“I can’t seem to get out of my own way,” an old friend would say when relationships went awry. The left might say the same thing if it had that level of awareness.
A significant fraction of the American electorate has regressed to the Middle Ages. Democrats keep trying to oppose them by the rules of the Age of Reason and wonder why nothing they do works.
When you get far enough down in size, Newton’s Laws, the mechanics governing everyday reality, no longer apply. Go far enough down the right-wing rabbit hole and reason no longer applies either. Yet the left refuses to acknowledge that, believing it can reason people out of that place.
Take for example, the Critical Race Theory ruckus. By some polls, CRT was a factor in Republican Glenn Youngkin’s Tuesday victory in the Virginia governor’s race. Pointing out that the theory is not taught in primary and secondary schools has little effect. Facts do not prevent angry, sometimes violent, parents from disrupting school board meetings.
“Poorly educated voters — who believe in myths, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories — say education is important,” tweeted Michael Sexton, describing people who also reject science and an unvarnished account of history.
Republicans are not running on policies. They are running on feelings. Democrats keep trying to talk people out of feeling what they feel whether or not those feelings are based on real or imagined (or ginned-up) grievances.
In a place where reason no longer applies, the left is not simply bringing a knife to a gun fight, it is showing up empty-handed.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted Wednesday night that the failed Republican candidate in last year’s Delaware U.S. Senate race, Lauren Witzke, now claims that her loss by 100,000 votes was stolen by dead voters. She expects to produce “irrefutable evidence” that the seat belongs to her. This is the “background music” the “weird humming noise,” Maddow said, behind Republican politics these days.
The Republican Party just tells lies, former Sen. Al Franken told MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour.”
And the lies are winning for them. At this point, it is hard to tell how many are simply cynical politicians and how many are true believer. But it is likely that the plotters and schemers are feeding the true believers lies to believe.
Paul Rosenberg wrote up for Salon the webinar by Rachel Tabachnick that I mentioned attending weeks ago. That instructive recording is now online.
Tabachnick’s research finds that there are indeed thinkers behind the reconstructionist wing of dominionism held by the right’s foot soldiers. Not that many true believers are aware of it. They’ve simply absorbed it:
“The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law,” Tabachnick said. “Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it’s important to recognize the movement’s impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.”
When clips of a speech by North Carolina Republican lieutenant governor went viral this week, many will not have recognized the dominionism behind his promise that “Christian patriots will own and rule this nation.” But when he declared non-Republicans “our enemies” and the most populous state in the U.S. “Commie-fornia” [timestamp 8:10], what he put on public display was Christofascism.
I don’t have an answer just now for how Democrats combat that. But they had best start getting out of their own way and start thinking outside the Enlightenment box. Fascism is back.