The point cannot be stressed enough: The Republican Party of Reagan and the Bushes is just as dead as the Eisenhower/Nixon Republican Party, and what has taken its place is an anti-democratic movement determined to install permanent minority rule over an unwilling nation. Everybody knows the shape of the regime to come: plutocratic and racist, artfully camouflaged with enough Ku Kluxer-style “Christianity” to keep the marks onboard.
That this is not some fringe position in today’s Republican Party has just been colorfully illustrated by the revelation of a trove of text messages between Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence “Lockjaw” Thomas, and Mark Meadows, the former Congressman who was Trump’s Chief of Staff during the latter days of the Farce Fascist trial run. Following the 2020 election, Mrs. Thomas was all in on the Big Lie that it had been stolen from the Very Stable Genius, and was begging Meadows & Co. to stand firm. She also attended the January 6, 2021 Trump rally that turned into the sack of the Capitol.
At the same time, we have the account of Mo Brooks, the notorious Alabama far right firebreather, that Trump demanded, in exchange for his endorsement, a promise to cooperate with a brand new, hare-brained and blatantly illegal scheme to “reinstate” the Very Stable Genius immediately following the anticipated Farce-Fascist capture of both chambers of Congress. It must be emphasized that the clownishness of these schemes renders them more rather than less dangerous. The U.S. Constitution, after all, is only a piece of paper. If a bicameral Congressional majority of fascists declares Trump is duly “reinstated,” with support from more than four in ten Americans, and of course that Supreme Court “supermajority” of Justice Lockjaw plus his five fellow fascists, who knows what might happen? The rest of us might pick ourselves up off the floor, wiping the tears of laughter from our eyes, to find that we have two men both claiming to be president, and a U.S. military torn right down the middle.
After the past six years of what the late Philip Roth memorably called “the indigenous American berserk,” do you really want to call any scenario inconceivable?
Emanuel Goldstein 