Putsch of the Putzes
The legitimacy of the 2016 General Election in the United States of America was compromised long before the election took place.
Was it a "grand conspiracy?" Not initially. Not in the sense of a single coherent plan formulated by a consistent group of conspirators-- at least, not at the beginning. To me, it initially looked like political opportunism writ large, and the haunting fear that 'conservative' ideology was on the verge of irrelevance in a world where the pace of change was escalating, post-WW2 innovation and technology promised a broadening array of benefits to an increasingly unionized economy, and evolving mass communications threatened capitalist oligarchs' control of the political process.
When growing identity activism challenged America to walk the Founders' words of equity for all, and marginalized populations began winning victories, they faced the specter of a white, protestant, patriarchal oligarchy's doom.
What else could they do, but find the stress lines in the larger culture, insert wedges of fear, and begin pounding away?
Nearly half a century of calculated, intensive deconstruction of public education stoked racist, nativist identity and fostered ever-increasing civic disengagement and ignorance of the mechanisms of democracy.
Decades of shamelessly racist, xenophobic, anti-urban, anti-poor propaganda produced racist, nativist identity politics that placed GOP operatives in state houses, facilitating the gerrymandering that cemented control of state executive offices and legislatures.
The Friedman/Rand economic center of gravity was established to break the Unions, but it also diverted the economic base of the middle class overseas, provided ideological cover for the robber-baron renaissance, and disseminated the "greed is good" mantra.
As their efforts bore fruit and momentum gathered, the more generalized opportunism finally did coalesce into an actual conspiracy, a network of dark-money financiers fueling a network of covert and overt organizations focused explicitly on rolling back the political, social and economic control structures of America to something that resembled the 1880s. Pre-Union, pre-Civil Rights, pre-Women's Suffrage. It can be done.
It's being done.
Citizens United, ALEC, voter suppression laws, media consolidation, the incubation of the "useful idiot" wing of the GOP, and the enabling of increasingly extremist-skewed propaganda to push the overall center of gravity further and further right, resulted in the gutting of the GOP as a political party in any meaningful sense.
It's now simply the active arm of the oligarchy, carrying out a carefully incubated putsch cloaked under gossamer-thin legalistic veils, subverting long-outdated Constitutional tools to eviscerate democracy itself. (Think about this. If the GOP were still a political party, wouldn't there be considerably more ACTUAL input and participation from the "Party Leadership" in this process? GOP elected officials and the whole 'Party' staff structure are essentially a Potemkin village... there's no real power there.)
Now the Kremlin wants to play, too.
That's okay, actually. Because although the whole "Commie" thing was useful back in the day to whip fear into the American electorate, our oligarchs have always known that the "Socialist" in "USSR" was abandoned early, and the cabal that replaced Stalin's flat-out totalitarian rule were nascent oligarchs themselves, jockeying for position and cover to gather the resources of those "Soviet Republics" into their own pockets. And when the mechanism of the Soviet State was no longer functional, they'd jettison it (as they did,) and replace it with the overt oligarchy the Kremlin's been working on for decades.
Oligarchs can work with oligarchs, at least until one of them exposes a weakness and the knife (or the brolly tip) can be slipped in.
So when it became clear that Putin was working on his own version of the putsch, they gave him a pass.
Even when it became clear that his primo Useful Idiot is a putz.
Because, after all... Putin's over there. Our own little cabal of oligarchs is HERE. Always have been. They're well-entrenched, slippery opportunists who can turn just about anything to their own purposes.
So the putsch has taken place. Putin's Putz is set up as the stalking goat. But the Cabinet of Putzes being assembled now are the water-carriers for our very own domestic tyrants.
Ultimately, they'll discover they've bitten off way more than they can chew. Karma will catch up with them, and it won't be pretty. But in the mean time, buckle up.
The rest of us are in for a helluva rough ride.
wearily,
Bright
