In the GOP mind, armed insurrection is political discourse

The January 6 violent storming of the Capitol is a legitimate form of political discourse. That is what the Republican National Committee (RNC) recently said in censuring Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their participation in a congressional committee currently investigating the insurrection.

At any other time, such a declaration would be considered insane. Today, in an atmosphere of generalized madness and delusion, this is the view of one of the two major political parties in the United States.

Anybody who has seen scenes visually recorded by a plethora of sources knows such a depiction of what happened on that day is a gigantic falsehood. A lie on a par with the Big Lie that holds against massive evidence to the contrary that Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

In officially endorsing a failed coup attempt to steal the election in the guise of a move to “stop the steal,” the Republican Party finally has openly revealed itself as a fascist organization peddling an upside-down version of reality typical of an Orwellian society mindset in which truth is falsehood and falsehood is truth.

It is beyond pathetic. The millions of Americans who believe the pack of lies sold by Trump and his Republican followers since Inauguration Day 2016 believe what they want to believe against the evidence of their own lying eyes. They are the problem even more than the RNC.

There are political groups across the world that espouse all manner of crazy ideas, but except in totalitarian states like North Korea they are marginal. But here, the GOP became the power, and on taking office, Trump assumed the style and the persona of the Great Leader and has never relinquished it.

In the United States, with a surplus of information, it is easy to discern the truth even through the fog of falsehood on Fox News and other right-wing media. But too many people want to believe the Great Leader who confers on them the illusion of being winners just by being members of the white race and citizens of the greatest nation in the world. It is typical of cults that the beliefs of their members are virtually unchangeable by any amount of truth, reason, or logic.

As the RNC declaration makes clear, today’s Republican Party is a fascist cult. The January 6 events have nothing to do with political discourse. They amounted to a two-pronged attempt to deny the will of the voters. One prong was the violent assault intended to prevent the vote from taking place. The second consisted of parliamentary sleight of hand to invalidate the votes in those key states that insured Trump’s defeat.

It was a triple loss for Trump’s forces—at the ballot box, on the steps and the corridors of Congress where the forces of the law ultimately prevailed against the mob, and in the voting in Congress where Republicans failed to have the votes of strategic states thrown out. What happens when the nightmare—four more years of Trump— that a minority of our fellow citizens wanted to illegitimately inflict on the rest of us fails? Does the mirage vanish into thin air, or like the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party and the Ku Klux Klan in the nineteenth century, come back with a vengeance, perhaps in a different guise? Will there be another Civil War?

The Civil War never really ended. It was carried out in new forms. The tension over how a nation divided into two races could be made one nation based on equality was not resolved. After the war, Reconstruction began that process but was aborted by fierce, terroristic resistance in the South and shameful compromises for the sake of power by northern politicians. Oppression lived on into a new century. Jim Crow, strict racial segregation, American-style apartheid, prevailed in the South for another century while the “mind of the South” metastasized in other regions as the Great Black migration increased contact and conflict in the North.

In the 1960s, segregation and mass disenfranchisement of Blacks formally ended, but white resistance again erupted and prevented most school systems from achieving true integration. Whites deserted the Democratic Party in droves because of its advocacy of civil rights and joined the Republicans. As immigrants flooded into the country after the 1965 immigration reform ended the racist quotas in place since 1924, the country became increasingly multi-racial and multicultural and the Republican Party increasingly a party of whites.

White resistance to this new reality began gradually but grew significantly in the late twentieth century. The subterranean currents of xenophobia and racism that always existed erupted into the open in the present century. Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency were based on an appeal to restoring white Anglo supremacy.

Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 and the electoral victories of Obama in 2008 and 2012 outraged the adherents of white Anglo supremacy. A significant number of them concluded that violent action and electoral cheating were the only way to maintain or increase white Anglo supremacy and therefore was, by that the very fact, a legitimate form of politics.

The logic of the Republicans at this juncture is reminiscent of that of Henry Kissinger when he rationalized U.S. undermining of the freely elected government of leftist Salvador Allende in Chile by saying in essence that we can’t allow a country to become communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.

That’s what the former president was saying as he instigated the crowd in a speech just before the January 6 assault: “You have to fight because otherwise you won’t have a country anymore.” He was right. If Democrats again become the dominant party, the country of whites, for whites, and by whites will be over. Like apartheid South Africa, that country will be history. That’s the fear behind all the nonsense being spouted about critical race theory and the 1619 Project.

A person with the English-Only movement I once debated on television said as she pointed at me: “Latinos are a mongrel race.” I was amused at the broad nature of her ignorance. The ignorance inherent in prejudice plus the ignorance that in nature mongrel populations thrive and “pure” in-bred ones decline or die.

White panic is made from such ignorance and fear. A mongrel nation, shit-hole countries, the same tropes reflecting a single dread. “Why do we want immigrants from Haiti? Why not bring them in from Norway,” said the portly man with a long tie and orange hair.

Will we survive the latest American rebellion against democracy, equality, and justice? We must and we will. We mongrels are a race of survivors.