Today's "Culture War"-- Why Are America's Liberals "Missing In Action"?

 

(Photo credit, Congressman Brian Schatz The Guardian, Andrew Harnik/EPA)

-"Confronting that which we are doing wrong is the first and biggest step toward getting it right"

The following is in part my response to the courageous statement by Congressman Brian Schatz (D-HI) of earlier this week, imploring fellow Democrats to "scream from the rooftops" and use tougher language to denounce the GOP's vicious propaganda campaign and obstruction of the Biden Administration, to confront a Party which now acts in flagrant disregard for the national interest. It is a good thing that he said it, and it was a long time in coming. Linked here is the Guardian coverage.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/10/republicans-democrats-us-senator-brian-schatz

I have my own take on the situation, which will be more or less what my friends would expect to hear from me. Once again it falls on me to ask the most obvious questions. Why should Congressman Schatz even have to make this statement publicly? I would say that the fact that he felt compelled to do this intervention is not a good sign.  

Are his fellow Congressmen, excepting possibly those sitting on the January 6th Committee, in a vegetative state? Are they high? Preoccupied with Wordle? Searching the want-ads to make plans for a career change when they lose their seats in November? Checking in on the Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson situation? What universe are they in that one of their colleagues has to shove, cajole, plead with them into speaking frankly about what the fascist GOP is doing?  

Even more obvious a question is "where is the visible real world opposition in the population, aside from that of handfuls of activists and Progressive media pundits?" It was certainly there during the Summer of George Floyd, but now, not so much. One might also ask, where are the Progressives these days, picketing Joe Manchin's Barbershop for using coal fired electricity to run his hairclippers? 

Those are just a few concerns I have at the moment. So the rest of this rambling mess below is basically my vain attempt at answering (or trying to) my own questions about why the need for this speech by the Congressman. That is, what is underlying his statements which he might not have wanted to air publicly?

I have no interest in maintaining good "optics" or sounding credible by anyone's standard besides my own. I would rather hear disagreement and debate than get "likes." Likewise I've no interest in trying to find "common ground," rather to "shake people up."  

Additionally on a personal note, I despise doubletalk. Few things aggravate me as much as people who publicly and truthfully blurt out what they really think, then try to "walk it back" by expressing regret for "their poor choice of words." They don't regret sh*t, really. They regret being caught and called out for beliefs which are repulsive or just plain idiotic, or behavior which is sociopathic. That's why on those rare occasions when politicians of any persuasion speak their minds and stand by it, I take note and mark it "important."

So, here we go. 

Part 1

"Culture War." 

Most people who identify as liberal, conservative, moderate or progressive in their politics have heard this term thrown about, and believe that they understand it's meaning. It is the subject of news headlines, lead stories on cable TV and radio talk shows, the campaigns of political candidates of all stripes, and the virtually infinite variety of social media "memes" which people slap up there and share without much deeper thought.

["The term is commonly used to describe aspects of contemporary politics in the United States.[2] This includes wedge issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racial discrimination and other cultural conflicts based on values, morality, and lifestyle which are described as the major political cleavage.[2]

--Wikipedia

In general it is a mistake to assume that terminology referring to a concept or philosophy means the same thing to everyone. Likewise, it is a serious blunder to assume that that the meaning of those terms remains the same over time. In a universe of constant change, the meaning of words does not necessarily remain fixed, and neither do the assumptions we draw from them. Indeed, one of our greatest problems has been the erosion of actual communication in the era of the Internet, a seeming contradiction in so far as we are technologically enabled now to be "everywhere, all the time."

So, back to our subject, in this case the term "Culture War."  We have recentlyseen a big change in which the so-called "issues" related to it's meaning have undergone a political transformation into forms of extremism which are unprecedented in America since the slaveowner's rebellion of 1860. 

This is why we have been largely blindsided and ineffective, in my view, in resisting the most destructive aspects of the right-wing fascist theocratic offensive currently underway against democracy in America and globally.

"Culture War," which has gone through many different iterations historically, is now a "key and code" slogan for incipient race war.  It doesn't mean the same thing which it did last year. This has now become Donald Trump's personal war on Joe Biden, Democracy, and the non-white American population. 

Race war is the actual strategic agenda of the Trumpian religious right. Real war, with real blood being spilled. It is already started, just in case you missed the significance of all of the Confederate and Nazi memorabilia out there on January 6th, or haven't read the text of the speeches given in public by Trump this year.  And this scenario is a live one, right now. This fact, which I will document, is what the majority of naive liberals have hysterically avoided. They would rather stick with their "personal issues" and outmoded strategies which remain within their comfort zones, now that their years of relative political inaction has rendered success on those issues virtually unattainable.

The ugly truth is that decades of apathy, distraction, retreat into the utter banality of today's popular entertainment, victimization, cynicism and failed leadership, has allowed a slow motion coup of sorts by the GOP to occur. They have commandeered right before our eyes the Federal Court system, far too many State legislatures, governorships, and a politically lethal grouping of obstructionist so-called "moderate" Democratic Senators who have served to strangle President Biden's Democratic agenda in the crib. 

This slow coup has been spearheaded by a coalition of right-wing fundamentalist religious cults, operating tax-free under the guise of a 501c3 non-profit lobby group called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by the fascist Billionaires in the Koch and Mercer poitical orbits. Their activists and donors are engaged in a religious inquisition, disguised as a lobbying effort for legislation. And over decades they have succeeded in hand-picking and electing hundreds of legislators who have rammed their legislation through, stripping voting rights, targeting academic freedom, protections for minorities and Labor, the Constitutionally protected right to abortion, rights of LGBTQ persons, rights of immigrants, environmental protection and gun ownership restrictions. They are stormtroopers in pinstripes, marching through our institutions and controlling the political narrative of the nation through issues which they have defined. And we have waited until after they have won these victories to start fighting them. Instead, we have been satisfied to sit back and complain about their "corporate greed," then turn around to spend hours on our laptops trying to figure out how to "hit it big" by gambling on Crypto. Then at least we can console ourselves that it is more than ok to be greedy,  so long as we not be corrupt. 

(For more background, see this short article by Martha Rosen) 

https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2022/01/martha-rosen-article-alec-fascist.html

We are left with only a handful of liberal constituencies which are engaged in fighting for policies which were already doomed to defeat, since the American people's indifference made possible the hijacking of the Presidency and Senate by ideological lunatics in 2016. 

And it must be said, that owing to the awful advice of several of his centrist White House political advisors, President Biden has been playing "footsie" with this traitorous fifth column, in the name of striving for bipartisanship and unity. He misread the growing seditionist mindset of those people he once worked with in the Senate, and was therefore vulnerable to being misled in this way. Biden was likewise advised to not attack Trumpism directly, out of fear of antagonizing Republican moderates whose votes they need to carve out for re-election. These so-called Republican moderates, of course, exist only in the minds of these advisers. This, I believe, is the single most tragic lack of vision which will lead to a top down GOP takeover in 2022-2024. 

This is also why the President has an approval rating of 33 percent. Because he has been trying to achieve compromise with the enemies of democracy and mankind in general, and tried vainly to ignore the growing insurrection against the United States, hoping it would "lose steam."  He has passed the buck to the January 6th Committee and the leaders of Congress. And the American people sense this. Everything else you are hearing as analysis is diversionary blather. 

A great plan they had there, wasn't it? 

In the meantime, the religious right is no longer driven simply to obstruct or interfere with sexual freedom, or "women's health," or to roll back restrictions on racial or gender discrimination. It has gone well beyond discrimination in the recent decade, especially since the two-term election victories of President Barack Obama provoked the re-emergence of today's modern "camo wearing MAGA redhats" the reincarnated Ku Klux Klan, whose leaders oxymoronically (or just moronically) are called "The Freedom Caucus." They are at war with the US Constitutional System itself, as was the evil Confederacy upon which they are modeled. 

To believe otherwise is to ignore the Trump driven transformation of the GOP in the last seven years, a form of denial and living in the past. Too many liberals, I'm sorry to say, are fighting a war on behalf of issues which they've already lost. They are either not even on the battlefield at all, or on the wrong one, against an adversary which has adopted strategic objectives far more bloody, destructive and pervasive than what we are currently prepared for.

Therefore, it is a great concern to myself and others that the routinized and impotent strategy of a legalistic lawyer's approach to fighting the so-called "Trump/GOP" is a pre-programmed failure, based on self-delusion and myopia. The laundry list of right-wing "wedge issues" previously defined as strategic in this conflict, mainly serves as a kind of propaganda "hook" for roping in large numbers of scientifically ignorant religious bigots, suggestible, and enraged people in service of a much uglier political agenda. And out of that political mob, they are distilling their hard-core activists, contributors, candidates, and yes, their terrorist leaders. The issues themselves, so personally important to the life, health and well being of so many, are for our adversaries just a fig leaf behind which they hide their real agenda.

The issues of abortion, gay marriage, the 14th Amendment, critical race theory, sexual identity, mean almost nothing to the GOP's current controllers. They are merely a pretext for bringing their targeted population/demographic into a kind of religious conversion process, an "entry point" into whichever quasi-religious political cult they are running. 

As a rule, the purpose of cults from the beginning are those things which they do at their very end, not the so-called issues which they use as "the hook" to pull people in. In this case, not unlike Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, Hale-Bopp, or the Manson Family, the purpose of the Trump cult is baked into their "grand finale." Accelerated race war as a fabricated Biblical projection of their End Times Armageddon worldview is the goal to which they are headed. That's why they mobilize for Trump, because he is "The One" leading the way, along with Carlson and his followers. 

For example, I can virtually guarantee along these lines, that were Trump to be reinstalled into the Presidency, America will invade Mexico within three months, and this will be the opening salvo. Speculation? Not really, he has already said he would do this in his positive response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine! And I, not being deluded, take everything he says seriously as statements of intent, as more people should have in the 1920's when Hitler published "Mein Kampf."

Meanwhile the majority of the liberal opposition continues to live in a fantasy world that it's still all about their old personal lifestyle issues, using their obsolete lawyerly methods, (the same methods which have already lost the prospect of free and fair elections) the equivalent of bringing a bow and arrow into modern combat. 

The failure of modern politics and culture is the result of the failure of its intellectual leadership to protect its citizens from political and religious misleadership. The inability to change and adapt in time is why the 1930's German Social Democracy was the greatest political failure in modern times. And this, therefore is the source of my greatest personal fear, in watching today's Democratic Party fail in exactly the same way. 

Such a failure, in that sense, can itself mean one of two things. Either misleading people to fight for the wrong ideas, or fighting for the right ideas in the wrong way. What we are seeing today, as in 1930's Germany, is a possibly civilization-wrecking combination of both.

Fighting today's so-called "Culture War" through litigation is as axiomatically absurd as trying to resist the 1930's rising Nazi dictatorship in Germany with civil suits on behalf of Jews who were beaten, or their businesses burned. We engage in wishful thinking that Trumpism will be defeated in a courtroom, or that the deranged fascist dictator Vladimir Putin will be deterred from committing genocide in Ukraine by the threat of War Crimes charges.

In the United States, we rely too much on lawyers in an era that demands we produce more scientifically educated intellectual leaders who lead by example, and "lead from the front," to use a military term. Think for a minute of how much energy we expend agonizing over what Merrick Garland will or won't do about Trump, until the point of exhaustion where we desperately need some break time to surf the internet and look for Cat videos to get a little psychological relief.  And rarely are we self-critical enough to consider trying to change what we are doing.

Does anyone want to argue that they don't go through this themselves, have the same thoughts, or grasp at the same straws? 

The very concept that fascist propaganda, stochastic terrorism or a police state can be effectively opposed through legal skirmishing, when those forces are fully in control of the legal system itself up to the Supreme Court is actually pathetic. Need we rehash the history of the Jim Crow system which characterized the former Confederate states to remind ourselves of just how pathetic a concept that is? Please, stop cheerleading for lawyers, treat yourselves a little better and just breathe for a minute.

Reality is that this is not the 1950's or 60's when the active force of liberal moral conscience backed by a highly energized student movement had real discernable power. They mobilized behind the legal efforts of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, or the ACLU, and as well the MLK led Civil Rights Movement.  There is very little meaningful such activism today, with the exception of the voting rights activists gathered around Stacey Abrams in Georgia. (Who by the way, have been royally stiff-armed by the Biden White House) 

What we currently have as a student movement is for the most part small, scattered, and fixated on climate doomsday and dystopia scenarios, which are more expressions of generational hatred than actual politics. As a veteran of a student movement which once changed the world, I see this clearly and have no hesitation in saying it. 

And I believe this is what Congressman Schatz and many writers are reacting to and are most alarmed about. Liberals today are, in the majority, as passive as the infamous "Eloi" in H.G. Wells' science fiction novel "The Time Machine," who would like zombies serve themselves up as the daytime meal of the underground cannibals, "The Morloch." 

Unfortunately, the current disposition of our "liberals" is that of citizens who passionately recognize and oppose autocracy, theocracy, sexism and racism, and sincerely hope that "somebody" will do something to oppose it. The demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd in the Summer of 2020 were their last "big hurrah," and they've been mostly political bunker dwellers ever since. 

Also consider that the recent virtual legalization of right-wing vigilante death squads resulting from the Rittenhouse verdict has put a bit of a chill on public demonstrations of opposition to Trumpism, something which I've written and warned about, a fear factor that works on us subconsciously, and which we also try to avoid confronting. 

So, today's hunkered down liberals think they are doing their bit by voting, reading the New York Times, watching Saturday Night Live, getting vaxxed and boosted, and sending ten dollars a month to "The Lincoln Project." These are the things we feel safe doing, which amount to very little if we are honest. 

Such is the privilege of never having had a grandfather who was lynched, or a brother shot in the head by police while unarmed during a traffic stop, or a Mexican child separated from his mother at the border. Opposing racism for many has become a suburban white liberal hobby, something to do after Pilates or separating  plastic bags from the organic waste in the trash, a badge of honor to be proudly displayed on your Facebook or Twitter profile page. Not something worth personally risking anything for in order to oppose it. No, liberals don't fight "that way," these days because it's enough to have sincere feelings and make sure you tell everyone else about them. 

So, you want to know why your Congressman isn't fighting? Because they are following the example of their presently "not present" constituents. They are in hiding and waiting to see how things turn out in November, hoping that state and Federal prosecutors and litigators will clean up the whole mess, just like our Moms used to come in and clean up our rooms for us. 

Being liberal today, for the most part means taking a "public position" which does not require engaging in actual conflict. And this is why the religious right is chewing up huge chunks of US political territory unimpeded. Because the opposition either refuses to fight, or to learn how to fight more effectively, with only a few notable exceptions,  such as some of our Progressives and voting rights activists.  However, at least our liberals have their Ukrainian flag icons next to their names on social media. That counts for something, right? No, actually not. 

And one more thing. Try not to lump all of this into the deep depresso category of doom and gloom, or an angry rant. it's none of that.  We are just getting started. There is a pathway out of this crisis which supercedes politics as we have known it. And we will get there. I've said for some time that it will take utter disaster to jog American liberals out of their delusionary dream state. And disasters we will most definitely have. 

With that, I'll pause here and we will move to Part 2, which is the part which Congressman Schatz and other defenders of Democracy won't address. Which is, "how did we get here?"