So here's the problem...

...the imminent elevation of a wingnut fundie (what the hell do you call a religious/political "conservative", anyway? There needs to be some sort of one-word term for "religious nut/right-wing nut". Holy wingnut? I dunno, but Barrett is what one of those is...) to the Supreme Court reminds us that the current political problems facing this country are damn near insoluble.

Let this go - let the "conservatives" lock in a political mastery for the next fifty-odd years - and you have a numerical minority that clings fanatically to political, social, and economic ideals that range from disliked to violently loathed by the 55-60 percent of the nation that is not them forcing those ideals on that majority. 

Basically you have the political setup of any number of ex- European colonies; the colonial-favored minority rules the colonial-crushed mass of the population. As places like Nigeria and Cuba and Nicaragua and Rwanda and Congo and Indonesia discovered, that's not just not stable democracy, that's not stable, period. The ruling minority eventually has to go full-dictatorship to keep the mobs down. Or the mob rebels and it's civil war.

But...let's assume that the opposite happens. Trump loses bigly, the blue wave washes over the Senate, and suddenly the positions are reversed; the "liberals" hold all three branches, and are in no mood to act nice.

So Trumpkins left and right are prosecuted, wingnut lust-objects are attacked and destroyed, the Court is packed...all the wingnut nightmares bloom.

But the "conservatives" are still there. The hard, irreducible, intransigent lump of wingnut hate for the 20th Century remains scattered all across the nation. It can't be reasoned with. It can't be bargained with. It can't be appeased. It will prefer to burn the nation to the ground rather than accept the existence of Drag Queen Story Hour.

So instead of post-colonial Nigeria, we're stuck with Britain in 1859 Ireland or 1750 Scotland, or Austria-Hungary in 1914 Serbia ; a ruling majority has to deal with a violent minority utterly unwilling to live peaceably under their conquerors, with Ingraham and Limbaugh and Hannity as Radio Rwanda or the Black Hand, constantly urging resistance to the oppressors.

I have no fucking idea how either one of those works as nonviolent politics even in the medium term. Either one leads to shooting one way or the other, either as rebellion or dictatorship.

And I have not idea how to change that, or avoid it. I think it's just coming, and we're going to have to figure out where we all stand when it does.

Update 6/27: Interestingly enough, Bob Reich thinks we're already there.

The Fire Next Time, or, Jane Brown's Body

 For some time I've been wondering what the first shot of the coming "next Fort Sumpter" will be. The event that turns our Cold Second Civil War hot.

 Oh, wait. I didn't mention the whole "cold Civil War" thing? Damn. I am getting forgetful in my old age.

So you see, there is no "We the People" anymore.

C'mon. You know that. Just be willing to quit kidding yourself otherwise.

Instead there's a sort of vast inchoate mass of humans who call themselves "Americans" that takes in every damn one and every damn thing under the sky. All sorts of people, being and doing all sorts of things. Moderates, liberals, atheists, Quakers, whackos, undecideds, and the hopelessly lost.

And there's a hard, irreducible, intransigent knot of people who call themselves "Conservatives".

The latter - and they do have some internal divisions, too - don't see the former as "Americans" at all.

These "conservatives" have some ideology but are mostly defined by what and who they hate.

They hate "liberals", first and foremost.

But the different internal divisions hate different aspects of these "liberals".

The racists, who are primarily invested in being white and that being the default position of "American" hate the pushy darks and anyone who has the temerity to even slightly question that White Is Right.

The gunhumpers - many of whom are white, too - hate anyone who tries to pry them off their lust objects, all fifteen of them.

The religious nuts - many of whom are also white (but not all; this is where the largest fraction of not-white "conservatives" come into the GOP tent) - hate anyone who's not doing whatever their invisible sky daddy says they're "supposed" to do, or doing things that the transparent sky wizard says they're not "supposed" to do. So they hate mostly abortions and the women who have abortions, and anyone involved with abortions. But they also hate non-straight people who are doing any sort of non-straight things (like having other-that-hetero-sex) or ARE doing things that straight people are doing (like marrying and having kids and going to yard sales and shit) plus Muslims and Jews and...well, you get the idea.

There's also some people who don't "hate" so much as are either just regular old greedy bastards - these are mostly just your basic rich people doing what rich people have always done, which is simply whatever it takes to make themselves richer - or people who have drunk the Ayn Rand kool-ade and are stupid enough to actually believe that big corporations and big rich people will screw you (the average non-wealthy person) over slower than big government, so they're just fucking idiots.

Anyway...all the the things these people love - theocracy, plutocracy, weapons, racism - are largely anywhere from unpleasant to outright offensive to everyone else. So they can't really run ON those things. Turns out that if you tell non-"conservative" people what these various "conservative" people really want, about 98.7% of those non-"conservative" people haaaaate all that stuff. 

I mean, hate, like with the intensity of a million suns.

So the "conservatives" just usually lie, and instead talk about how if you don't vote for them the commie liberals will flouridate your water and make you gay marry a Muslim transsexual.

Seriously. That's it. Flogging tax cuts for the rich, and feeding red meat culture war shit to the base.

Other than that the GOP's got nothin' for the vast majority of the American people.

So for about the past 40 years the "conservatives" have been at war with the liberals and everyone else who isn't "conservative". It's been a cold war, mostly; until lately no actual shots have fired.

But then on Friday Ruth Bader Ginsberg died and so now here's what's gonna happen.

Trump will send the name of some reliable bag of Federalist Society wingnut hate (apparently smart money is on some Opus Dei lunatic named Amy Coney Barrett who is chock full of the sort of old-fashioned Inquisitorial spite and malice that appalls most cradle Catholics) before Ginsberg is cold.

Moscow Mitch McConnell will ram this internet-comment-section-level-troll through confirmation and she'll be sworn in before Election Day to help her pals like Thomas and Kavanaugh strongarm "conservative" talking points onto everyone in this country.

And then it'll be Game On. 

They'll come for the 20th Century.

You think I'm joking?

Abortion will be first, of course. Roe will be toast. There will still be abortions - because as long as there is sex there will be abortions, don't kid yourself, - but only safe for the rich. For the poor and the lower class they'll often as not kill the women along with their spawn, which is the point.

Obergfell will be next, and, frankly, we'll be damn lucky if they don't overrule Griswold, Loving v. Virgina and Brown v. Board.

Lochner. Fuck. Lochner.

If you don't already, you need to Google Lockner v New York, because that's what the rich "conservatives" really want; a return to the Gilded Age, when plutocrats like John D. Rockefeller could say "The public be damned" and really do it. The six-vote "conservative" Supreme Court is gonna drive us back there most quick smart.

Along with any sort of workplace protection, you can kiss environmental and financial regulations bye-bye. Welcome back to the industrial world that used to set rivers on fire, and the highway to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum by way of 1895.

The only happy news is that as we roam this dystopian thermal hellscape at least we'll all be heavily armed, because any and all sort of firearms regulation is going to be dead'er than a dodo.

So after Donnie and Mitch seat their wingnut it won't matter how many liberals or "centerists" get elected. Every piece of legislation they pass will be litigated to the Supremes, who will take their "conservative" axe to it.

And the only real answer to prevent this "conservative" Day of Jubilee?

Go full FDR. Elect a Democratic President and Democratic Senate and Democratic House, and...

Pack the Court.

And when that happens, the wingnuts will howl like rabid wolves, and the real red-meat nutbars, the Proud Boys and Nazis and wanna-be Freikorps will turn out with their rifles.

And there we'll be; waiting to see who fires the first cannon at the big brick fort in the harbor.

That's how I see it. I don't like that, but I also don't see any way around it. The Right is going to force the Everyone-Not-Right to bend the knee or they'll shoot.

And your and my and everyone else's choice is simply whether we're willing to bend the knee or shoot back.

I don't have to like that.

But I don't see any alternatives other than even worse ones; a corporatist "conservative" future where we all the "rest of us" end up as serfs in climate change Hell.

And, goddamn it, I'll go down fighting before I surrender to that.

Tortured logic

Y'know what may be the saddest part of the whole "I guess we DO torture..." business?

The degree to which being opposed to torturing helpless prisoners is being cast as a "liberal" issue.

Fuck that.

Torture is among the lowest, vilest, most despicable of crimes. There is no excuse for it other than fear and desperation. As I said earlier; I would harm a captive if I believed that it would save people who depended on me. But then - I would I hope, if I was man enough - I would accept my own guilt and turn myself in with the evidence of my acts as the criminal I was and stand trial for my wrongs.

Torture IS wrong. The wrongest of wrongs. There shouldn't really be any argument over that; it's not a liberal wrong or a conservative wrong, it's a human wrong.

Period.

But somehow this is all getting twisted around into a "liberal" versus "conservative" issue. The peripatetic "conservative" commentor "no one" - who has made his appearance here before as well as over at the MilPub and Jim and Lisa's joint - just described my disgust and horror that my country is now unquestionably in the same class as Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as industrial states that torture their captives as a "liberal rant" (it's over at the 'Pub, but you get the picture).

And, y'know what? That just saddens and sickens me even more.

Because I grew up in a "conservative" house. My father the Master Chief was a rock-ribbed Republican up until the Eighties when he grew sick of Reagan's "government is the problem" bullshit. Many of the most decent, honorable people I know are or were "conservative".

But by that very definition the notion that the nation they love, that I love, could act like the Kempeitai or the NKVD is sickening and saddening to them as it is to me.

I'm sorry, but if you think that wanting to coldcock Dick Cheney for being a cowardly sonofabitch who ran like a frightened sissy when his country called on him to fight but loves the idea of having one of his lackeys torture some A-rab is a "liberal rant" rather than just being justifiably insanely outraged at the craven fucker's utter gall you are completely fucked up like a football bat.

Carrot? Stick?

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

Here's the deal. The woman who posted this is really a Good Person. Kind, caring, great mom...she was instrumental in the foundation of Occupy Portland. Has an immense sense of social justice. Very serious about Doing the Right Thing.

Yet...

This little motivational card typifies everything about my friends on the Left who are a certain type of lefty that drives me absolutely crazy.

It's all the kindness, all the love that it prescribes as the cardinal (or even the only) method of child-rearing; "...if we choose to be there as a guide, as a compassionate presence that can motivate from a place of genuine interest with patience and understanding so that ultimately our children will WANT to do things."

Mmmph.

Now in case you're already reaching for the phone to dime me off to CSD, look; I don't believe that kids - any kids, my kids, yours, whosever - should be raised through force and fear. I agree that "tricks and threats" are not a good idea; I didn't like them as a kid and I don't like them now, either as an adult or a parent.

But I do think that there is more to parenting...hell, there's more to LIFE...than "genuine interest...patience and understanding."

The bottom line is that there are some things that nobody wants to do. Nobody "wants" to go to the dentist. Nobody "wants" to pay taxes. Nobody "wants" a colonoscopy, to break up with their lover, to clean up human waste, to go forward through mortar fire, to work long hours in bad conditions. No amount of interest, patience, understanding, love, money, incredibly great mind-altering monkey sex...will make any of that shit more likeable and want-able.

But that stuff still has to get done.

Some of the most important lessons I've ever learned in life involved discovering the ability to persist through truly rotten times and places and finish whatever task I had to complete. That required a certain degree of internal toughness that wasn't inherited or inspired from within; it was instilled, and often through the teaching of people who were anything but compassionate and gentle.

So, yes, as parents (or peers, or leaders, or mentors, or followers) we should be patient, compassionate, understanding, and interested. That's an important part of teaching and learning; the saying "If you don't care about them they won't care about you." is true as hell. The only thing a savage who "leads" through fear earns is a cooked-off grenade through the door of his hootch as soon as his victims work up the nerve.

But...I think there has to be some steel there, too. I believe there has to be a place for a simple declarative statement; "You need to get this done. Now." Because...well, because sometimes it does have to get done now. And not in your time, or in your way, but at some time and in some way that you may not "want" because if you don't then other people - and, possibly, you - will lack for something or suffer ill consequences.

I always get the sense that this kinder-gentler thinking has permeated the Occupy movement and much of the Left in general. It's the need for consensus, the unwillingness to be rude, judgmental, abrupt, and unpleasant. Sure, we do our name-calling, but to what effect? How does marching in the street calling some bloated bankster a "vampire squid" affect said bloated plutocrat up there in his paneled office? How does that reinstate Glass-Steagall? How does that kill the sunofabitch's "carried interest" deduction?

Where's the lefties who "want" to do the had graft of twisting legislators' arms, drumming for donations, running campaigns, winning votes and defenestrating these rotten plutocratic bastards and their bought Republican stooges?

I'm not exactly calling for the rope and the torch...but, still...I just don't see how you beat Darth Cheney with love, patience, and understanding. And I don't see how that - and ONLY that - helps give a kid the kind of persistence in the face of frustration and lack of pleasant reward to become an adult who can do unpleasant things when they need to be done.

I am being to harsh on my liberal friend? I feel like I am being so. I sort of hate the feeling of being the Mean Boy and rudely thumbing my nose at all that lovingkindness and gentility.

Yet I can't escape wondering if people like the Homestead strikers and the freedom riders of Montgomery, the Paris Communards and the students and workers on the barricades of 1848 and 1917 - the humble people who actually took on the bosses and their hard men and changed the world - might have had something a trifle more demanding in their upbringing than genuine interest, patience, and understanding.

Half Beck and Half Maddow

Interesting article in the Economist here.Reading it gave me an uncomfortable twinge.

Because I'm one of those insular people he describes.

The last real prolonged contact I had with real red-meat conservatives was when I was in the service. And I should note that there I generally tended to keep my mouth shut unless something really unpassable came up.

The last really conservative friend I had was an engineer I worked with, and he and I haven't spoken since he took me out for a drink with his two fellow Red State pals and we spent most of the night arguing politics.

I know I've often observed about what I consider the dysfunction of my country in this place. And reading the article, I find the author's observations uncomfortably similar to those I've made and noting that his conclusion - that the "big sort" is making the United States ungovernable - is exactly what I've been fearing. But, also, realizing that his main thesis, that "...America is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.” indicts me along with the rest of the country.

Portland is often protrayed as a blue city in a relatively blue state. But we're not, really. We're a VERY blue city, those of us clustered around the confluence of the Columbia and the Willamette. You get out to places like Oregon City and Scappoose, though, and you're in magenta country; mostly red with a tiny hint of purple. By the time you get as far as Corbett to the east, Canby to the south, or North Plains to the west, you're as Red as the Soviet banner. The entire eastern half of the state is as conservative as can be; nary a Democrat has been elected there since the repeal of the Sunset Laws back in the Sixties.And I'm as bad or worse than anything described in the article. I actively avoid Fox News, knowing that hearing the conservative take on events will produce a skeptical sneer in minutes and reduce me to incoherant rage after a quarter of an hour. I used to read conservative magazines such as American Spectator or National Review; now, I can't tolerate their worldviews enough to examine them for some traces of appeal. When I hear Beck, or Coulter, or Hannity, or Palin, entsichere ich meinen Browning.

If I'm any evidence - and I'm a well-educated white man, the very embodiment of the sort of person my society gives power to and trusts to rule - we're not even trying anymore.

The Economist review comes to the complacent conclusion that;

"Mr Bishop goes too far, however, when he says the “big sort” is “tearing [America] apart”. American politics may be polarised, but at least no one is coming to blows over it. “We respect each other's views,” says Mrs Wortendyke of the few liberals in the home-schooling movement. “We hate each other cordially,” says the liberal Mr Balis."

But I fear that that complacency is outdated. I find little remaining cordiality for conservative goals amid my neighbors and friends, while everything I hear and read, when I do stray into Fox News World, suggests that those who disagree with me and my friends do so violently.

Lincoln once said that a house divded against itself could not stand; that the nation could not exist half-slave and half-free. I wonder; can a nation half-Beck and half-Maddow long endure?But to preserve that house Lincoln had to fight a civil war. The half that was slave had to be beaten down. I have growing doubts that the Beck and Maddow nations can find any commonality. But I dread the possibility that the divide must be, not bridged, but conquered.

What can we going to do - can we do anything - about this? Or are we doomed, like the France of 1940, to tear ourselves apart until some foreign enemy enter to mercifully end our squabbling?