There's No Dealing with the Devil (or the GOP)

 https://truthout.org/articles/us-fascism-is-spreading-under-the-guise-of-patriotic-education/

“The real crisis in history is what we forget to remember.” Henry Giroux, Author, Public Intellectual, Educator

The other day I reminded myself that this blog is in its final year of existence. Twenty years or one thousand posts, whichever comes first, is the promise I made to myself. It’s May, and this is Post 981 of my vanity project, a public diary of mostly half-baked political and social commentary, gripes, ill-informed and angry lamentations, predictions, posts about baseball, which I no longer follow, and football (soccer) about which I’m hopelessly addicted. Some of my predictions have been proved by time or trend, but as Hunter S. Thompson was fond of saying, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.” 

I remain agitated and annoyed by political happenings in America, the drift toward authoritarianism and single party rule, but also elsewhere in the world. Climate change has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time now because it adheres to no boundaries and each catastrophe affects different people very differently; the wealthy, along with politically and socially connected people usually make out fine, though they may feel some inconvenience. I think about the elites of Germany when the Nazis seized power by force, or Chile and Argentina which fell to authoritarian military dictatorships. For many people, life didn’t change that drastically, and folks with money had what they have in every time and place: Options. Escape routes. Destinations. 

What I sense most is fissure. Splintering. In this age of atomization and social alienation and loneliness the prisons bulge and mentally-ill homeless people walk the streets, live in tents alongside creeks, behind restaurants, beneath freeway overpasses, wherever a person can claim a space and not be immediately rousted, run-off, or arrested. There’s nowhere near enough housing for people who need it -- those of sound mind as well as those of ill and sick and broken mind -- and rents are so high in so many places now, out of reach of most wage earners. Nobody wants low-income or so-called affordable housing on their block, anymore than they want a halfway house or a mental health clinic or a prison, so there’s not enough supply to meet the urgent need, and too many properties are owned by massive, unaccountable hedge funds. 

America has too many billionaires to also have democracy -- the wealthy will never voluntarily share power, and every day the political system slides further away from the people. Extreme views are normalized. Apparently a lot of people approve of this politics of destruction, while many others don’t seem to care if our anemic democracy lives or perishes. Wiser and better educated folks sound the alarm, wave the red flag, but are ignored, shunned, blacklisted. 

I’m no fortunate son waiting for his inheritance. If the House of Representatives in Washington D.C. succeeds in their quest to turn a routine authorization to pay debts ALREADY INCURRED into a war over future spending, most of it for the neediest Americans, children, the elderly (your auntie, grandmother, mother, uncle), Veterans, and the United States defaults on its obligations, the result may be an economic catastrophe as gnarly as the Great Depression. I’m partially retired and will be directly impacted. The last time the GOP played chicken with the debt ceiling, in 2011, when Kevin McCarthy was just a puppy, still learning where and when to lift his leg, the nation lost trillions of dollars in value and thousands of jobs. Average and poor folks suffered the most, as they always do. This time the pain could be even more widespread. The world economy is intertwined, and the crisis McCarthy and the Crazy Caucus seem dead set on precipitating will be felt from Kansas to China. 

This completely manufactured debt ceiling crisis might be America’s Brexit moment, a stunningly stupid self-inflicted wound, all because of one party’s lust for power. 

Something that shows just how far the political system has moved away from the people it purports to represent is this: should the GOP win this cynical joust it’s not hyperbole to say that millions of their own constituents will feel real pain. The Social Security and Veterans rolls are full of dead red, Trump is God, MAGA Forever people who won’t understand until it’s too late that they’ve been used as sacrificial lambs by the party they support, no matter how outrageous, extreme and dangerous that party becomes. McCarthy and Co. don’t care; they’re willing to burn it all down. 

Nothing constructive results when complete fools like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Loren Boebert and cross-dressing George Santos are taken seriously. These people are the GOP’s new breed. They’re Trumpian. Grandiose. Empty-headed. Bigoted. They’re attention whores unfit for any public office. They don’t even go through the motions of pretending to represent the people who elected them; they represent themselves. They’re gambling they can run the bus off the elevated expressway and blame the wreck on Biden and the Democrats. Torpedo the economy, create anxiety and anger and real suffering, even, as I said above, for their own constituents and corporate donors, and then use all their propaganda tools and know-how to convince a gullible public that only the return of Donald J. Trump can save America. 

White America. 

Authoritarian political parties, left or right, bank on their ability to fool masses of people; this is why the GOP attacks public education at every opportunity, why its strategy gurus and data analysts want to prevent college students from exercising their right to vote. Choosing its own voters is the sweet spot for the GOP. They employ every trick in the bag to exclude particular voters from the polls. 

The point of education, as Henry Giroux has argued for years, and does so again in the piece linked above, which I encourage everyone to read, is to teach people to act as citizens in a representative democracy. Critical thinking is the true target of obnoxious people like Trump, DeSantis in Florida, Abbott in Texas, and Kemp in Georgia. 

But don’t take my word for it, read the piece by Henry Giroux and make up your own mind.