I watched the LWT segment on the West Bank, and learned about Hebron and price tag killings, and have, at least for now, lost faith in humanity as a species. I seriously doubt we’re going to get past this enough to create a communal society, a public serving government, or reach out to colonize space.

My father is a literal rocket scientist, now retired. Was one of the Mission Control guys back during the Apollo missions. He’s now a total MAGA true believer.

Here in the states, Kristin Kobes Du Mez (an Evangelist Christian, herself) traced the dawn of the Christian Nationalist movement back to Jerry Falwell who was sore about interracial marriage and school integration when he formed the Moral Majority as a voting bloc. Abortion access was a common anger point which Falwell chose as the single issue to drive the group towards Republicanism, allowing for Reagan to win by landslide, and then deregulate, break unions and allow lobbyists back into Washington.

Behind The Bastards draws it back to the Great Depression (which our industrialists thought was a keen time). Hoover and his friends were sore about FDR’s New Deal, even though it was a last chance to let capitalists try to make it work, since a lot of Americans were thinking about what Lenin had been doing as an alternative to living in cardboard and stacked paint cans, and surviving on flour paste (until they die of malnutrition). James W. Fifield Jr., who had just built the very first megachurch (essentially a Protestant cathedral) and was way in debt, appealed to industrialists by reinterpreting scripture to exclude all the feed the hungry, enrich the poor stuff. Fifield’s version of Christianity, mixed in with American Exceptionalism and anti-communism informed the propaganda that began to be taught in schools and ministries. At first it wasn’t very good, but in time it got better with practice. (Although I don’t see what people see in PragerU.)

The thing is, even those conservatives who are never-Trump or anti-MAGA still believe in the policies that got us here. Precarity (that is, job precarity, rent precarity, family precarity, health precarity, etc.) is what drives those who are not civic-savvy to strongman Mussolini wannabes. And this – gutting social services, tough on crime police brutality against poor and minorities, the prison industrial complex – are the policies that brought us to 2015 where Donald J. Trump walked in and took over the Republican party.

Even if we stop Trump this year (a huge ask) the GOP is going to strut out the usual rogues gallery of Teds Cruz and Jebs Bush and Rands Paul until another charismatic radical captures the hearts of their base, and we’ll be fighting of yet another coup. But that assumes Harris not only wins in 2024 (despite expected election violence and fraud) but also any coup d’etat (procedural and violent) are put down, and no civil war erupts. (According to DHS analysts, we are not prepared for what we expect from Trump’s militant followers)

According to CIA analysts interviewed on PBS, the US currently has all the necessary conditions for civil war to break out (based on their studies of civil unrest, worldwide). In similar conditions in other nations, if power was issued to the public through massive election reform so that public-serving policy could be implemented, we’d be able to back away from the precipice of civil war and one party autocracy. A voting system that allowed for more than two parties (i.e. not First Past The Post) would help bunches. So would another New Deal style relief package (like the Green New Deal). But right now the establishment Democratic Party is not into that, and the Republican party just wants to neuter elections (and go all in on one-party autocracy).

The thing is, the conservative intelligentsia in the 1970s and 1980s were fully aware this was the eventual outcome of conservative ideology. They had seen this process play out before, and yet they chose to support deregulation and disenfranchisement of the public. As Brad Raffensberger pointed out, he won’t cheat for Trump, but he believes in the policies that would bring more Trumps, and will vote for Trump in 2024 since he’s the [R] guy. This is what smart conservatives look like.

It’s to say they didn’t just buy the ticket to ride this train, but they used their holdings to decide where the rails would be laid and where its destination should be. Maybe they didn’t believe we’d arrive while they were still alive.

So am I mad at any one person? Not really, it’s like being mad at a cuckoo for fucking with other birds. Parasitism is the most dominant survival strategy across all life on Earth. I just wish we humans had better capacity to do the rational thing rather than hating on immigrants and Blacks and Jews because Fox News and OAN tell us to.

So I’m not angry, just disappointed.