Of Hippie Punching and Grave Dancing

El TrumPig... lo vamos a dejar ser Presidente?
Posted by Jorge Mújica Murias on Saturday, February 27, 2016

Back to _Wizarding ways?  Back to "Long Division".

The intense dread I feel today has nothing to do with the candidate I am supporting, or the Democratic Party for that matter, despite my long and contentious relationship with the machine that belched up Hillary Clinton--AGAIN!--for  the "I Love the '90s"  Neo Liberal Nostalgia ( Yesterday's Back, Yesterday's Back) coronation and a little more of the "sit down, shut the fuck up hippie" that broke my little first time voter heart within a year or so of the 1992 election.

No...we'll have plenty of time to unpack this shit--again.

The intense dread I feel today has to do with the two party system, and the fate of our democracy.

Okay, so the two party system is itself un-democratic because some voices will still be silenced (DO Stop Thinking About Tomorrow). If we are to have a two party system, and for that system to be as democratic as it can be, each party must necessarily have big tents, and critical voices must be present.  For all the hippie punching from the DNC,  the fact that there are still liberals in the party speaks to the inclusiveness of the party despite itself, and chiefly, why a New New Deal Democrat like Bernie Sanders could be the 45th President of the United States.

The knock on Hippies is that Hippies are touchy-feely, and all about feelings, where as serious people use reason, pragmatism and a kind of paternalism that reminds us wild eyed commies that we have to live in the real world, not some Aquarian Idyll.  The world is a dangerous place, and we need sober solutions, son.

On the other hand, the GOP's version of hippie punching concluded, really, with the election of George W. Bush, and wasn't really about punching "hippies" in the usual sense, because "Republican Hippie" is oxymoronic to the point of cognitive-dissonant meltdown--or stoner comedy hilarity. What ensued was not so much comedy as irony, and then irony gave way to dread as it became the new normal.

When the Bush Administration derisively referred to the "reality based community", it seemed the culmination of the disastrous "from the gut" leadership from a man that had shit for brains, and after that was shown to be disastrous, I certainly hoped that it was an outlier, a historical "whoops" and sanity would resume as soon as an adult was elected.

Noper.

The GOP hippie punching was not directed at social justice idealists, but rather from radical ideologues toward the kind of reason based, "Dad" governance that had been the GOP brand for forty years.  The Far-Right, the Dick Armey (named for the astroturf "Tea Party" the former Texas Representative and Far Right Bastard created to co-opt the grassroots) rabble rabbled the Conservatives into punching the Moderates, who in turn beat the crap out of Liberal Republicans--all cheered on by Drudge, Breitbart, RedState, Limbaugh, FAUX News and the assortment of bitter, angry dittoheads as getting the RINOS (Republicans In Name Only) the fuck out of the party.  The problem is that once the liberals were out of the party, the purge was on like Donkey Kong, and the moderates were the new liberals, the new RINOS, and they had to be punched out of the party--all to the screaming delight of the dittoheads and the right wing bloggers, who love nothing more than "kicking ass".  Rinse. Repeat.

The result of all this punching is a party that rejects reason  and pragmatism a priori, and that has managed to be both reactionary and radical at the same time.  Quite a feat, really, until you consider utter illogical, zero sum  rage of the angry white men who make up this party's base, and now, its candidates.  

Sure, they have a lot to be angry about--lost jobs, lost homes, an American Dream slipping away-- but after years of the GOP convincing people that single Black mothers, or Guatemalan immigrants, or lefty college professors or any of the other host of Straw Bogey Men are the true oppressors, aren't "real" Americans, and the crypto fascist "blood and soil" rhetoric of the "Heartland" and the anti-intellectual, anti-reason, anti-reality "gut feeling" governance of Bush, the GOP has devolved into a roiling beserker projection of all embedded white male supremacy, Social Darwinism, Know-Nothingness and unfettered greed and power lust that fester below the lofty words of our creed.  What you see and hear at a Trump rally is the naked Id of Old Evil America foaming at words that are a rich ingrate's approximation of Mussolini by way of Morton Downey Jr.

Trump will win tonight not because his policies make sense--he doesn't have any.  Yet, he will win by shilling the dittoheads, who are long past thinking too deeply about any of this, and just be the  avatar for their free-floating bitterness and hostility toward everything they have been acculturated to hate, which is now, apparently, everything but the promise of restoring America.  Of course, this will accomplish nothing but the upward transfer of wealth, because that part has not changed.

And then, voters willing, he will lose, and then GOP will collapse utterly, and that will be that.  The party of Lincoln will have come to thoroughly self inflicted end, and unlike my friends who consider the Democrats "their team" and would applaud total victory.  I won't.

As a small "d" democrat first, and a capital "D" Democrat out of shared interest and a sense of responsibility to elect people who are more or less competent at government, rather than the proudly anti-competent on the right, the idea of single national party scares the fucking shit out of me...

Actually,  I suppose the dread I feel is about the Democratic Party,  because I know the history of the party's when hubris when it perceives its hegenomy and, from working for NKY for Obama in '08, the craven nature of its machine politics.  If Team Blue absorbs the moderates, as it did with most of the Liberal Republicans, then the Neo Liberal right turn will continue, the hippie punching will ramp up.

And what the fuck will we do then?

Update: The ignoble end to the party of Lincoln is nigh, taken over by racists.  There is nothing defensible here, no way to explain away Trump as the party's nominee, no justification in voting for him.  None.  You are, or will be, complicit.