Will Bunch, Philly Inquirer Article Exposes "Red Caesar" Scenario For Dictatorship, Post-Constitutional Order-- If We Are Not Alarmed, We Must Be Dead.
According to Bunch in his agaonizing recap of a "Guardian" article, there are so-called right-wing "intellectuals," including Steve Bannon, tied to think tanks and colleges like Claremont that are openly floating plans to make Trump a "Red Caesar." What is extraordinary is that they have abandoned all stealth and are proposing this openly. It is backed by billionaires and is the actual agenda of MAGA. In fact, this is more than a scenario, it is their plan, and Trump's candidacy is the linchpin for it. The article linked below is must reading, and we should get this around.
Most people reading this "get it." But we are not sufficiently conveying this to others, for reasons of fear, timidity, pessimism, cynicism, or an addiction to living in a comfort zone. Or just disbelief, combined with a false belief that only a tiny handful of extremists today are advocates for dictatorship. In response to that I would remind people that the Nazis nationwide popular vote total in 1928 was 2%. Then the US Stock Market crashed. The next year there was a world depression along with massive economic dislocation and chaos, sowing the seeds for Hitler to seize power three years later with a 36% plurality.
So, in this light, if people are prepared to drop "business as usual" and get themselves into the fray now, I can make suggestions and help with them. Those who are unwilling to try shouldn't even be here.
As for Will Bunch, he is a seasoned liberal political writer with a decades long track record. I have been reading him for decades, and I never remember him writing with such an anxious and urgent tone. He is like a number of public figures who are sounding the alarm to alert people to two aspects of our crisis which are most frightening. And speaking for myself, after nearly 50 years of life in the political world, after reading this I can honestly say that if I had hair, it would be standing on end.
First is that the Democratic Party strategists, who should be at their most militant and in a high state of mobilization right now, are conducting political outreach as if the last eight years never happened, and their messaging is so disconnected from reality as to be like something newly arrived from outer space. Second is the hideously misleading "both sidesism" of leading liberal media in presenting our current existential crisis as being something other than the conscious design of the MAGA/GOP. And mainstream media gets away with it because you, the reader, let them, since hardly anyone challenges them. Feeling powerless and wallowing in despair is what will cost your grandchildren a future, if it continues.
We have chaos being deliberately unleashed by a fascist movement, which objectively embraces political violence, dictatorship, and jailing their opponents, yet the Democratic establishment won't bring themselves to say that this is what is happening. They are busier spreading the good news that Joe Biden is only three years older than Trump, and that he isn't fat.
Bunch is one of several leading voices for democracy who is screaming this reality from the rooftops to rouse people out of their semi-comatose states of mind. But he, like other commentators won't go far enough.
Like most liberal media pundits, he won't confront his readers with their passivity, lack of urgency, complacency, spectator syndromes, or just plain old disgusting cynicism and despair. Instead, they criticize other media, and write endless exposes of the plot to destroy democracy and who is leading them, while not challenging anyone directly to get off their asses and do something about it.
He won't tell us that we are the problem. And we are. What will destroy democracy and our Constitutional system is the degree to which we choose to do things with our spare time that can wait, instead of fighting to stop this.
We are inching closer to the point where electoral politics might no longer be a remedy, and we will instead need to build a resistance. And if it comes to that, there is no guarantee that a resistance will succeed, or for that matter will remain peaceful for long.
They, (or Trump actually) intend to literally crash our financial and economic system in order to unleash chaos and bloodshed by November. They are taking us down the pathway where a majority of desperate and frightened people will go along with a strongman system to "restore order," just like the Germans in the late stages of Weimar.
We really need to sit down with friends and family and make a plan. Each of us. Clear the decks of our usual distractions and secondary personal bullshit and decide what we are going to do starting now. We need to dial down the counterproductive "Court TV" watching, and instead get active in every possible way. If we don't have a national mobilization to defeat MAGA in full swing soon, we might not even have an election. And while I won't presume to tell anyone what they should do, I will make the case that it is now the time for us to decide, today.
Leave the cynicism and pessimism at the door, and don't tolerate it in other people. If someone you know tells you Trump and Biden are no different and therefore they are not voting or writing in some third party faker, don't politely "splain" why Biden is so great compared to Trump. Ask them, "uhhh, may I ask why do you have your head in a bucket of shit," or something metaphorically equivalent. We need to shock people, not with the latest horror story on what Donald Trump did today, but with how idiotic and out of it they are acting by being cynics.
If you want to help impact people and get them moving, stick with me. I'm not here as an information provider, because you can get that elsewhere, but I do know what goes into organizing people and leading political campaigns.
You already know what dictatorships look like because you are watching Russia under Putin. Treading lightly with people who are oblivious or indifferent to this reality condemns them to living under something far worse, and the fault will be on you because at a moment of truth you crapped out and didn't give them the big shove in the right direction which they needed.
You don't have to yell at people, but don't let them sleep all day. Wake them up. And do it where possible face to face. Otherwise they will snooze the alarm.
