Against committed clowns
Scott Lemieux comments at Lawyers, Guns & Money on our authoritarian party’s redefinition of freedom. Lemieux referenced Jamelle Bouie’s helpful reframing of FDR’s Four Freedoms as an antimatter version for the MAGA party. It is a repudiation of everything conservatives once claimed to hold sacred and didn’t. But you knew that.
“What should we make of all this?” Bouie asks of Republicans’ ongoing efforts to revoke the freedoms of any American who doesn’t drink at their fetid trough:
In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.
There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
In the nation Republicans are dismantling in full view, Bouie writes, “you can either dominate or be dominated.”
“It’s all Wilhoit’s Law, and the rest is mere details,” Lemieux observes.* They may act like clowns, but they are committed clowns.
*For those who need refreshing, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition…”