–‘I Have a Dream’ or “I Have a Nightmare?’
WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Monday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes.
• Great battles seldom preserve the status quo and the one shaping up in Washington could greatly accelerate ideological change or usher in an even longer period of grueling trench warfare. The coming Senate trial of Donald Trump – as a private citizen – is an inflection point, a big one. Conclusive? Probably not. Some writers wonder if the Civil War ever ended, and if this is part of its continuation. Others declare that in a few years either the Trumpist Republican Party flourishes or alternatively America as we imagine it still exists. In this view it’s either-or. Both can’t coexist. Corporate America seems to be turning against at least some Republicans, cutting off contributions, even closing down speech venues, for now. In the longer view, the Jan 6. Capitol invasion and the Senate trial of a president and even an Inauguration can be seen, not as decisive culminations, more as momentary waystations for an otherwise speeding train on its way to ever bigger battlegrounds. What’s around the next curve?
• One thing that all sides might agree on is that Washington’s pitched battles can be a merely spectator sport in the rest of the country. In this era that point may have passed. Fewer and fewer can be bystanders when their statehouses are ringed by armed guards. Early on, when women in their finery and men dressed for a summer outing gathered on the hills overlooking those first Civil War battlegrounds few would have imagined that by 1865, 700,000 soldiers and civilians would be dead. Even five years earlier, when Abraham Lincoln won his four-way race for president via the Electoral College, not the popular vote, it wasn’t clear that in a few weeks South Carolina would secede, then Mississippi, then Florida, then Alabama, then Georgia, then Louisiana and on and on.
• Those curious well-dressed onlookers on the hills were still so numerous the following July that they got in the way of retreating Union troops after the Battle of Bull Run. Will someday the timeline of a new Civil War count the killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter awakening, the Kenosha Wisc. conflagration, the October plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the Nashville AT&T building bombing and then the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol and all the other points along the current timeline be a string of prophetic markers presaging an all-consuming disaster? We can hope not. Or, an historian can observe, people of good will can step in and make sure it doesn’t happen.
• Let’s dial back the alarmism for the moment to focus on this particular week. At this writing we don’t know exactly when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will choose to deliver the Article of Impeachment to the Senate. But we do know that act will intensify the news spotlights on one man, Sen. Mitch McConnell. All those historians who claim that large tidal forces determine history – the industrial revolution, the resurgence of nationalism, drought and climate change – always come up against the elevation on the stage of a person who switches the script. Once kings, emperors and conquering generals made history swerve. Now it’s a politician from Kentucky.
• The bystanders on the hills can handicap the results. Is McConnell going to let his rage about Jan. 6 push 16 other Republican senators to convict? That would assure another simple majority vote can deprive Trump of the status of a potential candidate and returning hero. Never having conceded that Joe Biden won fairly, Trump has declared a “movement” that he hopes will grow, not recede. He hopes to be an influencer, not just a loser. If there is no conviction Congress can still use the 14th Amendment to accomplish the same thing. The grievances and wedge issues Trump helped widen into significant fractures will not have disappeared.
• The political earthquake that voters in Georgia triggered, after Biden “stole” the election from Trump, is a lot to absorb. Those ballot box reverses/victories help magnify the fears of millions of Trump voters about the future. Ideological repression is only the beginning in their view. The shutdown of Parler by tech giants, seen to be allied with Democrats, can be seen as a giant hand of pending Socialism squeezing the neck of conservatism. In fact, any Fox News, OANN and Newsmax viewer can easily believe that’s exactly what’s happening. The view does require a blind spot, of Parler as a conduit of violence, the staging platform for insurrectionist plots, the boiling cauldron of bloodthirsty schemes. The view has to be of a Parler of conservative discourse, with “conservative” defined somewhat differently for this purpose. Soon Parler will be back, and so will the argument over its net effect.
• In an era of aggravated inflammation every one of the current wedge issues is ripe to be concentrated into an intolerable acid bath when the actual future is unknown – as it always is. For those Trump supporters encouraged to anticipate the worst, the worst is readily available. Borders opened to hundreds of thousands, H.R.-1 passed to seal off Republican chances behind a wall of mail-in ballots, the prisons now packed with black criminals beginning to be crowded with white insurrectionists as the FBI uses Internet chatter to track down thousands in their homes and communities. Will there be shadow presidents controlling Biden, whether Susan Rice, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Let’s not forget Kamala Harris, who’s already vice president. Or Bernie Sanders, already the chairman of the powerful Senate Budget Committee. Nancy Pelosi is now even more powerful, the Biden administration providing her with many fellow West Coast minions. And so the nightmares proliferate for those who opposed Biden and specially for those who also love Trump. And to serve as the ominous background to everything else. Covid-19 mutates, its variants providing ever more justification for lockdowns and strait-jacket national mandates. A U.S. death toll that goes past 500,000 is predicted, a toll that mows down Democrats and Republicans alike, but mostly those of color and of age. Its most important victim, normalcy. It pumps fear into the cauldron already bubbling with so much else.
• From this day’s viewpoint, in the context of a nation’s capital that’s become an armed camp, with vast areas blocked to traffic, public transportation diverted, even on-line gun sales tamped and inbound airliners populated with air marshals, there aren’t many scenarios that seem impossible. Statehouses ringed by heavy security. Law enforcement networks linked nationwide alert for any troublemakers. It’s not martial law yet it’s very far from normal. Inauguration Day and the Senate trial get closer and coffee shops many states away are closed down.
• Paranoia aside, all the headlines in the morning from Italy, easily dialed back on @macenewsmacro, serve as a reminder that political instability is more the norm elsewhere. Two-party democracy, once seen as the epitome of stability, can be viewed pessimistically as an anachronism. A world full of allies has been splintered. After years of Trump-era demonization, China’s now growing boastful exceptionalism, with the only economy to have grown during the pandemic, looms as not just a competitor economy, but as a bogeyman of hugely inflated dimensions. Little America, with just 5% of the world’s population, can seem more like a Switzerland than a giant astride the world. If its productivity surge is in the past, if its management of the virus is the best it can do, if its internal divisiveness is growing into wounds that won’t heal, if its debts become an unbearable burden, then Switzerland might be an outcome that’s way too optimistic.
• This is where we look forward to the sunshine and cleansing effect of things like prospective social media reforms, of social safety net reinforcements, of effective vaccines, for virus and other kinds of ills. After all, that widely quoted 73% diminishment in misinformation posts since the president’s twitter feed was shut down proves it works, or does it? Two insightful pieces over the weekend point to a future where the outcomes are for American futures substantially different from today but not terminally catastrophic. Neither are particularly friendly along strictly conservative-liberal dividing lines. A historian at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Suzanne Schneider wrote in The Washington Post that the Jan. 6 Capitol defilement was “quintessentially American.” The crowd was intent on using violence as a “mode of personal expression” but had no underlying ideology other than fealty to Trump. “A hodgepodge mob with no discernible convictions” isn’t a base upon which to build a fascist state, she argues. Others might ask on Martin Luther King Day, by what mechanisms his dream gets any closer. Her views to some extent mesh with those of Fareed Zakaria, who wrote and expounded on his CNN program on the way political parties can disintegrate and fade when their ideology hollows out. The first American political party, the Federalists, “veered into authoritarianism and lost any ideological consistency or integrity.” Then the Whig Party split over slavery and despite the victory of its celebrity Gen. Zachary Taylor had “shrunk into oblivion” by the late 1850s.
• If the future does not belong to Trump Republicans it may also not belong to Biden-Pelosi-Schumer-Sanders Democrats either. Americans in general – a species that may still exist – don’t have a lot of patience with ideological paralysis. They tend to throw off the strictures of any sort once they have a chance, whether it’s a pandemic, or a Depression, a debt crisis, pointless wars or dead-end political ideology. For now, the path ahead is up to Mitch McConnell and then perhaps to Joe Biden. After that, something new that could make 2021 has irrelevant as 1865. First, the Senate trial of Donald Trump.
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Contact this writer: denny@macenews.com.
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