Fascism Watch for 2 October 2023: the End of Politics Edition

[solarbird]

Let’s get another layer of caught up, shall we? All these links are news, and there’s a lot of it. Occasionally I think I shouldn’t try to knit these articles together when I’m this far behind, and I should just give a list of article titles with links; I’ve done that in the past.

But I think this tells a more holistic story, but sometimes I’m not sure. What do you think?

Republican group running anti-Trump ads finds little is working, which is not exactly a surprise but it’s good to see something closer to actual hard numbers on this. Even video of Trump saying things the MAGAts find intolerable gets brushed off, with rationales and excuses found. This is, of course, natural for a cult. The only arguments that made any headway at all were general-election practicality and “Trump fatigue.”

This does tie in a bit to the whole Republican idea of an “end of politics,” which unfortunately actually means an end to electoral government in general. Occasional Republicans called for dictatorship all the way back to the Bush II era, with one pundant writing that Bush II should bring his “victorious army” back from Iraq and install a new, “more compliant Congress,” but it was less than well received even by Republicans in that time.

Since then, the matter has forked a bit, with some still working the “Our country to rule, or no country to rule” line, like Marjorie Taylor Greene saying states should ‘consider’ secession. (Yes, this is newer than last February, it was this past month and a step further along in aggression.) But as with “states rights” and “leaving these matters to the states where it belongs,” that path has largely been abandoned in favour of a national-scale approach.

And under Trumpism, far more of the rank-and-file are ready for it – not just top-down national imposition on issues, but an outright dictatorship. See also not just The Growing Threat of Republican Election Vigilantes but ‘Red Caesarism,’ the out-and-out right-wing call for a right-wing dictatorship to “restore” the country. (“Restore” it to one run for and by white male Christian supremacists, naturally.)

Any such takeover will be framed as an attempt to restore a “rightful” outcome, of course, just as it was with the January 6th coup attempt, but it will be what it is: another coup.

But whether it be by force, fraud, or farce, they’ve made entirely clear what they intend to do if they do reclaim power. Project 2025 is much more than making LGBT people illegal again. (Though that’s a clear and stated part of it; they’ve even written how they’re going to go about it.)

It’s more about making Trump into the Putinesque dictator he so clearly wants to be, a dictatorship with elections, but only ones Republicans cannot lose, and carte blanche to use threats, intimidation, and violence; to overturn local voting and elections (also expressly called for in Project 2025, I note), to turn schools and the courts into Christian fundamentalist agents of indoctrination, to ramp up, not down, climate denialism, to push strict gender roles down to legal clothing, and to build a MAGA legal system to use against political enemies and noncompliant journalists.

And to “put kids in cages.” Yeah, that’s a quote of Republican operative Mike Davis.

So is how he described it:

“It’s going to be glorious.”

They’ve shown us – they’ve screamed to us, with orchestra and fireworks – who they are.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.