So long as we’re doing Stalinism, apparently:
I would throw in the ecstatic rightwing support for police state government powers (and I’m not talking about the fringe – the line starts at Andrew Sullivan and includes every Republican Congressperson save one) to make a larger point. On the subject of government power, the reversal was so extreme that it was like watching the GOP step out of a bodysnatcher pod. It became obvious America doesn’t have a conservative party any longer. There aren’t even that many conservatives; if it was Jews most cities couldn’t form a minyan. In the late Bush era, if you count out the fringe parties we have on the one hand reformed ‘conservatives’ whose domestic and foreign policy amounts to stalinism minus the healthcare, and on the other hand you have Democrats.
We’ve had about sixteen things go wrong in one week, and I was talking offline about this with some people, but what Democrats aren’t grasping entirely is just how fucking fucked we are, as a country, when governed with this kind of selfish “fuck you, I got mine and you ain’t getting yours” mentality. Governed by fear, governed by rage, governed by suspicion, governed by our worst instincts and darkest thoughts and most batshit worst-case scenarios. Governed by the people who, on balance, looked at the numbers and said fuck it, let’s go pack this in, it’s Miller time, and so what if a few more die while we chill?
A.