Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, January 8, 2018

I Hate Illinois Nazis

It's increasingly clear that the hard right in this country is an authoritarian party.  Their commitment to the rule of law is weak; instead, they see the law as a cudgel to smash their enemies.  That - to put it mildly - is not the rule of law. 

Since the hard right dominates the entire Republican party because even non-authoritarian Republicans fear their base, we are basically faced with the fact that in Trump's America, the Republican Party is really closely aligned with the sort of political movement we associate with Erdogan, Le Pen and, yes, Putin.

The problem, of course, is that while some Republicans see themselves as principled small government conservatives, as long as they tolerate Trump and call for investigations into nontroversies like Uranium One or Clinton's goddamned emails, the difference between a Chuck Grassley and a neo-facist goober like Louie Gohmert is effectively meaningless.

The Republican Party needs to be beaten like a rented mule next November, and I say this not as a partisan, but as someone who fears the direction of our democracy is taking.

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