Monday, June 07, 2021

Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Well, Mostly "Fear!"

The long-term effects of that mooncalf renaissance are impossible to gauge from here. Trump will not be returned to power in August, and any attempts to make that happen on the far-right fringe — although perhaps extremely unpleasant in the moment — will appear even more benighted and pathetic than Mike Lindell. But another seed has been planted, and whatever sprouts from it will serve to further justify the Republicans' widespread and more or less legal campaign to subvert, undermine and reshape electoral democracy to suit their needs. Trump himself may be rendered increasingly irrelevant, or may stage a comeback even more grotesque than his initial ascension to power. That question, at least arguably, is not all that important.

Either way we have arrived at the situation predicted by sociologist C. Wright Mills more than 60 years ago, when he wrote that "men and women of the mass society," now "driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern," would come to feel themselves "without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power." Mills concluded: "At the end of that road there is totalitarianism." That's the utopian endpoint Mike Lindell longs to wish into being.

Because nothing else in the world is ever going to happen, ever, except Trump.  The fact that this guy lost the popular vote twice, and his margin actually nearly doubled the second time around?  Meaningless.  The fact that Biden is twice as popular now as Trump was at his lowest polling?  Meh!  The fact that covid is all but defeated and the world is returning to normal and the GOP still can't find a way to critique Biden (border crisis, anyone?  what happened to that?  CRT?  Get real, summer is coming.  What else ya got?  Bueller?  Ferris Bueller?).  Doesn't matter!

Only Trump matters! In the end there is and can only be TRUMP!  And FEAR of Trump! Because as long as Trump matters, we have something to wring our hands about!

Beats trying to solve problems, that's for damned sure!

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