I believe that we are witnessing the death of the currently constituted ‘conservative’ Republican Party, but that death may take a decade to come into effect and until then we are in grave danger.

There is an old saying that if you are not a liberal when you are twenty you have no heart and not a conversative with you are fifty you have no brain. Now, the saying itself is hogwash, implying that liberalism is for the unintelligent and unwise instead of recognizing that both political philosophies have something to offer and have solutions for pressing problems. That said, there is some truth to it. As people age, they begin to drift away from the politics that utilize higher taxes, care less for educational matters, and have a more ‘good old days’ orientation to social change. This is not the same has today’s GOP with its passion for strongmen, its adoration of violence, its callous disregard for the slaughtered, and its hateful attitudes those not of its ethnic/sexual/social identity. None of this is conservative any more than the Holodomor was liberal.

Political science has identified that the generations aging into their full political are drifting far less to the ‘right’ than their parents and grandparents. The American right is poisoning future voters and leaders turning them away in significant numbers. People who were repeatedly traumatized as children, not only by school shootings on the news, but in practice drills against their own potential massacre, have little patience for the ‘thoughts and prayers’ crowd of the baby boomers. People for whom non-traditional sexual lives, roles, and loves are simply a fact of their friend group have no tolerance for the bigoted hated wielded as a political club. People who entered their careers as the world’s economy burned have no use for the ‘capitalists’ that worshiped ‘greed is good’ and stole their children’s and grandchildren’s wealth. As the grim reaper removes the older generation from its perch of political power conservatism and the GOP will change.

That change is however slow and the wounded dying animal that is the neo-fascist movement of the current GOP will not die peacefully. It will lash out, it will thrash, and we must fight it at every level. There are better political times on the horizon, but we cannot dream of those better days, we must fight and survive to see them. It is said that the long arc of human history bends to justice, that is not correct. Not by itself, we must bend it to justice by the force of our actions, our morals, and our will.

In the last week Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson from the murderous Russian forces while in the United States the Democratic Party not only retained control of Senate but quite possibly expanded their number, while limiting fascistic GOPers to very limited gains within the House of Representatives.

Yes, I am drawing a direct and clear parallel between the Russian butchery in Ukraine and the attempts to end American Democracy. If this upsets someone, I don’t care. American Democracy is far from perfect but by the blood, toil, and death of patriots it has expanded until the current incarnation of the Republican party devoted itself to self-serving sanctimonious power over liberty. American Democracy is something I will defend unlike those lying false pretenders.

The liberation of Kherson is not the end of the Ukrainian war, it is like Operation Torch in the European theater but one step closer to that victory, not the victory itself. And the same with the election. The Senate was saved and the House crippled but the war wages on, Berlin lies ahead for our democratic army not behind us.

The Japanese Emperor surrendered his nation and saved his people from a devastating invasion and from incalculable death while the mad men of Nazi Germany clung to their evil dreams and destroyed their nation. So, it will be with the Modern Republican party. The evil men now with their rigor mortis clenched fingers on the tiller will not surrender their controls, they will not save their people but rather insist that sacrifice everything to save the leaders’ precious bank accounts. This is an electoral war of destruction and until the GOP is burned to the ground and rebuilt it will go on.

A disaster in 2025 is possibly being laide next week here in 2022. Next week throughout the country vital positions in government are being contested by conspiracy-minded election deniers. Should they win offices in enough future battle groups states then they will be able to subvert our constitutional republic in the presidential elections of 2024.

It will not take many victories to place into vital offices, such as various Secretaries of State to make it possible for these antidemocratic Republicans to either submit a slate of electors of their own choosing or simply submit none at all. Either way with the battleground states at the tipping point thy would be able to install a wholly illegitimate Republican president, one that is very likely to be again Trump.

We would begin 2025 with a president who not only lost the popular votes but only by corrupt means installed into office. The souther enslaving states declared their secession from the Union because Lincoln won the presidency without a single Southern electoral vote but the election itself was seen as legitimate. The election and installing of an illegitimate president will be a magnitude worse.

When this corrupt presidency issues executive orders and action what will be the reaction of the deep blue Democratic states? Will California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and others ‘bend the knee’ to the white house?

I doubt it.

Will they honor the Supreme Court when its social conservative majority rules against them?

I doubt it.

There you have the shattering of our Constitutional Republic.

There you have the end of the Union.

Next Tuesday the future is in your hands, choose wisely.

In 2004 GOP backed initiatives in 11 states passed banning ‘gay marriage.’ During the early 2000s the Republicans repeatedly and consistently placed on local and state ballots initiatives to ‘ban gay marriage’ as a method to energize their base and play upon long held but weakening prejudices. There were enough ‘moderate’ voters holding to those bigotries that winning some of them over could swing elections.

When the current Republican led tirade against Trans people surfaced first surfaced, I thought it was a similar ploy. The ‘Gay issues’ had been settled at the courts and what followed surprisingly quickly was a sea change in public opinion. The ‘ban gay marriage’ movement had been corralled to the most bigoted and no longer held the potential of electoral victory. Trans people, still only a concept to many people and outside of common perception, might hold the key to again energizing the GOP’s base voters while winning over a few of the undecided middle. I do think that the ‘bathroom bills’ and such was a repeat play of the ‘gay marriage’ tactics of the early 2000s, but it has moved far beyond that now.

Following the trail blazed by the former president the GOP now seeks cruelty for its own sake and not merely as an after effect. They now longer couch their arguments and plans in bland inoffensive sounding language but instead drive directly to harmful, cruel, and targeted attacks on Trans people and their families vis the power of the state. From Texas to Florida and beyond the state wielding the terrible club of criminal action batters at a group already heavily marginalized, bullied, beaten, and murdered.

When you combine this with the active plot to destroy representative democracy it is clear that there are no good Republicans left.

In just over three weeks here in the United States we will hold our ‘mid-term’ election voting for the entire House of representatives and a third of the Senate, along with numerous statewide and local elections.

Traditionally this election coming in the middle of a president’s first term is one where the party not currently holding the Presidential powers gains significantly in politician power. Apathy by the party in power and in supporters, energizing anger at being out of power by the opposition, dissatisfaction with the unrealized and usually impossible promises of the current administration all combine to push the traditional direction of these mid-term elections.

If forced to place a bet today I would bet that, in general, this trend will hold, and the GOP will gain control of the House. But that bet would be at considerably lowers odds that in past mid-term elections.

Every election is unique but this one sees factors never before in play.

Usually, a president defeated at the box office quietly fades for a number of years from public life, leaving the electoral fight to a new wave of candidates. Not this time. The Former Guy has held nearly continuous rallies and has forced candidate after candidate to effectively swear their undying fealty to him and his lies that the last election was ‘stolen.’ Instead of allowing the public to focus on the new administration and its inevitable failings the Former Guy is reminding everyone what was so unpleasant about the last election. The one he lost.

After the last election a coordinated and violent attempt to overturn its results marred our perfect record of a peaceful transferer of power. Even when Lincoln won the 1860 election without a single elector from the Enslaving States, they attempted to separate themselves from the Union and not overthrow the election. The horrific images of the assault on the Capitol have not faded in part because the Former Guy insists on remaining in the public eye, continually reminding the public of his attempted coup.

In the intervening years since the last election the highest court of the land has also taken utterly unprecedented action, stripping, for the first time, recognized individual rights from the American people. This has possibly energized a base that would normally be complacent or even resentful of an administration that has failed to deliver everything the base desires.

Are these factors enough, are there are black swans, to change the course and upset the historical expectation?

I don’t know. I hope so, but I simply cannot know.

The world is on fire but there is hope. Remember that the essential message of The Lord of the Rings is that despair if a failing because it presumes a determined future, and no one can know the future where unlikely events can produce unlikely and joyful outcomes.

The War in Ukraine

Certainly, over the last weekend things have improved for the Ukrainians. Russian lines have shattered in some sectors and there are reports that Ukrainian forces have reached parts of the Russian border. But the war is not over. We may, looking back with the advantage of history, see this as a turning point or we may see it as another battlefield fluctuation. What we need to do is continue supporting the Ukrainians in their fight with weapons, money, and morale.

American Politics

The political system of the United States is also aflame and here the structure is fully engulfed. The slow steady poisoning of the Republican party with racists and authoritarians has brought that body politic fully into its diseased state. From New Hampshire to Arizona the GOP is infected, controlled, and Led by people who have rejected democracy. The former president did not create this situation, he is a product of the infection not its cause. As someone who was a registered Republican from 1980 thru 2003 it boggles my mind to see the party in its current state. If you are someone born in the 90s this may seem ‘normal’ to you and that the GOP has merely thrown off the mask and revealed its true nature, but it doesn’t look that way to me.

To me it is far stranger and far more extreme than that.

In the 80s conservatives often anti-nuclear power and weapons movements ‘watermelons,’ because they were ‘green on the outside and red on the inside.’ The Soviet Union helped fund and promote those groups and movements to disrupt the West and NATO. These groups and associated travelers were considered foolish and gullible by the right for how they accepted Soviet propaganda as truth with any healthy skepticism and now those roles have been reversed. It is the conservatives embracing and promoting Russian propaganda with qualm or reservation. It is the conservative pulling Russian aggression to their bosom and declaring it just and good. It’s nearly incomprehensible to witness. Literally for decades I have heard conservatives rant and snarl about a supposed ‘deal’ from Edward Kennedy to take Russian assistance in a bid for the presidency. (A tale that has but one unverified source.) And now they openly proclaim that they would rather be Russian than a democrat. They turn a blind eye to mountains of evidence of Russian interference in American Politics. For those of that lived through the final stages of the Cold War this is a topsy-turvy as when Kirk found himself in the Dystopian Terran Empire. I hope that this year’s election defies the historical norms, that young people, so fickle in their off-year elections, arrive in droves and surprise us with Democratic victories, but even if that doesn’t come to be, the fight goes on and I will not despair.

I recently got into a very brief exchange, cordial and pleasant, were as they complained about West Virginia Senator Joe Machin I advised that at this time this was the very best they could hope for out of a state that went for Trump by nearly 40 points. They were unconvinced and spoke of winning WV with ‘Democratic Values.’

Here’s the thing, helping people with their medical bills, lowering the costs of vital medicines, protecting them from predatory corporations, and exploitation by their employers seems to many like winning arguments and intuitively self-obvious reasons to support Democratic candidates. But people only sometime vote by policy. I think much more often and much more powerfully it is ‘vibes’ and culture that move people and provide incentives to action. You cannot win people’s support, no matter how generous the policy, if the price is perceived to be an attack on their culture and thus an attack on the people themselves. How many progressives would accept a deal where the nation gets fully socialized healthcare for every single person in the country, but every school is also required to tech that anything other than heterosexual coupling is ‘abnormal’ and a ‘perversion.’ Very few I suspect, and they would be right to reject such a thing. The hypothetical deal is absurd and fallacy of extremes, but the core concept is sound, people will reject material advantages for ‘cultural’ issues. Culture can and does change and it can be guided, poked, and prodded along so what is true today culturally is not what will be true in a decade or two but to win in places such as West Virginia at the very least you must not offend the people by attacking their culture.

This is an element often ignore or progressives are ignorant of when attacking Trump. He is a vile, racist, authoritarian bully and I desperately want to see him in prison orange, stripped of his make-up and his wig. However, when I see elites attacking him for things such as his love of junk and fast food I am angered. They are too blinded by their desire to attack the piece of shit that they fail to see they are also attacking scores of people for whom KFC or McDonalds are normal and enjoyable fare. Creating that division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ only binds them to the orange man-baby tighter. There is no policy argument that will win over such basic tribal identity as that one.

Sadly, that battle has already been lost. Nearly seven years of snobbish attacks have well welded these people culturally to Trump but that is not enough to assure him electoral victory. I beg progressives do not go for the cheap shot and the stereotype attacks but please try and think about where you can win with culture in addition to policy. Our nation depends upon it.

On a recent podcast I heard conservative commentator Mona Charen state that she was shocked at how quickly the GOP became Trump’s GOP. The host, Charlie Sykes, repeated his long-presented view that the racist authoritarian streak in the GOP had been a ‘recessive gene’ that has now become dominate but this is a terrible analogy for what has happened, absolving all those ‘good’ conservatives for their action and inaction that created the current condition. A better analogy is found in chemistry class: Titration.

In titration one liquid is slowly, drop by drop, added to another. The base liquid is clear and colorless and at first e3ach drop appears to do nothing. The swirl the mixture but it remains clear, colorless. Then after a number of drop colors appears but fades quickly away in the swirling returning to the clear colorless form. But at some point, a single drop transforms the mixture and now the flask is filled with a colored fluid that had just moments before been colorless. It has changed and seeming from a single drop but of course it was a process that had been carried out over time.

This is what has happened to the GOP. Listen to ‘Never Trumpers’ and after a short time someone will remind you that in the old days, they threw out the crazy Birchers, that the party used to enforce rationality. But that was in the early 60s by the late 60s Nixon played his Southern Strategy, inviting in the racists whom the Democrats had enraged with the Civil Right legislation of the great society. The drops of racism began to be added to the GOP, but it wasn’t much, and it didn’t really change the nature of the party. Then there was Nixon’s War on Drugs and that was quite deliberately not enforced equally across racial lines. More Drops into the mixture. Welfare Queens, Crack babies, and more and more drops added to the mixture, flashes of racist color but with enough swirling you could make them go away. Crime Bills and torture for brown people were more drops added to the liquid, along with ballot initiatives against ‘illegal immigrants’ that really targeted more brown people. Throughout this process the left ceased to be political opponents and were the enemy of the nation.

Trump didn’t ‘change the GOP,’ he was the final drops the completed its titration into a neo-fascist, racist, caricature of the party that had thrown out the Bircher only to crawl back into bed with them.