Each slice of that poison pie gave them a few more votes

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The main page from which I get this data says that Michigan has topped 3 million COVID cases (in a population of ten million) and 41 thousand deaths. Last week I didn’t report the data because I thought the Christmas and New Year holidays prevented the data from being properly updated. I didn’t want to give hope when it wasn’t deserved. I don’t think I have that excuse this week, so I will assume the trend is good news. The peaks in new cases per day for the last few weeks is 2055, 1161, 920, and 867. Yes, the peaks in the last two weeks are below 1000. The weekly peak in new cases per day hasn’t been below 1000 since the first couple weeks of the pandemic back in March 2020. But the pandemic is not over and many of the government programs to warn and protect us are quietly going away. So we’re on our own to protect ourselves. That mask in public places is still a good idea as is keeping up to date on vaccines and boosters. In the last three weeks the deaths per day has dropped to the 8-14 range. I didn’t have time today to talk about the insurrection in Brazil and the dangerous first few days of the new Speaker of the House. As important as I think they are and as much as I want to discuss them, today’s priority is a couple posts from the middle of December that I finally read a few days ago. The first is by Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community. Brother recommended this post and I’m glad he did. Hartmann discussed the final stages of Reaganism, which is what we’re living through. I knew some of the history Hartmann discussed and I wrote about it in previous posts. Hartmann explains it well, pulls in a couple more threads, and explains what it has to do with today. This thread of history begins back in 1971. Corporations were annoyed that for the previous 40 years government had been controlled by labor unions and other lefty types. The middle class had swelled to two-thirds of the population. Ralph Nader kicked off the consumer movement with his 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed. Rachel Carson started the environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring. The Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1971 put strict regulations on campaign fundraising and spending. And corporations felt nobody in government was listening to them. So Lewis Powell, a tobacco lawyer, wrote what is known as the Powell Memorandum. He urged corporations and the wealthy to seek and cultivate political influence so they could reclaim the nation from the clutches of the lefty types. Nixon was so impressed with the Memo that he put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year. In 1976 Powell helped end the Elections Campaign Act, blunt the power of the recently created Federal Elections Commission, and struck down campaign finance legislation going back to the start of the century. Another ruling came in 1978 which gave corporations the right to bribe politicians. Those bribed politicians – Reagan at the front of the line – lead to the massive Reagan tax cuts. America didn’t get its first billionaire until after those cuts. Before then college was free or affordable. Public schools were the finest in the world. Hospitals were non-profit. Our infrastructure was top rate. Since then, not so much. Hartmann lists several other things Reagan did for corporations. One of those is allowing businesses to buy up radio stations, creating a network of corporate owned conservative talk radio. By 2015 the middle class had shrunk to only 49% of the country. By 2022 the 1% held more wealth than the whole middle class. In only 41 years the Reagan Revolution has profoundly changed the country for the benefit of the wealthy.

As the GOP’s game of shilling for corporations and the morbidly rich became obvious, support for the party slipped. Needing more votes to gain and hold political office, Republicans reached out to bigots, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and open fascists. Each slice of that poison pie gave them a few percent more votes. When working class white men realized they’d been screwed by 40 years of Reaganism, they were unsure where to focus their rage. Republican politicians and rightwing media were happy to supply the villains: women in the workplace when they should be home barefoot and pregnant; racial minorities who “want your job” or to “rape your daughter”; and queer people who are “after your children.”

And that has given us the nasty guy, DeathSantis, and Abbott. In just 41 years we’re at the end stage of Reaganism with an unrelenting barrage of corruption and hate from Republican media and politicians. Will we continue down this path towards a fascist strongman and the collapse of American democracy, or will we turn back to the New Deal and Great Society? That led me to a question I’ve pondered several times now: Is any society safe from rich people who feel they need to control society and its government? In America’s case it started with a guy who urged rich people to do just that. Soon rich people had the legal ability to bribe politicians. What went on behind the scenes to prompt Nixon to put Powell on the Supreme Court? Or was Nixon already on the side of the rich? Are there modern democracies that have escaped this problem? Britain hasn’t. Neither has Italy and Hungary. France struggles to balance corporations and workers. Australia has had problems. Germany appears to be good for now, after arresting a network of coup plotters. Are there others? The second important post is by Sean Kelly. What had been a series of tweets was unrolled into the Thread Reader. Kelly discussed the Martin Niemöller poem that begins “First they came for...” Most people think that poem means by the time they come for you there is nobody to speak on your behalf – so perhaps you should speak on behalf of those currently being targeted. Yes, that is a valid and important understanding. But Kelly sees something more important.

The poem starts off with "first they came for the trade unionists" and yes, the speaker is not a trade unionist but more importantly, the way it really works, is that the person HATES unions and is GLAD that "they" are coming for them. Each line of that poem is the fascists working their way up through marginalized groups that a lot of people agree are "going too far" or "a problem," and at each line they are accumulating the power necessary to get to the next rung of the ladder. This poem is directed at the sort of people who will aid the fascists even though they're part of one of the categories the fascists hate, because they think that this will spare them. It never does. ... These naive numbskulls think they're building a newer, more modern fascism, an inclusive fascism that will allow for whatever type of thing they are to be on the winning side of it. But fascism needs an enemy to perpetuate and thrive, and they'll get to you eventually.

What that means is don’t empower fascism. Don’t allow injustices for one group – right now it is trans people – slide to preserve a seat at the table. Don’t focus on the economy because that allows conservatives to maintain the narrative that trans people are a threat. Don’t sacrifice “sick days for railroad workers” to avoid looking bad.

This is why you have to speak up about everything. No matter how trivial, no matter how irritating it makes you think you sound. When fascism shows up, you can never let it have a comfortable seat.

For something completely different... The Cultural Tutor explores the idea the cinema will be the definitive art form of the 20th and 21st centuries. We’ll still have painting, sculpture, even opera. But cinema – at least the best parts of cinema – will surpass the others. Opera was the top of the artistic mountain in the 19th century. It unified storytelling, acting, music, theater, sets, and costumes into one total work of art (what Richard Wagner, opera composer, called Gesamtkunstwerk). Cinema has incorporated all that too. Cinema has also borrowed from painting how to depict heroes, how to show spectacles, how to frame a shot, how to depict something that doesn’t actually exist, and how to use color and lighting. And, like other forms of art, cinema can question, challenge, and provoke.