As David Frum predicted in January 2018, when “conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” They have rejected more than that. They now reject any rules they don’t like.
Even police.
Is there anything of America in them beside the wrapper? Responding to the tweet below from future Jan. 6th material witness Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), John Stoehr of The Editorial Board newsletter thinks not:
When Republicans say “Real America,” they are not talking about the real America. They are not talking about the actual sovereign nation where you and I and everyone we know live. They are not talking about 50 sovereign states making up a federation — a union — based on a written Constitution and the rule of law, founded on equality and dedicated to the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To be sure, they want those things. They just don’t want everyone else to have those things. If everyone else did have them, the Republicans wouldn’t be what they tell themselves they are. “Real Americans.”
When Republicans say “Real America,” they have in their heads a very specific place. It’s not a real place, as I said. It’s a wholly imagined place that, as such, frees them from moral accountability and all manner of mutual obligation to anyone who is not already committed to this wholly imagined place. It is a confederacy of the mind and spirit, unbound by tangible boundaries, a “nation” existing inside the actual United States, where “real Americans” live as God’s chosen people.
In Real America, as opposed to the real America, social relationships and political power are structured according to “the way things are,” according to “the natural order,” according to God’s will. As such, God rules over Mankind, men rule over women and white Christian men rule over everyone else. To GOP confederates, this is not their doing. It’s God’s. As such, anything that threatens ordered power threatens God and is deserving of any kind of response necessary to defeating it.
Classic Lakoff right there.
But the Real America they want preserved cannot coexist with democracy, capitalism and liberalism in a world economy driven by technology. Yet their imaginary America needs them all to survive. Stoehr writes, “So the chief goal of this parasitic ‘nation’ is striking a difficult balance between the preservation and perpetuation of the authoritarian collective without killing off the democratic host that’s necessary to the preservation and perpetuation of the authoritarian collective.”
This is an old story. The America right-wing reactionaries want made “great again” is the America of the Truman and Eisenhower years. It is the country where dad “wore the pants.” He went to work and mom stayed home, cooked, cleaned, and raised the kids. As God intended. Black people and other minorities knew their place and knew better than to seek equality or a share of political power.
But reactionaries want their bedroom communities of McMansions, too. And their big-ass trucks and SUVs and cable. They want all that and to pay their bills, by god, but they won’t support an economy in which business owners pay employees enough to support them without a family needing two or three incomes. They hate “entitlements” like universal health care for unReal Americans, yet are the most entitled among us.
They want it all and they want their way and they want it now or they’ll throw tantrums. And do.
“The GOP confederates hate the real America,” Stoehr writes. “They are willing to do anything to stop it from ‘taking over.’ Even prolonging the pandemic.”