The world is on fire but there is hope. Remember that the essential message of The Lord of the Rings is that despair if a failing because it presumes a determined future, and no one can know the future where unlikely events can produce unlikely and joyful outcomes.

The War in Ukraine

Certainly, over the last weekend things have improved for the Ukrainians. Russian lines have shattered in some sectors and there are reports that Ukrainian forces have reached parts of the Russian border. But the war is not over. We may, looking back with the advantage of history, see this as a turning point or we may see it as another battlefield fluctuation. What we need to do is continue supporting the Ukrainians in their fight with weapons, money, and morale.

American Politics

The political system of the United States is also aflame and here the structure is fully engulfed. The slow steady poisoning of the Republican party with racists and authoritarians has brought that body politic fully into its diseased state. From New Hampshire to Arizona the GOP is infected, controlled, and Led by people who have rejected democracy. The former president did not create this situation, he is a product of the infection not its cause. As someone who was a registered Republican from 1980 thru 2003 it boggles my mind to see the party in its current state. If you are someone born in the 90s this may seem ‘normal’ to you and that the GOP has merely thrown off the mask and revealed its true nature, but it doesn’t look that way to me.

To me it is far stranger and far more extreme than that.

In the 80s conservatives often anti-nuclear power and weapons movements ‘watermelons,’ because they were ‘green on the outside and red on the inside.’ The Soviet Union helped fund and promote those groups and movements to disrupt the West and NATO. These groups and associated travelers were considered foolish and gullible by the right for how they accepted Soviet propaganda as truth with any healthy skepticism and now those roles have been reversed. It is the conservatives embracing and promoting Russian propaganda with qualm or reservation. It is the conservative pulling Russian aggression to their bosom and declaring it just and good. It’s nearly incomprehensible to witness. Literally for decades I have heard conservatives rant and snarl about a supposed ‘deal’ from Edward Kennedy to take Russian assistance in a bid for the presidency. (A tale that has but one unverified source.) And now they openly proclaim that they would rather be Russian than a democrat. They turn a blind eye to mountains of evidence of Russian interference in American Politics. For those of that lived through the final stages of the Cold War this is a topsy-turvy as when Kirk found himself in the Dystopian Terran Empire. I hope that this year’s election defies the historical norms, that young people, so fickle in their off-year elections, arrive in droves and surprise us with Democratic victories, but even if that doesn’t come to be, the fight goes on and I will not despair.

I recently got into a very brief exchange, cordial and pleasant, were as they complained about West Virginia Senator Joe Machin I advised that at this time this was the very best they could hope for out of a state that went for Trump by nearly 40 points. They were unconvinced and spoke of winning WV with ‘Democratic Values.’

Here’s the thing, helping people with their medical bills, lowering the costs of vital medicines, protecting them from predatory corporations, and exploitation by their employers seems to many like winning arguments and intuitively self-obvious reasons to support Democratic candidates. But people only sometime vote by policy. I think much more often and much more powerfully it is ‘vibes’ and culture that move people and provide incentives to action. You cannot win people’s support, no matter how generous the policy, if the price is perceived to be an attack on their culture and thus an attack on the people themselves. How many progressives would accept a deal where the nation gets fully socialized healthcare for every single person in the country, but every school is also required to tech that anything other than heterosexual coupling is ‘abnormal’ and a ‘perversion.’ Very few I suspect, and they would be right to reject such a thing. The hypothetical deal is absurd and fallacy of extremes, but the core concept is sound, people will reject material advantages for ‘cultural’ issues. Culture can and does change and it can be guided, poked, and prodded along so what is true today culturally is not what will be true in a decade or two but to win in places such as West Virginia at the very least you must not offend the people by attacking their culture.

This is an element often ignore or progressives are ignorant of when attacking Trump. He is a vile, racist, authoritarian bully and I desperately want to see him in prison orange, stripped of his make-up and his wig. However, when I see elites attacking him for things such as his love of junk and fast food I am angered. They are too blinded by their desire to attack the piece of shit that they fail to see they are also attacking scores of people for whom KFC or McDonalds are normal and enjoyable fare. Creating that division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ only binds them to the orange man-baby tighter. There is no policy argument that will win over such basic tribal identity as that one.

Sadly, that battle has already been lost. Nearly seven years of snobbish attacks have well welded these people culturally to Trump but that is not enough to assure him electoral victory. I beg progressives do not go for the cheap shot and the stereotype attacks but please try and think about where you can win with culture in addition to policy. Our nation depends upon it.

On a recent podcast I heard conservative commentator Mona Charen state that she was shocked at how quickly the GOP became Trump’s GOP. The host, Charlie Sykes, repeated his long-presented view that the racist authoritarian streak in the GOP had been a ‘recessive gene’ that has now become dominate but this is a terrible analogy for what has happened, absolving all those ‘good’ conservatives for their action and inaction that created the current condition. A better analogy is found in chemistry class: Titration.

In titration one liquid is slowly, drop by drop, added to another. The base liquid is clear and colorless and at first e3ach drop appears to do nothing. The swirl the mixture but it remains clear, colorless. Then after a number of drop colors appears but fades quickly away in the swirling returning to the clear colorless form. But at some point, a single drop transforms the mixture and now the flask is filled with a colored fluid that had just moments before been colorless. It has changed and seeming from a single drop but of course it was a process that had been carried out over time.

This is what has happened to the GOP. Listen to ‘Never Trumpers’ and after a short time someone will remind you that in the old days, they threw out the crazy Birchers, that the party used to enforce rationality. But that was in the early 60s by the late 60s Nixon played his Southern Strategy, inviting in the racists whom the Democrats had enraged with the Civil Right legislation of the great society. The drops of racism began to be added to the GOP, but it wasn’t much, and it didn’t really change the nature of the party. Then there was Nixon’s War on Drugs and that was quite deliberately not enforced equally across racial lines. More Drops into the mixture. Welfare Queens, Crack babies, and more and more drops added to the mixture, flashes of racist color but with enough swirling you could make them go away. Crime Bills and torture for brown people were more drops added to the liquid, along with ballot initiatives against ‘illegal immigrants’ that really targeted more brown people. Throughout this process the left ceased to be political opponents and were the enemy of the nation.

Trump didn’t ‘change the GOP,’ he was the final drops the completed its titration into a neo-fascist, racist, caricature of the party that had thrown out the Bircher only to crawl back into bed with them.

One of the recent controversial and in my opinion dishonest ruling from the Supreme Court of The United States is Kennedy v Bremerton School District which ruled that the school district violated Coach Kennedy’s right when it fired him for conducting prayers on the football field directly following games. I will not relitigate the case, there are numerous good sources to understand the legal issues in contention, but I want to point you towards a podcast, Advisory Opinion, where the lawyer representing Kennedy appeared and argued the case for the hosts and the public. Hiram Sasser abused the English language so thoroughly that words ceased to having meaning, particularly the word ‘private.’

Sasser argued that his client had engaged in private prayer which is Kennedy’s right to exercise and the school district trampled on his religiously liberty by firing him.

This ‘private’ prayer took place on the football field, immediately following the game. A field which just moments ago had been the focus of attention for a stadium full of people. It is difficult to conceive of a setting less private. Had Coach Kennedy strode out to the 50-yard line and begun masturbating I doubt a single conservative in the nation would have considered this a ‘private’ act. The abuse of the word continues. Members of the football team followed Kennedy to the field as asked if they could join him to which he reported replied ‘It’s a free Country.’ Call me a stickler for language but when you participate with other in an activity, others who members of the general population and not there by invitation, that is public and not ‘private.’ The continued abuse of the language in describing any of this as ‘private’ is nothing short of dishonest doublethink. In my personal opinion, clearly not private as I am stating it in the open and in full view Sasser, the Supreme Court engaged in deceptive contorted logic with selective facts to arrive at the conclusion that the conservatives had already decided was the one that they wanted.

In the classic SF film Forbidden Planet Professor Morbius enhanced by alien technology unleashes his Id as an indestructible monster to protect his paradise. In a very similar manner, the GOP crafted and unleashed their own Id when they struck the bargain in the Southern Strategy welcoming racists to win elections and now that monster is the party instead of the party’s beast. None of the those ‘wiser’ heads foresaw or intended for today’s Republican party. They had the very best of intentions, but forces unchained are quite difficult to contain.

Today I am seeing many on the left looking to their own monster to wield and that monster is violence. In their minds the recent and terrible court decisions are not a call to political action and work but rather a ‘justification’ to unleash the mob. hat rioting and violence are the bargains they would strike today.

I would ask them whose deaths are justified by their anger?

Thomas?

Roberts?

McConnel?

The Capitol Police person who just happens to be ‘in the way.’

Violence by its nature is uncontrolled and unruly. It will spread further then you ever intent and its final results are unforeseeable.

Violence is always justified in the first person and a crime in the third.

Friday’s SCOTUS decision to reverse Roe is utterly unprecedented. Yes, the court has reversed and overturned decisions, major monumental decisions, but never before has the court rescinded a legally recognized individual right. A week ago the people had X number of rights, today it is X-1. The long, arduous path that this nation had struggled on of slowly, inexorable, expanding individual rights has ended. The line has been crossed and it can never be uncrossed. For the rest of the nation’s existence the member of court will know that with enough cajoling and pressure they can remove any right that they find unpleasant. We know already that a member of the court is looking are more recently won rights as targets for elimination. “Cooler heads” tell us to not panic, that this lone voice on the bench has not the votes to imperil those rights. Well, for 50 years there was not the votes to imperil any individual rights and then there were. Precedent and legal traditions no longer stay the court’s hand from the political ends they wish to obtain and for those conservatives cheering you are far too short sighted. That abandoned respect of precedent and tradition can just as easily apply to Heller and MacDonald. Why should liberal justices have any more respect for you recently won rights as you had for theirs? You have initiated a no rules cage match where only victory matters and it will not end any time soon. The aged old guard of the liberal party has continued to play by rules that right has long abandoned but the next generation of liberal pols have watched and learned the lesson to whipped them with and the tables always turn.

I do not celebrate this, but I do welcome it. A return to politics with rules and norms can only be achieved if the right suffers, and suffers terribly, for the unrestricted warfare that they have unleased.

I dream, I hope, but sadly without a lot of faith that it will come to pass, that Friday represents the Right’s Pearl Harbor moment. A devastating attack that was meant to cripple an enemy but instead woke a slumbering giant and that brought about the attacker’s utter ruin.