Backyard and Beyond

As this is a referendum on autocracy, I voted against fascism.

People who vote for Trump after four years of Trump are voting for vicious, corrupt, irrational, monstrous authoritarianism. They are, through Fox-infected stupidity and/or white supremacist malignity, announcing themselves as fucking monsters enabling the dismemberment of American democracy.

People who vote for a third party candidate like Howie Hawkins are expressly stating that they don’t want to be counted in the anti-fascist vote. Utterly contemptible.

It’s been an education to watch this in real time, in our time. The policy of the Republican Party is that only votes for Trump should count. Trump has said he hopes his judges will stop the counting of ballots at midnight tonight. Typically, ballot counting can continue for days, sometimes weeks. This sexual predator’s alleged-rapist crony on SCOTUS says that such counting has the potential to “flip” elections — uh, duh? — and cites someone who says this is bad, but the legal scholar cited says precisely the opposite in the citation. (Was it Kavanaugh’s abject mediocrity shining through here — he was so eager to inhale Trump’s fart his clerks didn’t catch his errors in time — or was it rather just his fathomless contempt for law, boldly lying anyway, just like his master, the modern exemplar of the gosse Lüge?)

Trump is a lot of bullshit. He’s actually acutely weak in many ways, like so many bullies, but only if we stand up to this threats and bluster.

The real question is what do we do? In 2000, Republicans got away with stealing the election. That was a vital lesson for them. The Republicans on the SCOTUS stopped the Florida count. The first woman on the Court, S.D. O’Connor, later regretted that that naked partisan vote would be her legacy, but it was too late: idiot prince George Bush was in and the savage republic grew by leaps and bounds.

We have no tradition of the general strike. It’s been beaten out of American history. But we must have it if necessary.

Demonstrations will be essential. But they’ve got to be non-violent. The fascists want violence, it’s their cause, their essence, their language, and they will provoke it as an excuse for clamping down. They will also initiate it and blame us, while the corporate media’s death-spiral of both-sidesism will amplify that calumny. (Sadly, NPR is one of the most egregious of venues peddling the absolutely false equivalency of both-siderism. I’ve stopped listening.)

While the US military has no real tradition of intervention in domestic politics, and many retired generals have spoken out against a military coup, there is a vast network of federal police forces, some of them actually mercenaries, who have already proven to be something of a Praetorian Guard for Trumpism. Combined with the militarized police force klans in many American cities — their sadistic contempt for dissent on ample display this summer — and the paramilitary nativist/white supremaciast terrorist cells working at Trump’s beck and call, we’re really on the knife-edge. (The basis of Republican power, the backbone to oligarchy, is an entwined grotesquerie of fundamentalism, white supremacy, QAnon-insanity, and police nationalism, all extremely dangerous.)

Don’t look for leadership among the leadership of the Democratic Party. They’re temperamentally, institutionally, and historically unprepared to save democracy. It’s up to us. Let’s hope the vote against Trump and the GOP today is authoritarian-proof. Ecrasez l’Infame!