The insurrection continues
What did we learn from the July 26 hearing of the Select House Committee set up to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol?
The testimony of the four police officers who were on the front line resisting the assault make several things clearer than ever.
The worldview of the hard right is nastier and more twisted than we even imagined.
These people came prepared to kill.
Their singular objective was to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. In effect, to perpetrate a coup.
They did not believe that Joe Biden had won fair and square, and that Donald Trump lost.
Their mission was to right this wrong. They were as deluded regarding reality as Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but not a fraction as noble.
Their targets were chosen ideologically. They wanted to kill, first, Democratic leaders, then Democrats in general.
Innocent victims were not a problem. This included Vice President Mike Pence, police officers, and anybody that stood in the way of their mission. Just collateral damage.
White rage was the mood among this almost exclusively white mob. Pure racism was a major part of their ideological mindset as evidenced by the racial slurs they hurled at Black and Latino officers, the Confederate flags they carried, the signs expressing support for the Nazi Holocaust, including one proclaiming that “six million were not enough.”
Republican lawmakers shrugged, comparing the horrific, lawless violence to a visit by tourists, with Trump declaring that there was “a lot of love” in the hearts of the terrorists. In reality:
The insurrectionists were defeated but not chastened. The delusions continue.
The insurrectionists who call themselves patriots are traitors.
Next, they expect Trump to be restored to the presidency in August, by conveniently unspecified means. More delusion.
In the meantime, right-wing Republicans in the states are working overtime to steal the next election by denying the vote, through countless devious means, to minority and Democratic voters, and installing Trumpian Republicans to count votes.
Except for a handful of Republicans who are on the way to being drummed out of the party, the Republican Party is a fascist, totalitarian party. Purges are commonplace in these kinds of regimes.
Liz Cheney may be a hero, but like Trotsky she will lose. Stalin had more power.
Trying to rescue the “soul of the Republican Party” like Cheney wants to do is a fool’s errand. The party has not had a soul for a long time. The party that wants to deny food to poor children, health insurance to those who cannot afford pay to play mercenary medicine, and countless other outrages against the vulnerable and on behalf of the rich and powerful: What kind of soul can it have? A cold and dark one.
Historically, the GOP has been slouching toward being the party of the “Lost Cause” and it has finally achieved it. It has become the party of all the reactionary lost causes: the Civil War; the nativist immigration regime that held sway from 1924 to 1965 and kept out brown and Black people; the fight to crush what little of a social safety net remains; the struggle against a rational, scientific view of the world and for an obscurantist, semi-Calvinist religion of the white Evangelical elect, without charity or mercy; the crusade to erase difference—sexual, political, religious—from the sphere of rights.
All this is bigger and more deeply rooted than Trump. Yet it is still true, especially when it comes to Covid-19, no one could have screwed it up worse than Trump. Trump is the distillation of all that is ugly and evil in the American character.
That is why so many hate him. Loath is a better word. Why I abhor him is also why more than a few revere him. Those who worship this false savior see themselves in the mirror when they look at Trump. They are Trump, scared white supremacists that fear that their comeuppance for centuries of abuse and oppression is coming. It is.
I have a fraught relationship with being and American, but still I expected more from the American people. How can anybody, from a moral, religious, ethical or any other standpoint, adore an ignorant blowhard, a narcissistic oaf, a bloated, bilious bigot, a cruel man who separates children from their parents and who golfs while people die in droves from Covid-19?
On January 6 at the ‘Storm the Capitol’ rally, Trump told his supporters, you must fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore. That goes many times over for us who have never been fully accepted as part of this country. Let us fight like hell. And beat the hell out of them.