Violent minorities allowed to metastasize go very dark
Something Digby wrote about right-wing “Orbanism” on Monday reinforced concerns I (and likely you) already have:
Comparing liberal commitments to civil rights to this movement is ridiculous but the description of what these people are about is on the money. This is Orbanism and they aren’t trying to hide it.
Something NBC’s Ben Collins said during Chris Hayes’ show Monday night framed Trumpism/QAnonism in a way I had not considered before. Since Richard Nixon popularized “the silent majority,” American conservatives have salved their cultural insecurities with the belief that while liberalism might seem dominant in popular culture, Real Americans™ (them, naturally) represented a governing majority. The red-state lean of the Electoral College helped prop up that belief.
What’s slowly sunk in since the election of a black man to the White House in 2008 and since Donald Trump’s 2020 repudiation is that, no, white conservative Christians do not (or no longer) wield that kind of clout in a system based on majority rule in an increasingly muliticultural USA. They are roughly a third of eligible voters but little more. The comfortable fiction is no longer sustainable. What’s a revanchist to do?
The Republican Party has allied itself with the extremist fringe over the decades— with white supremacists, the Birchers, the T-Party, QAnon —to secure their votes, David Corn chronicles in “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.” It’s not just political calculation anymore. It’s the party’s identity.
The QAnon doomsday cult wants the world to be 20 years ago or 50 years ago, maybe even 100 years ago, said Collins, and doesn’t know how to get there. Prophesies from “Q” repeatedly fail to come to pass. Believers see their only path forward as violence and intimidation. The only votes they think they can win are small-ball, local elections they can see with a hand-count and where intimidation can work for them.
Conservative extremists are leveraging whatever power they retain to exert control where a small cadre of belligerent loudmouths can cow small-town public officials and neighbors. School boards and local elections are obvious targets. They are even now running candidates for state offices that wield power over elections so that even in the minority they might ensure their candidates win. The whole point of it, Hayes observed, is “you don’t need a majority to get your way.”
Lacking the national clout minority support cannot produce, they are leveraging what threats and intimidation can. It’s not the apocalyptic vision of their dreams, but consider history. Countries have fallen into fascism driven by the efforts of committed minorities willing to use violence where democracy fails. The results are catastrophic and realized too late by the majority population.
Hayes in his monologue said, “Right before our eyes, the de facto leader of one of two major political parties…is embracing fully a violent, authoritarian cult mythology. It’s one that explicitly imagines its political foes being killed.”
They are not ready for Rwanda-style violence, a knowledeable friend said this week, but with revival-style rallies they’re putting in place the religious justification for it.
Complacency is not an option. We were sure America was not crazy enough in 2016 to elect Donald Trump.
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