In Disney +’s first Marvel Cinematic Universe television series WandaVision Wanda Maximoff after a life of trauma and her world shattered by grief explodes with a power she never conceived of having transforming the dying town of Westview New Jersey in her escapist fantasy of reality where life became an endless procession of sitcom episodes. Actual reality intrudes forcing Wanda out of her delusional and her artificial reality.

The series sits as a perfect metaphor for the Republican party’s current madness and sadly we are the imprisoned citizens of Westview forced into another’s delusion of reality, trapped by their fears and inability to face facts that are too painful to admit.

The litany of GOP lies, and delusions is extensive; the January 6th attack and insurrection was the product of Antifa masquerading as Trump supporters, systemic voter fraud stole the election, mask mandates are tyranny, COVID-19 is an inconsequential flu, racism only exits against white people, thoughts and prayers prevent mass shootings, Christianity is oppressed and in danger of vanishing, and many many others. For some these are calculated lies used to seize and maintain power for far too many these are their reality, and it is a reality as valid as Wanda’s sitcom life.

Unlike the residents of the fictional Westview there is no outside force or agency coming to our rescue. We have the reclaim actual reality for ourselves. The GOP must be driven from the lever of power until they have expelled the delusions from their system. This did not begin with Trump and it did not end with his defeat. The long road to sanity’s recovery still is ahead of us.

Between H.R. 1, the fact that the current president had about 7 million votes more than his opponent and still only barely won the contest, and the deeply imbedded partisan in the system there has been a lot of talk about reforms needed to the USA’s election systems but there is another reason to enact reforms fast, to save the Republican Party.

Out system is a two-party system and the sort of ground up redesign to change that is simply not in the cards. Given that we locked into a two-party system it is essential that both parties be sane, viable, organizations fairly representing broad cross-sections of the American electorate. This is not the path we are on.

Our congressional districts having been gerrymandered into local one-party dominance enforces a drive for either party to the extremes. An incompetent, insane person like Marjorie Taylor Greene only has to win their primary to win a seat in government. As more gerrymandering draws more districts into this pattern the real election become the primary where fewer voters and more extreme voters decide the outcome. This was bad enough before 2016 but after Trump’s takeover of the Republican party and its commitment to a dwindling base of support and its adherence to lies and conspiracy theories, this is a design for disaster. As long as the primary process controls the outcome the situation will only get worse.

This is not an argument to kill off ‘conservatism’ however you might define that. This is the way to keep both parties, though the rot is far deeper on the right than on the left, responsive to the general electorate and not their fanatical bases. If we do not reform our election right now, we are headed for one of two futures, either the GOP, more insane and less connected to reality becomes the dominate political force by way of its current anti-democratic attacks on voting and the franchise or the Democratic Party becomes immune to challenge because the GOP has shrunk itself to a base unable to contest national elections completing its transformation into a regional rump party.

Both outcomes are bad for the Union. Our system requires two healthy sane parties and only by election reform can we return to that ideal.

Yesterday, February 17th, 2021, Rush Limbaugh radio/political personality died.

In the mid to late 90s I did listen to his radio program though I could never be called a fan and certainly not a ditto-head, a term for his most devoted followers. During my failed collegiate pursuits, I, for a while, majored in political science and as this blog indicates still have a deep and abiding interest in the political arts, governance, and public policy making at least occasional listening to his program something of interest. It never became a regular experience because even though at the time I was a registered and voting member of the Republican Party Limbaugh did not present reasoned argument from a foundation of logic and solid moral philosophy bur rather engaged in demeaning, cruel, petty, and personal attacks masquerading as humor in place of serious thought. He was not a satirist; he was a bully. Limbaugh’s crude and vicious attitude towards those he perceived as enemies established the moral direction of conservatism and cleared the path for the ascendency of Trump. Today’s ignorant, petty, lying, Republican party devoid of morality or honor is the crop that grew from Limbaugh’s popularity and unchallenged position as the party’s loudest voice. Before he himself went into the grave he first put serious conservatism there leaving behind its idiot and bigoted brother.

There are voices on the right demanding that Limbaugh’s critics restrain their voices and their tone out of respect for the dead. I will not mock or demean him or engaged in petty, puerile, personal attacks not because Limbaugh is deserving of respect but because he is not worth the violation of my manners or principals. Nor will I criticize those who are unleashing their own brands of cruel humor because to demand that this man be treated with a respect he never found for others is hypocrisy that is unmatched. Let him bask in the same respect he showed for his enemies.

He is dead but the wreckage on our political norms from his career lives on.

Among my political readings and podcasts there are two distinctly conservative voices, The Bulwark and The Dispatch. Both are staunchly ‘Never Trumpers’ who did not support and have consistently argued against and fought the Trump takeover of the Republican Party.

The Dispatch includes a number of writers exiled from National Review for their anti-Trump views including David French, Steve Hayes, and Jonah Goldberg. The Bulwark rose from the ashes of The Weekly Standard and includes the likes of Charlie Sykes, Jonathan V. Last, and Bill Kristol.

Among the ‘Never Trumpers’ one common divisor is the ‘Burn it All Down’ camp vs the “Reformers” camp, the former believing that the current GOP and its leaders must be driven from public life before conservatism can be reclaimed and the latter supporting a more limited expulsion of Trump supporters but not of the core GOP elected officers.  The Bulwark, while not uniformly, is pretty much a ‘Burn it All Down’ establishment and The Dispatch are ‘Reformers.’

Perhaps the most significant difference between these two conservative voices is the level of self-reflection they are willing to tolerate. Both camps hate Trump and his enthusiastic cult-like followers and call out the authoritarian bent that led to the Jan 6 2021 attempt to overthrow the election and the incoming legitimate government but there is a difference when it comes to the reason Trump took their party.

The Bulwark team has been much more willing to look much earlier than 2015 and search for what made it possible for a vile, corrupt, bigoted conman to leapfrog to the head of the GOP primary while The Dispatch’s team seem much more willing to label Trump a bolt from the blue, a strange and unique occurrence abetted by media influence, that is unlikely to repeat.

Frankly, I am with The Bulwark on this. Trump did not spring from the GOP fully formed like Athena from Zeus. The voting base of the GOP had been primed, cultivated, and molded for years into the sort of force that would respond to Trump’s brand of cruelty and without recognizing that fact and destroying that foundation there is no salvaging of any movement on the right.

Today, 20 Jan 2021, Donald Trump, grifter, liar, sexist pig, and the man responsible for more American deaths than all of the USA’s casualties from the Second World War and the only President to be impeached twice and who inspired and incited a seditious attempt to overthrow our democratic system of government, finally loses his grip on the power he so never deserved to be become, hopefully, our first and only pariah ex-president.

While Trump, his family of coconspirators and conmen along with their retinue of henchmen, yes-men, racists, and scoundrels, have exited the executive branch the festering pestilence that gave rise to them remains unburnt shot through with the spores for the next generation of monsters.

Let’s be clear, levelheaded conservative philosophy is not the genesis of this rot but what the Republican party has become, after decades of playing to bigots of all types, is an anti-democratic party motivated by fear, hatred, and an eternal point of view that the world is forever victimizing them and in American being them victim of injustice justifies all manner of violence. From County music to Rap and in media from novels to feature films has been the glorification of revenge of the wronged and that fact that this poisonous political philosophy is not being victimized matters not at all. They believe to be true and in that find the justification to murder police officers defending our capitol. The mob has been dispersed but its members remain.

In the halls of Congress Representative and Senators furiously are trying to wash away Trump’s foul stink. Some play to his base while most attempt to play us, with words of how bad Trump was and how he lied. Yes, he lied and you stood by as he lied for your team, your cause, and said nothing. Trump’s people are not purged from the party, that control the party. The RNC chairperson dropped from her name the family surname that irritated Trump and bent her knee to him. She has retained her power and her fealty to Trump.

The GOP must be burnt to the group and rebuilt. The path ahead is long, hard, and I fear holds much violence, you cannot have literally millions of people convince that their ‘election’ was stolen without some taking matters into their own hands, but we must press on, we must fight for our republic and our union.

A putsch is a violent attempt to overthrow a government and what happened on the 6th of January 2021 was a putsch and I think it will turn out to be a more organized one that many currently believe. It was also not the first in this election cycle the disrupted plot my militia members to kidnap the governor of Michigan was also a putsch.

I believe that the seditionists on January 6 can be divided up into three elements, Useful Idiots, Trump Zealots, and Dedicated Insurrections.

The Useful Idiots are people of the rank-and-file GOP base that arrived at Washington D.C. that day to bleat and cry about stolen elections, make a lot of noise, but without any plans to actually do anything of substance. They are the ones most likely to believe that the vice-president actually had the power to throw out the election and most likely comprised the majority of the mob. Every army needs cannon-fodder and that are usually unaware that has been their designation. These would have been the cosplayers to the revolution.

Trump Zealots are the hard core and willing to be violent supports of Trump as strong man. I think that the ‘Proud Boys’ most likely fall into the element. These people are not particularly political but motivated more by hate, fear, and a deep desire for a social order that places them on top. It’s my opinion that these are the people who would have taken member of congress and the senate hostage and perhaps worse in their hatred of the world and would have fixed the eye of the media on themselves during the crisis. These are the people bearing flex cuffs and shouting for vice President Pence.

The third and by far most dangerous to our system of government were the Dedicated Insurrectionists. These men came armed, armored, and with a serious plan. They understood that the Pence couldn’t give the election to Trump and that the counting of the electoral ballots was the pivot joint to the transferer of power. These are the people who came with maps of the capitol’s underground tunnels and that ransacked not Nancy Pelosi’s office but rather the Senate Parliamentarian’s.

The Senate Parliamentarian is hardly a public figure of renown. I certainly could tell you their name with researching it and according to people who have worked in the capitol for years that office is obscure and not easily found. The insurrectionists that went there did so with a purpose and I think it was to find and destroy the paper ballots of the Electoral College.

If those ballots had been destroyed before they were counted congress could not have completed the presidential election of 2020. The Constitution makes no provisions for a ‘do over’ and all of the hard legislative deadlines were well past. The Constitution does clearly map out what happens if the Electoral College cannot select a president, Congress, voting by state delegation not individual members, elects the president and that would have given the office to Trump.

I have no faith, absolutely none at all, that the Republicans of this congress would have abandoned Trump for something so quaint as democracy and would have voted him in as president, some by cowardice, some by party loyalty over the nation, and some for sheer toadiness, but I have a certainty that would have been the outcome.

Perhaps as more come to light and the investigation progresses, we will discover things that makes these conclusions unsupported, if so, I will happily change my tune, but I think the opposite is more likely. As we uncover the facts of the failed plot, we will learn that more people were involved, perhaps people of high office, and that the putsch came dangerously close to succeeding.

Which is not to say that Trump isn’t monstrous because beyond doubt he is a monstrous human being, vain, greedy, slothful, and utterly lacking in nay compassion or empathy he fully fits the bill but the real monster is the one he claimed, the Republican Voter Base.

When LBJ arm-twisted, cajoled, and pushed through landmark civil rights legislation he is have said to have commented that the Democrats had lost the south for a generation. At the time the Democratic Party had two major social elements, the northern liberal wing and the southern segregationists. This split had been a major factor in Democratic politics for decades with progressive goals being achieved by continuing to give tacit approval by way of inaction to the racist policies employed in primarily southern states. LBJ ruptured this agreement and starting in 1968 with Nixon’s Southern Strategy the GOP made plays for the disaffected racists now soured on the Democratic Party. After a brief reversal with the election of Jimmy Carter the transformation was completed with the ‘Reagan Democrats’ of the 1980 and 1984 elections.

With subtle and sometimes not so subtle messaging the GOP whistled to this new fragment of its electorate with messages that provoked anger and fear because those are far more powerful motivators than policy. As the Democratic Party pushed to open society to more and more persons who had been pushed to the fringes with drives for equality and rights and numerous fronts the GOP responded by enraging this element more and more. Abortion, gays, and other ‘social’ issues which when you strip is all away always come back to individuals living their own lives, were the wedge issues to enrage the base and turn them out to vote. After the vote? The issues could be forgotten save for red-meat speeches to re-energize them for funds and marches.

The problem with anger as a motivator is that like a drug people develop tolerances. What was enraging last election is merely annoying this one and next cycle will be purely background. The doses have to become larger and more intense, distorted truth no longer works and manufactures lies and less coded speech are required to fuel the fury. This has the side-effect of driving away more moderate voices and voters but if you gain more than you lose then you still win and you control the mob, right?

You control until someone comes along willing to feed them hatred less diluted than your own. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015 and took control of a mob that had been decades in the making and with its fury fully behind him cowed the entire GOP into submission. Th elite well-educated master found themselves chained to the beast, dancing to its tune, and the tragic result we witnessed last Wednesday, the full-throated assault on democracy, the rage that demanded their whims be catered to and the power of their lies.

Trump fired the gun at the head of democracy with it was the GOP that forged and loaded it.