Tag Archives: Republican Party

Political Rants

Examining the Three Crises Three

I’m guessing none of you noticed, but I returned to podcasting a week or so ago. It was a slight return, a special episode of Strange Sound – special in the sense that there was no music and no editing to speak of. We had just passed the anniversary of January 6, and I had a bee in my bonnet. Either that or a rat up my ass. Not really sure which.

Anyway, in this special episode I expounded on what I call the Three Crises Three. It’s a bit like the political version of the Three Mustaphas Three, except less funny and no music whatsoever. My main point was that we as a society are facing three very serious crises simultaneously – crises that fuel one another in a toxic feedback loop of destruction. And hell, that can ruin your whole day.

What are these Three Crises Three? Let us discuss them one by one:

Crisis One: The Coup

Though it sounds cliche to say so, we experiencing a crisis of democracy in the sense that our republican constitutional government is under serious threat. Now, I know our system is deeply flawed. The alternative, however, is not something better – it’s autocracy. The right is openly talking about this as a real possibility.

But they are doing more than talking. Last year they identified all of the trigger points in our electoral system (and there are many). This year and every year moving forward, they’re going to apply pressure at those points. They had a plan and it failed. But failed plans are good practice. Clearly, the Autocratic Party (formerly the Republican Party) is building toward a second attempt, starting with the election this fall.

Crisis Two: Trumpatosis

Yes, I call COVID-19 Trumpatosis … because he deserves it. This pandemic is literally killing us by the hundreds of thousands. It is also sickening millions more and rending the social fabric of our nation, making organizing and mutual aid much, much more difficult. The Democrats are proving themselves incompetent at coping with this crisis, failing to take the steps necessary to end it.

On the other hand, the Autocratic Party is the party of denial. They have been from the very beginning. They are building successful political careers on the basis of massive failure and negligence in their response to COVID. What’s more, the Autocrats will be hard to beat if progressive Democrats can’t engage in aggressive GOTV efforts in the upcoming elections. Which means no end in sight for this crisis.

Crisis Three: The Climate Catastrophe

This is the ticking time bomb. The climate crisis underscores the fact that our old model of politics is no good anymore. It the Autocrats take power, they will stop even the most flimsy action on climate change. They will further ramp up oil and gas extraction and restart Keystone XL and other fossil fuel infrastructure investments. We can’t afford that detour. In any previous decade, diversions of this kind could be endured, but now – with less than ten years left to address this crisis – it’s simply unacceptable.

I know that the left in America hates electoralism. They have good reason. But we simply need to do this thing. We need to turn back the political cycle this fall and send more progressives to Washington. It may not be sufficient to address these crises, but it is none the less necessary.

For more on this, give the current episode of Strange Sound a listen.

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The case for vaccinating everybody.

Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon.

Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated.

The miracle that wasn’t

Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was nuts.

Well, here we are. We literally have the means to end this pandemic, and we’re choosing not to do it. And mind you, this criticism goes beyond the reluctance of my fellow Americans to take the jab. There’s a whole world out there begging for these shots. It is well within our means to manufacture and distribute enough shots to save millions of lives in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. It is also well within the scope of what can reasonably be defined as our “national interest” to do so. But we’re not. What. The. Fuck.

The hard problem

Our COVID vaccine standoff reminds me of the politics around climate change. The right keeps working to force the issue into a cultural context. In their view, your position on the salient question becomes a marker for the type of American you are. So if you encourage people to get the COVID shot – literally, to save the nation from this plague – you’re a “woke” liberal forcing your views on others and squelching their freedom of speech/expression/choice.

The same dynamic is at work with climate change. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there may be of already-occurring global warming. Right-wingers despise the idea of doing anything about it because that’s what the other side wants. Even if the policy would help people on the right, it’s more important to them to “own the libs” than to flourish or even survive.

One way out

I tend to be an optimist. My feeling, generally, is that losing hope is basically surrendering to hopelessness. The only thing we have in our favor is that there are more of us than there are of them. Our only chance is to act boldly, take the initiative, and move forward, even if we have to drag them along with us, kicking and screaming.

With respect to COVID, that means requiring vaccines (or a legitimate exemption) to gain access to a wide range of services (short of essentials like nutrition, housing, etc.). It also means making the necessary investments to quickly implement a robust global vaccination program, so that we can not only save millions of lives but head off these variants.

If people are truly tired of masks and social distancing, that’s what we have to do – get at least 85% fully vaccinated. You can have the thing you want, but you need to do this first. Pretty simple, right? DO IT!

Cuba revisited

Just a brief call back to last week’s column. After posting that piece and its Strange Sound podcast companion episode, I commented on some vaguely related Tweet by Code Pink and incurred the dubious wrath of what I call the Mas Canosa chorus. A crowd of right-wingers from the Cuban exile community basically called me a hater of freedom, etc., because I dared criticize some of their number for yelling “Fuck You” at Code Pink.

I typically don’t engage in pissing wars on Twitter, but I looked into this a bit and it seems that the Cuban exile community has invested in some Twitter bots. Were my digital accusers non-human? Hard to say, though their grade-school level virtue signalling could well have been the product of automation. “If you side with the brutal Cuban dictatorship over the people of Cuba, yearning only for the right to speak freely, then you cannot claim to stand against the powerful,” I was told by someone who supports strangling the Cuban people to death with sanctions. Sure sounds like a bot to me.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Soft coup.

The president of the United States is not going to give this up. The party that made him president is not going to stop supporting him in his delusions. All you T.V. pundits and mainstream media commentators waiting with baited breath for Republican lawmakers to “pivot” or “come to their senses” or “admit in public what they acknowledge in private”, save your breath. Donald Trump is the chosen leader of the Republican Party – chosen because he encapsulates all that they stand for: celebration of greed, white aggrievement, authoritarianism, and destroying the useful parts of government (i.e. the parts that help people in some way). They can no more abandon him than a snake’s body can slither free of its head. And while they haven’t tried this blatantly in the past to steal an election by ignoring or invalidating millions of ballots that have already been counted and certified, they have always demonstrated their potential for doing so.

Let me be clear. As I have said in my podcast, Strange Sound, this is Trump returning to his original Plan A from back in 2016. I know that sounds like Plan 9 From Outer Space, but it’s true – Trump ran his 2016 campaign as a branding exercise, thinking that he would lose, cry foul, claim fraud, and use the resulting white outrage to build his new media empire. Things didn’t work out as planned, of course – Trump won, and had to resort to Plan B: milk the Presidency for all its worth, and as it turns out, it’s worth quite a bit. Now that he has obviously lost his bid for re-election, he’s resorting to Plan A, only it’s different than it would have been in 2016, because he is now President of the United States, and the power of that office amplifies everything you do to a level unobtainable via any other means. I think people tend to underestimate this dynamic, but it’s true – the Presidency has enormous influence, far beyond that of any cheesy reality show star or phony billionaire.

And so, unlike what would have happened four years ago if he had pulled this in the wake of an electoral defeat, his insistence that there was massive fraud is backed up by the United States Justice Department, all of the resources of the Executive Branch, and the entire spectrum of right-wing media. That amount of power and influence is enough to shake even the firmest of governmental foundations. Even if Trump’s lawsuits and challenges are vacuous, ill-constructed, and unsuccessful, the very attempt to overturn the results of this election is creating an indelible impression in the minds of millions upon millions of Americans. This, at best, will undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s administration and, at worst, will prompt political violence and mass unrest. What the president and his enablers are doing is profoundly irresponsible and detrimental to the stability of our democratic institutions. It is a kind of soft coup in that it robs the new administration of its ability to govern. Just as badly, it creates a playbook for future authoritarians of the right who will surely emerge from the GOP in the coming years.

Don’t treat this as a joke. That is not what this is. This is an attack on the administrative state, and it remains to be seen whether or not this attack will succeed.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.