The war against democracy in the country that has most championed it is now being waged as definitively as when Germany invaded Poland in ’39 or Japan invaded Pearl Harbor in ’41, specifically now by Republicans in Congress and some 19 Republican-led State legislatures, along with two turncoat Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, and, Oh yes, still Whiner in Chief, Donald John Trump. That’s a long sentence for a short headline, I know, but anything shorter and I might have lost your attention. And at this point, what with the pandemic inall, lost attention might result in a critical lost battle which Republicans would certainly seize upon to their strategic advantage.
And in a time of war, unity is only an issue if either side is disunited in their resolve to win. The Republicans, Trumpian to their rotten core, are indeed united. They could care less about democracy, a form of government that is anathema to their basic values of power, fear, greed, and intimidation. Those are values inherent in authoritarianism, in dictatorship, in oligarchies, in fascism. Democrats, excepting for the two previously mentioned, are for democracy, in full. Its values are governance by, for, and of the people–all the people, equally. They are in favor of a federal government using its financial resources to benefit the people via external and internal infrastructures. They are in favor of an open and healthy unobstructed debate of the issues of the day, hoping, even insisting, to come to consensus–that paragon of democracy that holds a country together, no matter how diverse its population. For without democracy, a country, as we have seen time after time, will lapse into the dregs of one-party rule which leads to dictatorship. And the world has rarely seen a benign and righteous dictator.
A time of war is a tense time, one of uncertainty as to how the outcome will manifest. Who will win? And what changes will unfold? And will the country survive as we’ve known it? It is a political war, yes, but it happens during a war on a lethal worldwide pandemic that should have drawn this world together but that has a further divided it. And to further complicate things, we are also at war with a rapidly changing climate that, because of human intransigence, ignorance, and greed, is rearing its head like the Buddhist realm of the hungry ghost with its figurative huge belly and an impossibly rope-thin neck that can never satisfy that chronically huge stomach. Forever starving; never satiated.
With all these rampant, out of control hungry ghosts, the prognosis for the health of humanity and the health of our Mother Earth is guarded, to say the very least.
In this political war, which, in a sense, is the keystone for the fighting of the other wars, we will see how resilient our democracy is. We are witnessing a kind of D-Day where the forces for democracy–the Commission to Investigate the January 6 insurrection, President Biden, the Attorney General, Stacy Abrams and her Fair Fight, most of the Democratic Party including its legislators and its voters, liberals, along with many anti-Trump Republicans and Independents–are massing its forces on the front lines to challenge the forces of fascism, or the governance by the few at the expense of the many. The fascist forces, which include Trump Republican legislators and election officials on local, state, and national levels, white supremacy gangs, QAnon crazies, anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, anti-mandaters, anti-Semites, anti-Moslems, our highly partisan Supreme Court, many white Christian evangelicals, and cult Trumpsters throughout the country, have fortified their armies with misinformation, conspiracy theories, ancient phony myths, Trump lies, false rationalizations, using social media, Fox “News”, extremist right wing radio shows, and Trump appointed federal judges.
Truth be known, the leading fascists are adept at manipulating facts to support their cause. They recruit their gullible minions then brainwash them to the point of their readiness to drink the proverbial Kool Aid. That’s when the minions get radical, as they are now, trained to threaten those they perceive as against their view of reality. It’s been happening like that for centuries. And the false thinking and intimidating behaviors from the time of Jesus when a Jew who preached peace and love for all was falsely accused and put to death, to the bloody and cultist middle ages when the end of times, called Armageddon, believed and feared by millions, was actually predicted to take place September 1, 1492, to present times when evangelicals still believe in the coming Armageddon when their Christ will return to Jerusalem, hence the only reason the Jews of Israel are at all tolerated, and lead the faithful to heaven while others who fail to convert, like Jews and Moslems, will burn in hell. Things really haven’t changed much.
So I say to fascists who forever pop up their heads like wack a mole puppets, I predict democracy will win this war. It won’t be easy but our motivation is extremely high. We have fought off attacks previously in our history: The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, World Wars I and II, The Depression, McCarthyism, and the Donald Trump presidency and its ugly aftermath. But the pandemic may be our most formidable enemy and we only have the Democrats fighting that. Unvaccinated mostly Republicans are, like cult members, apparently willing to die to make Joe Biden look bad. Very sad and very deplorable, indeed.
We still have time to mount that D-Day, though time is running out. The Commission on Jan. 6, Garland and the DOJ, cases against Trump are all moving along but at a snail’s pace. The 2022 elections and its Republican promise of voter suppression, gerrymandered districts, and partisan vote counting will ultimately tell the tale as to where we are headed as a democracy. And as I stand on the edge of the cliff looking out at a broad expansive sea, I have only a hope and a prayer that the country will do the right thing increasing Democrat majorities in both Houses of Congress thus allowing President Biden to continue making the progress he has already made.
