Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a festive holiday season, well, at least as joyful as one could be in the shadow of the continuing disaster that is COVID and the unacceptable US response to it.
Just a reminder of a couple of current facts:
Even if Omicron is milder, milder is a relative term. The US is still losing 1245 people per day. Extrapolated out that comes to 454,425 Americans. Not to mention the current death toll is probably undercounted, as explained here.
So, despite the hopefulness of the New Year, there is still a lot that needs to be improved on the West side of the Atlantic. And those reports don’t even factor in the outright deception being practiced in Ron DeSantis’ state of Florida.
Such is how Ron DeSantis has chosen to make his way in the world. This brings us to the main point for the day-2022 still has the United States in grave danger of losing its democracy.
And one political party is doing its damndest to accelerate that process. In his new book, Malcolm Nance explains the fundamental goal of MAGA’s during this new year and beyond.
Nance is not some wild-eyed liberal; he’s a conservative – but he is not a MAGA-type conservative. And he, like so many of us, are gazing out into the future and becoming deeply, deeply concerned.
You have, right now, one-third of the American electorate in the latest Ipsos poll refuses to believe that Joe Biden was elected president of the United States and that Donald Trump is the legitimate president of the United States. Things were moving so fast in the political sphere that the strategy I outline which I call DARF — deny, attack, revenge and fear, these are the four cycles of the political process that would lead us into an insurgency and could put us on the path to civil war — the deny phase came so quickly.
By March of 2021, Republicans who had gone on the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate and had deeply attacked the concept around trying to deny the election had completely flipped. For them to survive politically, they had to deny the very words they had said on Jan. 7 or the period leading up to the impeachment, and it was political suicide to do anything other than to accept the Big Lie. It was the basis for not just overturning what they thought they could overturn — the results of that election — but for destroying the foundation of American democracy in itself. And we are hurtling headlong into that destruction.
I think that we are well past the peter out part. I was really hoping by July of 2021 that the Trump machine would lose steam. What I didn’t realize at the time when I wrote this is what happens on the other hand, when they just decide that the American electorate is not wise enough to choose their own president. I never thought for a minute that the entirety of the Republican Party would just politically align themselves with the end of the American experiment.”
Nance is right, and one has only to look at other publications to note the same level of concern. But, unfortunately, the Republican party has made a conscious decision to walk away from the ideals of a democratic republic and do what they can to achieve an apartheid-style minority government.
Even my latest edition of The Economist points out the danger:
I am deeply concerned about this movement away from responsible government and enthusiastic embrace of authoritarianism. But, even worse – to me – is how many Americans refuse to recognize or, worse yet, cheerlead it on. Like those imbeciles who hear the words: and immediately rant about voter ID, refusing to understand that voter impression is, in fact, accurate and much, much more than just that. ( Not to mention they show an appalling lack of understanding of how voter registration works).
So among my many New Years’ resolutions, this year is to focus a good deal on the rise of the new Boers in America. They are, in fact, a threat to the country of my birth, far greater than any foreign threat, and they have to be destroyed. Yes, I said destroyed. Because if they are not, they will destroy the last remaining decent things about this country. That cannot be permitted to happen.
Christmas is over. It’s back to the grim world of today and the continuing wastage of the third decade of the 21s century. Welcome to the jungle.