This Is the Bleakest Moment for America in My Lifetime
Back in February, before the prion disease that has afflicted conservative politics for four decades reached its current, virulent stage, and when people still thought that the president* had some sort of pivot left in him, his original Muslim ban sent people into the streets to protest. In Nashville, some protesters were walking through an intersection in the marked crosswalk when a car piled into them, carrying a couple of them down the street until the local police finally flagged it down. This was generally thought to be a bad thing.
A Republican state legislator came up with an original solution. Inhumane, and almost incomprehensible in an evolved primate, but unquestionably original, via KDVR:
State Rep. Rep. Matthew Hill has filed a bill that says if a driver hits a protester who is blocking traffic in a public right-of-way, then that driver would be immune to civic liability if the demonstrator is hit and hurt, as long as it wasn't intentional. "If you want to protest, fine, I am for peaceful protesting, not lawless rioters," Hill said. "We don't want anyone to be hurt, but people should not knowingly put themselves in harm's way when you've got moms and dads trying to get their kids to school."
This bizarre public safety policy naturally caught on, because one thing this country does not lack is a universe of state legislators afflicted with the disease. In May, down in the newly insane state of North Carolina, a similar bill passed the state House of Representatives. From Fox News:
A new bill approved by the state House will legally protect motorists who hit protesters blocking the road-as long as they "exercise due care," according to The News & Observer in Raleigh. House Bill 330 was approved in a 67-48 vote late last week. The bill was drafted in response to protests in Charlotte that paralyzed traffic last fall. "I became concerned for drivers after watching the recent protests which turned into riots in Charlotte and other cities," Republican Rep. Justin Burr, the bill's sponsor, said to Fox News. "In a number of cases the protests turned riots resulted in violence and the terrorizing of unsuspecting motorist, their passengers and property." "I strongly believe North Carolina should protect law abiding drivers from facing civil liability if a protester is injured while attempting to illegally block traffic on a public highway or interstate."
Somehow, this made sense to Republican legislators and to the modern conservative mind. (The tactic also was endorsed by prominent conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds, who teaches law at the University of Tennessee.) Essentially, the statutes would create a protected class of vigilante motorists empowered to curtail free assembly with 4,000 pounds of mobile iron. This became an acceptable solution almost exclusively among Republican politicians.
So when anybody, especially the president*, talks about what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, from the Citronella Putsch on Friday night, to the violence on Saturday morning, to the graphic fulfillment of the philosophy behind these lunatic laws on Saturday afternoon, tells you that what happened in Virginia has anything to do with "polarization," or that it is a problem equally shared by Both Sides, that person is trying preemptively to pick history's pockets.
Every Republican who ever played footsie with the militias out west owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican who ever spoke to, or was honored by, the Council of Conservative Citizens and/or the League of the South owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican administration that ever went out of its way to hire Pat Buchanan, and every TV executive who ever cut him a check, and every Republican who voted for him in 1992, and everyone who ever has pretended his views differed substantially from the ones in the streets this weekend, owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican president-actually, there's only one-who began a campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to talk about states rights, and who sent his attorney general into court to fight for tax exemptions for segregated academies, owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican who ever played footsie with the militias out west owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican politician who followed the late Lee Atwater into the woods in search of poisoned treasure owns this bloodshed.
Every conservative journalist who saw this happening and who encouraged it, or ignored it, or pretended that it wasn't happening, owns this bloodshed.
The modern conservative movement-born of the Goldwater campaign, nurtured by millions of dollars from corporations and rightwing sugar daddies, sold day after day on millions of radios and on its own TV network-shoved the Republican Party right where it was dying to go anyway. These were institutions whose job it was to isolate this encroaching dementia from afflicting our politics in general.
Last November, we saw the culmination of four decades of the Republican Party trying to have it both ways, profiting from the darkest forces in American culture while maintaining a respectable cosmetic distance. On Saturday, we saw the culmination of the election that produced. At least, I'm praying this is the culmination. But I'm not sure about anything anymore.
Anyone who followed the presidential campaign saw this coming. Frankly, I'm surprised there wasn't more of it. Every Trump rally came with an implied promise of some kind of violence. Sometimes, the promise was fulfilled. Sometimes it wasn't. But it was the dark energy behind that whole campaign. For all the relentless chin-stroking about the economically anxious and forgotten white working class, and for all the prayerful coverage of Donald Trump's "populist" appeal, there was no question what was driving events on the Republican side.
If they merely wanted change, they had 16 other Republican candidates to choose from. But that wasn't what got them out to the rallies, to bathe in that dark energy and chant their imprecations. That wasn't what got them to the polls in droves. The inside voice, carefully honed by four decades of practice, had gone silent in favor of saying out loud all the spells and incantations that had worked their magic ever since Harry Dent had written the original book of spells and handed it to Richard Nixon.
Anyone who was at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland saw this coming. Heidi Cruz was reportedly physically threatened inside the convention hall. The frisson of danger that ran through Quicken Loans Arena was palpable and very, very real. Anyone who was at the Inauguration saw this coming. The address summoned up the desolate, witch-thickened wasteland he'd been handed. He had a memorable phrase for it.
American Carnage.
It came, finally-American Carnage, that is-on the streets and sidewalks of Thomas Jefferson's college town. He couldn't call it by its name. He couldn't heal the country because he'd hidden himself in its wounds.
As horrifying as the video of the murderous automobile was, there was another image from Charlottesville that shook me even more deeply. At some point in the long and bloody afternoon, a phalanx of local militia wannabes took up posts around Emancipation Park. They were dressed like Croatian guerrillas and they carried formidable firearms. As far as I know, they didn't do anything worth noting, but they were standing there as heralds to a very bleak future.
We now know what the reaction will be if the institutions of government, and the people in them, get so sickened by this administration that they act to rid the country of it. Is there any doubt that a president* who, after the events of this weekend, can't even see fit to rid himself of the fascists around him, including the ludicrous Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Ph.D., wouldn't balk at encouraging paranoid violence as a means of self-preservation? Is there any doubt that a president* who could not even muster the gumption or the outrage to criticize Nazis for what they are wouldn't blink at bringing the temple down on his own head either out of pure childish pique, or because he doesn't know any other way?
Except for himself and (possibly) his family, there is nothing this president* cares enough about to keep from destroying it if he thinks he has to do so. And, if he thinks he has to do it, he will use whatever tools are at hand, because why wouldn't he? Nobody in the party he purportedly leads has shown any willingness to do anything more than moan about how Troubled they are at what he's doing. And a lot of what his administration is doing comes from the same place in our history out of which James Fields, Jr. and his automobile came barreling in the summer sunshine of a Saturday afternoon. The administration still employs Kris Kobach for the purpose of suppressing minority voters. The administration is still in court defending the rights of oppressed white college applicants. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is still the attorney general, and a lot of people are trying to get the inside voice to speak again. Somebody never stopped whistling Dixie.
I can't remember a bleaker time in this country's history. The most perilous moments of the Cold War were frightening but, by and large, we were all in it together. The Vietnam period was angry and divisive but there was a central focus to all the rage, an ill-conceived and immoral foreign adventure that even its most wrathful opponents knew had to end sometime. But the centrifugal forces seem stronger and more mysterious this time. They seem to be coming from too many different directions and they seem to have a number of obscure and distant sources. Our sense of being a self-governing nation is being pulled apart. Our concept of a political commonwealth is unmoored and floating. Nothing is solid. Everything is fluid, and everything ought not to be. Not like this. Not in the 21st century. We settled some things in the last century that should have been settled for good.
I can't remember a bleaker time in this country's history.
Back in 1789, Thomas Jefferson, who founded a university in Charlottesville, engaged with James Madison on the subject of the popular basis of political authority. Famously, Jefferson wrote that:
"…As the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead, a living generation can bind itself only: In every society the will of the majority binds the whole: According to the laws of mortality, a majority of those ripe at any moment for the exercise of their will do not live beyond nineteen years: To that term then is limited the validity of every act of the Society: Nor within that limitation, can any declaration of the public will be valid which is not express."
Madison, in reply, tried in his usual way to talk Jefferson gently down from his high horse and back to the business of governing here on planet Earth.
However applicable in Theory the doctrine may be to a Constitution, in [sic] seems liable in practice to some very powerful objections. Would not a Government so often revised become too mutable to retain those prejudices in its favor which antiquity inspires, and which are perhaps a salutary aid to the most rational Government in the most enlightened age? Would not such a periodical revision engender pernicious factions that might not otherwise come into existence? Would not, in fine, a Government depending for its existence beyond a fixed date, on some positive and authentic intervention of the Society itself, be too subject to the casualty and consequences of an actual interregnum? If the earth be the gift of nature to the living their title can extend to the earth in its natural State only. The improvements made by the dead form a charge against the living who take the benefit of them. This charge can no otherwise be satisfyed than by executing the will of the dead accompanying the improvements.
Yeah, I know, just a couple of slaveowners talking there. But the point remains important. Like the law, democracy must be stable, but must not stand still. Some things must abide, beyond the power of equivocators, thugs, and misbegotten presidents, beyond the influence of inconstant political drama. Some changes must change and, once change occurs, it, too, must abide. It must become permanent, and not subject to periodic revisions engendered by pernicious factions. Like Nazis, I guess.
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