The Republicans’ Frankenstein Monster Rises Against Democracy
Rather than a shocking aberration, the events of last week are the logical consequence of decades of cynical rightwing politics and audacious plutocratic arrogance.
By Jim Miller
It finally happened. The Frankenstein monster of the American Right broke down the doors of the Capitol and forced our elected leaders to flee in the face of their surreal rage party.
Fittingly, the QAnon Shaman was there sporting his customary face paint, horns, full-body tattoos, and animal pelts as were white supremacists waving Confederate flags, and a host of others wearing anti-Semitic t-shirts, military gear, and the obligatory Trump/MAGA couture.
Some had guns and explosive devices, others simply wandered around with oversized flags taking pictures with their cellphones while they trashed the place.
Trump’s shock troops blared “YMCA” by the Village People on their way to the melee and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” once they arrived at the center of American power. They engaged in friendly banter with the cops, and then they killed one.
One of the mob, a woman from San Diego, was shot in the process of storming the building, and a few others died--all in the service of saving the country from the unwanted results of democracy.
Deluded by lies and conspiracy theories promoted by the President and indulged by a disgracefully large segment of Republican office holders and their media parrots, the fury-fueled band that ransacked the Capitol was a GOP rogues gallery that shamelessly exhibited all the ugly impulses that the party has fostered and exploited for decades.
It was the unwelcome mirror image that revealed the truly monstrous face of the more respectable corporate anarchists who like to talk about Jesus while they undermine American democracy. But this monster wasn’t here to “starve the beast” of government until they could drown it in a bathtub, as the conservatives in suits like to say, it was here to kill it outright.
Sometimes you get what you ask for.
The rioters who stormed the halls of Congress hate the media as well, but they still know a fascist coup isn’t real until it appears on Facebook. Thus, you need to diligently post your selfie before you assault a reporter and trash their equipment. You can’t create your own reality without killing the facts you hate at the same time.
So it goes . . .
The pathetic nature of this farcical scene would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. You can laugh or shake your head at the tinfoil hat crowd until they stage a surreal, murderous insurrection. And last Wednesday, the chaos in D.C. left the country riveted to their TV screens and progressives wondering what happened to their thirty seconds of joy after the Democrats took the Senate the night before.
Instead of a looking forward to the Biden inauguration, the country is sitting on a razor’s edge and worrying about what other horrors President Strangelove has up his sleeve if the Cabinet or Congress fail to remove him.
In the wake of the debacle at the Capitol, a disgusting tidal wave of high-profile hypocrites in the Republican party, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, and other major and minor institutional enablers of Trump’s ugly, hateful lunacy had finally had enough and heroically came around to condemning him with a few days left in his Presidency.
The rats, it appeared, were finally jumping off the sinking corporate pirate ship after they had gleefully plundered the commons under its flag. Thanks for the tax cuts, corporate deregulation, and Supreme Court majority, you could almost hear them saying, now you’ve finally become expendable. On to the next useful idiot.
It’s all hard to believe, except that it isn’t.
Sadly, this should have been no surprise. Rather than a shocking aberration, the events of last week are the logical consequence of decades of cynical rightwing politics and audacious plutocratic arrogance.
Back in 2017, in her book No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need Naomi Klein observed that “Trump, extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion—a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half century.”
She argues that Trump is simply “the product of powerful systems of thought” that have used racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry to “advance brutal economic policies.” Trump is also the pure product of the “merger of humans and corporations” that marks our era and the embodiment of “the belief that money and power provide license to impose one’s will upon others.” His chaotic machinations are completely in line with “a business culture that fetishizes ‘disrupters’” and his fundamental philosophy is also quite recognizable.
In fact, Klein argues, Trump is:
[T]he incarnation of a still powerful free market ideological project—one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones—that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs as superheroes who will save humanity. In 2002 George W. Bush threw a ninetieth-birthday party for the man who was the intellectual architect of that war on the public sphere, the radical free-market economist Milton Friedman. At the celebration, then US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.” He was right—and Donald Trump is a direct consequence of those ideas.
Later in the book, she notes that Trump’s neoliberal project’s tools are “all too familiar: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sphere, and low taxes paid for by cuts to public services.” This is basically “neoliberal business as usual,” which (with Trump’s cast of climate change denying fossil fuel industry leaders occupying much of his cabinet) has led us to the verge of “a species-threatening catastrophe.”
Thus, for corporate elites and others in the American oligarchy, Trump may have been uncouth, idiotic, and embarrassing but he was a useful disrupter as long as the market kept gaining and the rich kept getting obscenely richer.
The fact of the matter is that Trump’s grotesque oversized persona and accompanying Twitter meltdowns matter much less than the network of rightwing corporate forces operating beneath the radar screen as all eyes are focused on the clown-in-chief.
And they may be throwing him under the bus now along with the vicious monster they tacitly helped him create, but the real American power elite aren’t going anywhere, and their game plan isn’t changing.
Trump is disposable but we can be assured that the project of saving capitalism from democracy will proceed apace without him. Others will emerge to mobilize the rage in the service of a deeply undemocratic agenda that has fostered our historic level of economic inequality and entrenched plutocracy.
The Right is not so much committed to victory in the battle of the news cycle as it is to winning the long war by seeking to permanently disable their opponents and undermine any effort to protect the commons.
And anyone who argues that this is just the result of Trump’s personal extremism is missing the fact that his political transgressions, including this final outrage, are simply lightning flashes in the night sky that illuminate the greater darkness. He is a manifestation of a much larger political, social, and economic crisis—a mere symptom of the greater disease that ails us.
Those who, as Nancy MacLean puts it, want “democracy in chains” have spent decades pushing us toward the present crisis. They have succeeded in doing great harm to the body politic while profiting handsomely. Last week we saw just how fragile our democracy has become.
Thus, the defense of the democratic project is the struggle of our time and everything is on the line.