Until we greatly reduce the power of the oligarchs

I have a Martin Luther King Day cartoon that didn’t get posted promptly. It is by MacLeod and shows an elephant saying, “Spare a thought for us Republicans on this difficult day when we have to dredge through everything MLK ever said to find something we can post that’s half acceptable to our racist supporters.” Brother recommended a post on Daily Kos that I would have found eventually. He also recommended a couple comments in the post that I would not have seen. So, thanks Brother! The post is by Dartagnan of the Kos community. His central point is that the nasty guy and his followers want one thing: revenge. Yes, a lot comes from the nasty guy’s use of revenge as his major campaign theme. It is more than that.

As Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, observes, the Republican electorate has, for the most part, swallowed Trump’s fiction and internalized it. Republicans have transformed Trump’s embarrassments into an insult against their own personal identities and belief systems. It’s an offense that demands and necessitates revenge against those fellow Americans who dared to insult them.

Admitting one’s choices are wrong can be difficult to impossible. Those who can’t admit do a lot to save face. And to do that they have to ignore the nasty guy’s criminal charges. They have to invent and believe preposterous stories of the Biden family, and conjure up fake horrors, threats, and enemies. It’s a coping mechanism. They are now convinced that millions of Americans, including their neighbors, look down on them. They hear it through the attacks and critiques of the nasty guy. And revenge doesn’t respond to discourse or reason. In the comments is a meme by DoctorH showing Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka saying, “What could be more noble cause for a Second Civil War than a litany of IMAGINARY grievances?” Now on to the comments that Brother recommended. These confirm a lot of what I’ve concluded over the last few years that what is going on is these people are highly invested in the social hierarchy, in which they consider themselves rather high up. What they are doing is protecting their social position. A comment by Bring the Lions:

The Big Lie is there to cover the Big Truth: the MAGA/GOP base can’t accept losing elections and power to the Democratic coalition. They can’t accept that they are out-numbered by the rest of us (hence the fixation on the size of rallies and flags). They refuse to see members of the Democratic coalition as legitimate Americans, having equal standing to them. That’s the Big Truth that keeps being alluded to in so many ways. Better to have the Big Lie about “election fraud” to masquerade the blatant racism and bigotry behind the whole denial. Because if they didn’t have the Big Lie, the conversation would have to be about how one segment of America simply refuses to accept that they can lose elections to the other, and refuses to accept that the other side has the legitimacy to govern over them. Once the conversation moves there - and that’s exactly where it should be - you can’t “both sides” it. You’re effectively having the conversation that needs to be held: how do you run a democracy when one side has given up on….democracy?

Confirmation bias on my part? I see it as: I’ve come to this conclusion of how the world works and here is someone who has come to the same conclusion. Brother pointed to the response to Bring the Lions by theghostofjohndewey:

great comment, but I will posit that it goes deeper even than what you say—the MAGA crowd is simply NOT ABLE to accept what America has become and is turning into; specifically, a country where being a white Christian male does not automatically put you on top of the social hierarchy; a country where gays are free to walk around “flaunting” their “unnaturalness”; a country where women-folk are not kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen; a country where Blacks are free to vote and live outside “approved” neighborhoods and marry into “the white race”; a country that is increasingly diverse, increasingly non-white, increasingly non-Christian, and possibly worst of all, a country where people are increasingly tolerant of anything or anybody that is “different.” “Make America Great Again” is all about “restoring” that (mythological) utopian America where none of the above existed, where even the poorest white man living in a shack with no power or running water still knew that they were somehow better than an educated, well-to-do black man (to use the most obvious example).

Yep, it’s all about the social hierarchy and their (rather high up) place in it. Brother also recommended the comment by jsteve7:

I think the biggest reason for the size of Trump support is what they see as a defense against their biggest fear of all — being voted into irrelevance from a DEMOCRACY. Being voted into irrelevance by people that don’t look like them, pray like them, sexually orient like them, and intend to create a racial, gender, sexual, and economic level playing field in this country. Trump supporters see themselves as bunkering up in a mindless and existential fight against anything perceived as “left.” The biggest right wing enemy in this fight is federal government as it is now seen by Trump supporters as THE instrument of the left to implement their vision of equality and justice for ALL — the last thing the right wing wants. So, what better way to fight this enemy than a gigantic wrecking ball? And even if Trump fails to completely wreck our democratic institutions, as he did in his first term, he can be a block against the perceived inevitability of government by and for the people.

I also noted the comment by doncoolodge:

There’s no way to defuse that deep an animus. That it exists makes it imperative that we utterly defeat them at the polls; the only alternative is surrender, and that’s unthinkable. But when we eliminate that possibility of elective revenge, that is most likely to only increase their rage. And they’ll still take their revenge, in the only way that’s left. Sigh. I keep flip-flopping from hope to despair, with the events that might bring me hope also leading me to picture the horrors that are also likely to evolve from them.

Peter Olandt of the Kos community wrote about something I and others have recognized for a long time but others still get it wrong. Olandt rejects the common idea that if we just defeat the nasty guy the problem is over. The article above says no to that – the nasty guy’s followers won’t disappear quietly. Olandt says no in a different way.

Both Trump and corporate media are tools of American oligarchs. The Murdochs, Kochs, and Crows of the world are the real power, menace, and conspirators out to destroy America.

The current effort began as a response to Roosevelt’s New Deal when taxes on the wealthy were 70% and higher. Reagan tackled the discontent of the rich with the mantra “Government is the problem.”

The elected Republicans needn’t have solutions to make government better, they could just muck things up worse and use that as justification that even more government needed to be eliminated. Republicans are anarchists and nihilists. So over the years we have privatized some parts of government, downsized much of it, and in Red States essentially removed much of it all while oligarchs got richer on it. When the initial results came in and most of us saw no benefit to the downsizing of government, the oligarchs needed to up their game to keep the momentum in their favor. The oligarchs tied themselves to racism, guns, and abortion as the polarizing topics to keep getting their servants elected while weakening anti-trust statutes allowing for media consolidation to push their message. With Citizens United, they legalized bribery making the process more streamlined for themselves. ... We haven’t come close to defeating the Fascism arrayed against us right now. We’ve barely kept the first attempt from succeeding while addressing NONE of the conditions which led us here. Until we greatly reduce the power of the oligarchs and keep them in check, we will simply face a Trumpian threat again and again.

In the comments JaketheRake says the article missed an important piece.

The oligarchs have turned from trump because they don’t control his cult. They have been wanting a different candidate for a while now. Desantis has failed to shine for them, now Haley will probably fail as well. They are done with trump, but can’t control his mob.

For a while now I’ve had the wish the nasty guy would save the nation a great deal of trouble if he just died. Lots of commentary say he’s ripe for a heart attack. But ... His base won’t believe he died in the same way they don’t believe a lot of other obviously true and well documented things. Also, the oligarchs are still there, making yachts full of cash. Peter Schickele has died at the age of 88. He is famous for his classical musical comedy. The biggest part of that was his invention of P.D.Q. Bach who he claimed was “the youngest and oddest of Johann Sebastian’s 20-odd children.” He would claim he had found another work by P.D.Q. which would be a parody of some aspect of classical music. An example is the “1712 Overture,” a parody of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” I became acquainted to Schickele in high school. Brother had bought a double vinyl album “The Wurst of P.D.Q. Bach” and I very much enjoyed it. A few more albums appeared after that. I saw Schickele live three times. The first was in the 1970s at a concert in Kalamazoo. I greeted him after the concert as was amazed at the number of food stains on his tux shirt. The second was in the 1980s when he did a concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. During that concert he wanted to point out an error in the program – at the end of the previous week’s concert description the period was missing from the last sentence. The third was a few years ago when Schickele was guest composer at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival. I likely attended more than one concert. By then he was walking with a cane and didn’t do any playing. But he definitely made his presence known – a pianist was playing one of his pieces and between movements Schickele came on stage. The laughter of the pianist showed he did not know that would happen. Schickele made some appropriately funny comment, then left to let the pianist continue. I also remember an appearance or two on Prairie Home Companion when it took up brief residencies in New York. Schickele would come up with compositions featuring quite unusual combinations of instruments. This article on ClassicFM has an obituary of Schickele and also a video of one of his biggest jokes – narrating the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as a sporting event. In doing so he taught a lot about how that piece is laid out. When I taught music theory at a small college in Detroit (now out of business) I played an audio version of that joke. My Detroit student’s didn’t get it. Classical music wasn’t their thing. Of course, there are a lot of his fun stuff on YouTube. I wouldn’t be able to find or link to them all. I’ll end with a link to Al Hirschfeld’s caricature of Schickele.