Unite now or a generation or more will live devastated lives behind a new Iron Curtain

Before the Anschluss, Austria was a sophisticated, educated, cultured society. They had set aside a monarchy and sought to build a Republic upon it, which was formalized at the end of WWI.

Within twenty years, Vienna, a shining star of intellectualism, music, arts, philosophy, psychotherapy and culture succumbed to Hitler.  The deprivations of the Versailles Treaty accounted for some, but surely not all, the transformation.

Monarchy to a (Racist) Republic to a Racist Fascism? What took the Austrians only 20 years has taken us more than 200. Bravo -- we score a few points for that one.

But anyone without an American flag up his ass knows that the fin de siècle Viennese, and the generation that followed, had a far greater intellectual and cultural capacity to resist imbecilic totalitarianism than do we in the US. If you are overestimating Americans, read Fox News' comments on Facebook, as I do. You will come away frightened and drained by the stupidity, fear, hate and ignorance. If the Austrians succumbed in 1938, we cannot imagine our own survival will be easy.

American society is scarcely above that of an ignorant blood mob (made even worse by their extraordinary view that they know what they are talking about), with tens of millions utterly ignorant of the 20,000 lies and the massive accumulation of evidence -- much of it out in the open -- that the Constitution is burning and a totalitarian state is upon us.  While the outright racism and violence (and the Schadenfreude it entails) of this administration may serve some of the Trump demographic, most are going to bleed red like the rest of us when social security and Medicare are stolen and bowing to government power is demanded of them. 

So what stands between us and oblivion is not quality or legacy.

What stands between us and oblivion is courage and an absolute commitment to excising the evil forces that will seek to subjugate us to their will at the end of the barrel of a gun.

The police, ICE and Eric Prince's mercenaries-- reinvigorated as Hessians, Antebellum slave catchers, late 19th century Pinkertons, and 20th century SS and KGB -- will seek to normalize absolute obedience to authority, and an abandonment of the rights and liberties of the tattered Constitution.

The Lincoln Project is doing admirable work, but how many centrists of honor, integrity and historical understanding will show up to turn out Trump?

African Americans will as always line up for many hours suffering pain, discomfort, inconvenience -- and now a deadly pandemic -- all while little white monsters do everything they can to make it impossible for them to vote and have their vote counted.

Our best chance of stopping the fascists may be in the hands of the disenfranchised far Left. Will they read the tea leaves and understand that if Trump secures power everything they value will become a Utopian pipe dream, vanishing into thin air for a devastated generation or more -- if not until the species is extinguished by the idiotic, anti-science, carbon-burning fools they allowed to secure absolute power?

Even an alliance with the far Left is no guarantee. Remember Guernica, remember the Spanish Civil War. Even all of us pulling together may not be enough. But that is not really relevant. The millions of purged voter registrations, hacked election machines, disappearing polls in blue districts, threats to mail-in voting, illegal intimidation threats at the polls -- the election may be stolen despite our best efforts.  What is relevant is that without unity in the center and on the left against brutal totalitarianism, all is surely lost, and our children may live their lives behind a new Iron Curtain.

For their sake, we must unite at all costs, whatever the costs, whatever the odds, whatever the risks.

Conservatism and revanchism in America

Conservatives -- and especially the reactionary, the counter-revolutionary among them -- are revanchist.

Liberals seem regularly shocked by this.

When the Right does what it does most fundamentally, which is to oppose emancipatory movements of human beings outside the inner circle (in the US, those who are not white, male, heterosexual Christian citizens) -- it's intention is not merely to regain the equilibrium of the ancien regime. It's intention includes vengeance for the mere act of questioning privilege -- the challenge to privilege is as much a crime as the idea of emancipation, itself.

This has been true for centuries, and was as evident in the French counter-revolutionaries in 1789 as it was in the Confederates of 1861, as true in the post-Reconstruction American South as it was in the proto-socialist interregnum between the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution, as true in the anti-Communism and anti-welfarism of the 1930s and 1950s, as it is in today in which fascists seek to crush Constitutionally-protected right of assembly and protest and punish those who dare speak truth to power.

The fascists don't merely object to your desire for liberté, égalité, fraternité -- they object to the idea that marginalized people would dare confront their power. Police don't want to force you to conform to their will for social stability -- they want to punish you, even kill you, for expressing the right to be treated with dignity. They see a protest against murder of the oppressed as an attack on their very concept of America -- a nation in which the jack boots of the oppressor has the right to crush the marginalized. Ask a reactionary to critique BLM: the answer will involve a flag. For them: normative America *is* inequality, violently enforced.

Blue Lives "Matter" More Than Yours in the sense that they are weaponized for the powers-that-be to punish resistance. Otherwise, they have no value to those who use them.  To the Trumps, Mnuchins and Barrs, the cops are simply hunting dogs allowed to torment and kill the Master's prey. But don't forget that it is not the dogs who lead the hunt and it is not they who set the agenda, although they are admittedly a feral pack in the US far too often. Defunding the police may be needed, but that is just a start. The reactionaries will seek to oppress and punish with or without them, as the deputizing of mercenaries and border patrol agents in Portland showed clearly, and as history for at least two centuries has shown us. (The Paris Commune was put down in part by the French Army even though it had been disbanded.)

The revanchism, the blood-letting vengeance, we see in the streets of America today may be new in its current form and new in the risks it imposes on the future of the American Republic, which is tottering on the precipice. But it is not truly new, having been a central feature of the reactionary heart and mind for a very long time. These past few weeks have been our own la semaine sanglante. But this is a tree with deep roots and the emancipation of all human beings will continue to meet resistance from the reactionary right after Trump is gone. That is who they are. 

After all, their punitive nature is so incendiary they had to invent Hell to satisfy that fire within them.

Many thought that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the devastating set backs to labor unions, the reckless race to break all records in economic inequality since 1980, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the ongoing exploitation of women and people of color in the work force, the Reactionary Right had lost its enemies and thus its fire. For some time, GOP leadership muddled over the option that horrified them: to become inclusive, generous, and law-abiding. But Trump found a simmering base, one still angry that blacks and women and queer and poor folks were still uppity, still expecting decency and marginal support, and the GOP realized there was still game in the strategy of hate -- and here we are.

The reactionary element in the US is thus a disease that can be suppressed but not eliminated. When Reagan and his followers killed off their enemies, the reactionaries became dormant, but a few forward steps such as the rights of gay people to marry, and the rights of transgender children to play school sports and use public restrooms, political correctness (which, outside of some excesses, was mostly about asking people rather than telling them what hurt their feelings and did them harm), and the concept of white privilege being introduced to mainstream discourse, stirred up the cancer, and it came back with a fury. Covid-19 is real and the suffering and deaths it is responsible for are palpable, but our incapacity to suppress it is also a metaphor for the resurgence of the reactionary cancer that has never been eliminated from our society. The reactionary's aversion to expertise and his anger-centered, blaming, vengeful nature was a very poor fit for the requirements of leadership in a pandemic, so the simultaneous rebirth of both a real and a political plague is not coincidence.