearing misogynists. These people are anti-science, anti-education, fact-denying and sometimes-violent, low-class haters. Our racist past never went away.
We’ve Been Here Before
Authoritarianism—the preference for a monarch or dictator who sets all the rules and makes all the laws—first swept across America in the 1930s, between two world wars and during the Great Depression.
The German-American Bund, or Federation, was a pro-Nazi group which had quite a following as seen in a massive rally attended by 20-thousand in New York’s Madison Square Garden. They held parades with the Nazi Swastika leading a cluster of American flags.
Automotive pioneer Henry Ford was pro-Hitler, and aviation trail-blazer Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer.
Like Donald Trump, the German-American Nazis had strong support from a nominal religious leader.
Father Charles (KOG-lin) Coughlin, a Catholic priest in Royal Oak, Michigan, was ahead of his time in using radio to spread his message of Jew-hating fascism.
Hitler’s Nazis Admired Jim Crow
Hitler’s Nazis were so impressed with the so-called Jim Crow segregation laws of the American South, they sent a delegation to America to study how racism was woven in to state and local laws.
The 1950s were the Golden Decade of White Supremacy and white male rule in America. Then came the 1960s and everything changed, forever.
The first world-shaking cataclysm was the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960. It meant women didn’t have to stay home and make babies. They could make careers. This was a direct threat to white male dominance.
In the 1960s the so-called Baby Boomer generation made it clear they were rejecting the White Male culture and politics of their parents.
Racism: A Republican Trait for Decades
Blacks, meanwhile, started getting uppity, demanding civil rights.
White conservatives responded by choosing a right-wing radical named Barry Goldwater as the Republican nominee in the 1964 election.
Barry Goldwater: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
Goldwater also opposed civil rights legislation.
Lyndon Johnson won the Democratic presidential nomination of 1964 and that same year he championed a new Civil Rights Act:
Lyndon Johnson: “My fellow Americans. I’m about to sign in to law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
That legislation, as much as anything else, led to the Presidency of Donald Trump. Resentment of the loss of white dominance of the nation’s culture and the nation’s laws is at the heart of Trumpism.
White grievance led to the third-party candidacy of the late Alabama Governor George Wallace:
George Wallace: “And “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
The Republicans watched the growing popularity of George Wallace with his blatant racism, and developed what became known as the Southern Strategy. It was a cynical effort by President Richard Nixon and his cronies to convert Southerners and all white racists into Republicans by using coded terms to promote racial discrimination.
On one occasion, Nixon shared a racist joke with Ronald Reagan, who would become the next Republican President in 1981. In a phone call Reagan was venting about the votes cast by African delegates to the United Nations:
Reagan: “Last night, I tell ya, to watch that thing on television as I, as I did.”
Nixon: “Yeah.”
Reagan: To see those, see those monkeys from those African countries, damn ‘em they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes.
Nixon (laughing): And then the tail wags the dog there, doesn’t it?
Reagan: “Yeah.”
Nixon: “The tail wags the dog.” :30
George H.W. Bush continued the Republican racial scare tactics in 1988 with a campaign commercial about a murderous black prison inmate who received weekend passes in Massachusetts, the home state of Bush’s election opponent, Michael Dukakis.
George W. Bush avoided racial dog whistles. Yet he was widely criticized for racial insensitivity. He inspected the death and destruction that Hurricane Katrina dumped on mostly black New Orleans, from the window of Air Force One.
The 2008 election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black President, shook the White Supremacists to their hateful cores.
Obama was a daily reminder that the complexion and the power center of America was changing, and it wasn’t white.
The White Right formed the so-called Tea Party, which pushed the White Supremacy agenda.
The Trump Dictatorship Party
In the last four years, the Republican Party has become the Trump Party, and as such, it is doomed.
It’s too far gone, too tainted with racism, White hatred, White grievance and demands for fascist rule.
Never again can the Republican Party be a principled and patriotic conservative force in the United States of America.
Donald Trump understood millions of American whites didn’t really want government “by the people” because the people were becoming brown and black. He realized the White Right wants a White-control dictatorship. Trump rode White anger into the White House as the Tea Party metastasized into the Trump cult. They took over the Republican Party.
“There were parts of the GOP that we have to look at and be honest about what it was. We didn’t, as a broad party, look at the people in parts of the base in the South and parts of the Midwest who were not motivated by free markets or limited government or individual liberty. They were motivated by racial animus.” —Rick Wilson, The Lincoln Project
Launching and sustaining a third political party may not be as difficult as many professional politicians seem to fear.
The Republican Party as the political power base for the fascists, racists and haters shows it’s time for a third choice.
There must be a place in American politics for conservatives who aren’t cult Kool-Aid drinkers. A new political party is an obvious answer.
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