Note to Trumpians: Freedom is Not the Same Thing As the Right to Bully People

Trump’s Capitol-storming supporters of January 6 could be heard bellowing “Freedom! Freedom!” as they surged into the Senate Chamber, the offices of Speaker Pelosi, and other strongholds of American democracy. But were they really interested in “freedom?”

Of course not. They simply wanted to kick the butts of anyone who disagreed with them. That’s what Trumpism is all about: kicking resistant butts.

 

When smart people – people like Hamilton, Lincoln, and Rosa Parks – talked about freedom they weren’t talking about kicking butts. Their sense of freedom included responsible behavior in the context of fairness, equality and the institutional levers of democracy. These are the things that ideally make freedom for everyone possible. And they are the very things the Capitol stormers were trying to smash.

 

                     Rosa Parks - Under Arrest

Speaking of Rosa Parks, a councilwoman from Temecula, California, Jessica Alexander, was bleating about “freedom” earlier this month as she compared herself to the heroic bus boycott initiator of 1955, i.e., Ms. Parks. Why did Councilwoman Alexander think she was just like Rosa Parks? Because people were asking that she wear a mask if she was going to join a council meeting in person. Councilwoman Alexander was outraged at this, saying she was being “pushed to the back of the bus” just like Rosa Parks.

 

Um, no. The councilwoman, unlike Rosa Parks, was not risking her very life to demand equality for an oppressed people. Councilwoman Alexander was having a temper tantrum because she views the health concerns of others with politicized contempt. Her idea of “freedom” amounts to a desire to signal her Trumpian loyalty with a gesture that heightens Covid risks for everyone around her. In other words, freedom for Jessica Alexander means “Screw you, other people!”

 

How did the idea of freedom get boiled down in some conservative minds to a mere gesture of hostility and contempt? Obviously, a lot of history lies behind this devolution, but the most recent element of this history is the rise of Donald Trump. Trumpism is fundamentally the glorification of bullying. Trump, in his dim-witted, slack-brained way, conceives of “strength” as the capacity to push people around for his own selfish purposes. He has no interest in promoting freedom, or democracy, or justice or – least of all – equality. He just wants everyone to do what he says. When people don’t, he wants to crush them. This mentality, accepted by his cult followers, is the essence of what they call “freedom.” It amounts to nothing more than bullying. In other words, freedom for them is just another word for “I wanna kick your ass.” And this is exactly what we – as a nation – have to move beyond. May the Force be with us.

 

On Gingrich, Trump and Not Putting America First

America First was one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans. This should be no surprise since this slogan encapsulates selfishness, ignorance, and prejudice, three of Trump’s favorite sentiments. But of course, Trump never really did put America first.

 

The first America First was a 1940 committee established to keep the U.S. out of World War II. It was criticized at the time for being too sympathetic to Hitler’s Germany and not sympathetic enough to Germany’s Jews.

 

Here’s a Dr. Seuss political cartoon from that era.

 

 

The Trump idea of America First is different from that 1940 committee, though it is no less self-centered and bigoted. He obviously never did put America or anything else besides his own narcissistic ego first. His corrupt ways were designed to fill his personal coffers not America’s. And as for genuine patriots, like those who fell fighting the Nazis in World War II, Trump reportedly dismissed them as suckers and losers. He couldn’t understand, he said, what was in it for them. He couldn’t grasp, in other words, what it meant to be patriotic.

 

There is a place for genuine patriotism in American politics when it is connected to worthy democratic institutions. But people who cling to the America First slogan never seem to be embracing that kind of patriotism.

 

Trump in 2016 seemed to think he could profit from a presidential run by parroting catchy slogans like, “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Then, when everyone was distracted, he schemed to divert a big chunk of America’s wealth into his own bank accounts.

 

Trump is in trouble now for his prepresidential shady dealings, but the shady dealings he undertook while in office were not a threat to him. He was protected from impeachment during his presidency by hyper-partisan Republicans. The same people who described Trump as “kooky” and “a liar” in 2016, went on to protect him and his malicious kookiness once he was in office.

 

By 2019, the Republican Party had become so hyper-partisan that it actually approved of Trump using American foreign aid for Ukraine as a bargaining chip in his 2020 campaign. Then, in January 2020, most Republicans gave a thumbs up to Trump when he provoked a violent and lethal mob attack on the Capitol.

 

Hyper-partisanship can be found in both parties, of course, but it is originally, and mainly, a Republican thing. As Fareed Zakaria’s historical summary on CNN last week reminded us, it was Congressman Newt Gingrich who encouraged his fellow Republicans to always use disparaging nouns, verbs, and adjectives when describing Democrats. He even handed out a handy cheat sheet to GOP members listing words for attacking Democrats. He offered it as “a lexicon of terms that drive a wedge of distinctions between themselves and members of the opposing party”

 

Here are some of the terms he encouraged his fellow Republicans to use in describing their Democratic colleagues:

 

abuse of power
betray
bizarre
bureaucracy
cheat

corrupt
criminal rights

decay
deeper
destroy
 

destructive

disgrace
greed
hypocrisy
incompetent
 

insecure

lie
obsolete
pathetic
radical

self-serving
selfish
shame
sick
stagnation

steal
threaten
traitors
unionized
waste

Gingrich’s partisan nastiness was successful in that it helped boost the Republicans into control of the House of Representatives for the first time in over 40 years. But it in no way put America first, and its cost was an entrenched mutually hostile and uncooperative attitude between the GOP and the Democrats. We are paying for Gingrich’s temporary partisan victory today by having to endure Trump’s grossly unethical behavior endorsed and supported by practically all elected Republicans.

 

What we can see from Gingrich’s early onslaught all the way down to Trump’s manipulations today is a gradual collapse in our nation’s governability. We slipped steadily downward because of Gingrich’s movement putting the GOP ahead of the country and continued to decline when Trump put his own interests above all else. It’s going to be difficult to recover the ground we lost, and it may even prove impossible if Republican leaders continue to be fearful of confronting Trump and incapable of leading their party away from the likes of him and Gingrich.

 

 

GOP 2021

A couple weeks ago the Republican party looked to be on the verge of an internal war over its future. The issue was this: should the party fall in line behind the crooked, narcissistic ex-president, Donald Trump, or would it do better following the lead of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

But alas, there was no war. The crook won without a fight. His final victory was confirmed yesterday when minority leader McConnell announced his surrender by saying he would “absolutely” support Trump if he were the GOP nominee in 2024. This promise of support came just 14 days after McConnell had described Trump as responsible for the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and referred to Trump’s behavior as “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

 

But Trump’s behavior was not, apparently, so disgraceful that McConnell won’t hitch his wagon to the Trump star should this prove convenient in 2024.

 

So the GOP is now saying - pretty much openly - that racism, misogyny, religious bigotry and profiteering from the Oval Office are all cool. Not only cool, but the essential defining qualities of the party. The Republican party has no platform, no coherent ideology, no reason for existing except to promote the Cult of Trump.

 

There is still an embattled handful of Republican office holders who reject the Trump Cult, people like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. For them I feel a little sympathy, but only a little. They should have seen this coming. The collapsing of the GOP into a crude, irrational racist cult did not happen overnight. Different leaders from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan and even George H. W. Bush helped shape the party with its southern strategy, its ludicrous racist claims that “welfare queens” were filching money from hard-working whites, its Willie Horton ads, and so on.

 

The Republicans have woven themselves into a web of racism, misogyny, and religious bigotry so tangled and illogical that it now seems to welcome any form of idiocy that helps promote hatred toward liberals, or Democrats, or Hollywood, or any institution that doesn’t fully embrace the premises of the Cult. Witness the recent entry of QAnon follower, Marjorie Taylor Greene into the House of Representatives as a newly minted Republican Congresswoman. Her most notable statement so far: the claim that space lasers might have been responsible for the California wildfires of 2018. The implication was that the California High-Speed Rail project benefited from the fires and so did certain specific individuals and companies.

 

According to Newsweek: “Greene implied that the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish banking family frequently referred to in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric), space solar power company Solaren, and California officials all had a hand in profiting from the fires.”

 

Thanks GOP. We look forward to future speculations from Ms. Greene and other esteemed members of your caucus. When it comes to bigotry and hatred, you guys are tops.

 

Actually, some observers are wondering how much of a future the GOP has. Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, has compared today’s Republican party to the Communist party of the Soviet Union just before it collapsed under the weight of its own nonsensical pseudo-ideology. Nichols emphasizes that he is not calling Republicans communists. Rather, he argues that neither the Soviet Communists of the 1970s nor the Trumpian Republicans of today have an ideology. Each is (or was) a personality cult surrounded by a loyal following whose members promoted themselves by spouting leader-approved gibberish. In the Soviet case, to advance your prospects, you had to talk about NATO and American imperialism. For today’s Republicans it’s important to claim that Democrats are radical socialists aligned with dangerously violent antifa supporters.

 

I don’t know if Nichols is right about the end of the GOP, but I hope he is. I’m not against having a moderately conservative party vying for votes (if only they would do so without suppressing the voters they don’t like). But what I can’t abide is a party so unmoored from reality that many of its followers believe that the Democrats are under the control of an elite group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Good God.

 

Please Republicans, I’m begging you: get help.

 

 

Dying Days of the Deplorables

The insurrectionist mob that forced its way into the Capitol on January 6 was markedly white and, for the most part, male. It was also thoroughly unpatriotic. Beyond that, who were these vandals?

You may recall a 2016 campaign speech in which Hillary Clinton used the phrase “basket of deplorables”:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And [Trump] has lifted them up.

Republicans pounced on her words and tried to present Clinton as contemptuous toward all Trump supporters. But the Republicans were lying (yet again) when they did this. By “deplorables” she clearly meant bigots. About other Trump supporters Clinton said this:

“[They] feel that the government has let them down”…they’re…“desperate for change.”  “[W]e have to understand and empathize with…” these non-bigoted Trump supporters.

I recall this voice from the past not only to express for the hundredth time my disgust for the Republicans’ dishonest caricature of Hillary Clinton, but also to connect the desecration of American democracy on January 6 with Trump’s deplorables. The people who trashed the Capitol building, broke windows, stole whatever they could haul away, and smeared feces on the inside walls were mainly male and overwhelmingly white. Their Confederate flag and brazenly antisemitic slogans tell us they were also overwhelmingly bigoted. These were the deplorables at their seething, snarling worst.

Their hatred for what America has become was evident both in their assault on the electoral process and in their brainless chant of

U S A!

U S A!

U S A!

They seem to think this chant makes them patriotic, but it does not. It amounts to nothing more than a tribalistic invocation that says “Us against you! Us against you!” Whenever I hear this chant I can’t help but recall the similarly tribal German chant of the 1930s “Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!”

I would consider it a great blessing to never again hear a mob shout “U S A!”

 

Meanwhile, about 500 miles to the south democracy roared forward driven by the force of genuine patriots. With the amazing Stacey Abrams taking the lead, voters in Georgia lifted an African-American pastor and a Jewish journalist into the Senate, putting an end to Mitch McConnell’s stranglehold there. The deplorables are truly on the run while American democracy surges. 

 

In a way the victories of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, represent crucial victories in America’s ongoing Civil War. It’s not a coincidence that five of the six senators who objected to Biden’s Electoral College victory were from former slave states as were about two thirds of the objecting House members. The foul odor of the former slave-based southern patriarchy remains pungent in its old haunts.

America’s struggle to realize its ideals has been long and hard and certainly it’s not over yet. But the tide is with the real patriots and, despite the nastiness that Trump’s deplorables promise to stir up in the near future, their glory days are unequivocally behind them.