It's Almost Too Late For The Left To Wise Up And The First Thing We Need To Do Is Admit We Haven't Been Wise And To Dump The Stupidest Who Will Never Learn

One of the most obvious and frightening truths to come from the past six months of Trumps regime and the Nazi style spectacle of his campaign is that there is a dangerously large number of Americans, after 241 years, an abolition campaign, a civil war, the struggle to expand the franchise to women and even among white men, the labor struggles, the civil rights struggles, etc. after all of that and the institution of effective universal availability to basic education and mass media, that thirty to forty percent of Americans have a dangerous tendency to support a fascist strongman as phony, as vile and as repulsive as the troll-doll hair, lard bucket, ignorant sleazoid, predator and proven crook, Donald Trump.  Anyone who wonders how the Germans could go for a vile piece of crap as Hitler should take a really good look at what's living in the White House, with that history to inform our choice.

That IS something that should keep people up at night, that is something that should be not only in everybodys mind but in their discourse and in serious political and legal discussions of how to avoid them pitching us into fascism.   With Senator Chuck Grassley and the rest of the allegedly responsible conservatives in the Senate and those in the House not only doing nothing but actively carrying water for the Trump regimes reign of criminality and open treason, it is something that we really can't avoid addressing in an effective way so as to prevent the disaster we are likely not going to avoid.

The idea that people whose political inclinations and ideology were not only anti-democratic but overtly in support of fascism and its preceding movements of dictatorial rule should have ever had the opportunities that an indiscriminate and absolutist interpretation of the free-speech, free-press, freedom of association of violence advocating fascists and other assorted scum is quite insane.   The idea that they should have the opportunity to lie their way into power - and such an attempt would depend on lies and other assorted appeals to the worst in people, was one of the stupidest ideas of the Jeffersonians and their political if not intellectual heirs.  Such a pose is only rational when it is impossible for things to go bad and it is impossible for the fascists to win.  If there is anything that the history of the world in the past century proves, that is not impossible.  Now, with Donald Trump sitting in the White House his enablers and cohorts in control of  the House and Senate, we now know it can happen here.*

That Jeffersonian superstition that enabling lies with the same privileges as the truth, fascists with the same abilities to win as those who support egalitarian democracy, equal right, equal responsibility to respect rights, seems to have believed that things would just come out right in the end in some absurd idea that human societies operate under some "balance of nature" when everything about human cultures, societies and governments happen as a result of human choices and human blunders and human personality.  There is no natural force to keep democracy alive and to prevent fascism.  Our current fashion in the interpretation of the First Amendment, with its facile and media-promoted absolutism and the phobia of censorship of fascist propaganda is as near a guarantee of things going bad as there could possibly be.   Add in that permission to lie that the Supreme Court gave the mass media and that only makes things more likely to turn out as they are.

As recently as 2008 I believed that there was a real difference in intelligence between those on the left and those on the far and even the nearer right.  But that's self-aggrandizing conceit.  If you want to look at who has been smart about things, taking maximum advantage of opportunities, many of them handed to them by liberals in recent decades, it has been the far right, driving our politics ever rightward since 1968 when Nixon won over the flawed but infinitely better Hubert Humphrey.  The left sandbagged him and helped put Nixon in office, it has repeated that in 1980, 2000 and now 2016. If the left were smart it would learn something and it doesn't.  It cleaves to disproven and even absurd theories that were given the test of time and have failed, over and over and over again.

The presence on the alleged left of the Greens, Marxists, Anarchists, and others who have had a hand in that idiocy is even more proof that as much as we love to believe we're brilliant, taken as a whole, we are nothing of the sort.   The political regime that includes them has been a dead weight on the left my entire life and long before my parents were born.  If you want to read a good history of that, James Weinstein's The Long Detour is a good introduction, even if he repeats a few of the stupid assertions that have not only kept us out of power but have enabled the worst.  And if you want to go see how well the left learns, go over to the magazine he started, In These Times and read the massive stupidity in its archive over the past two years and continuing today.   They should try reading their founders last book.  They might learn something.  But I doubt it.

*  I am more convinced than ever that the pose of Free Speech absolutism that was promoted was asserted for what various Marxists and near-Marxists hoped would enable them to propagandize the People of the United States to support their own, red-fascist, political ideology.  It was one of the stupidest ideas ever because if there is one thing that Marxists provided, it was one of the strongest cautionary lessons of all time in Leninism-Stalinism, Maoism and other Communist dictatorships.  Almost as stupid is turning violent anarchists like Emma Goldman into some kind of heroine.  If there has been one thing that has been a definite political loser, it's things like setting bombs and terrorizing people. Especially when it's done for a political ideology as stupid as anarchism.  Just this week I had to point out to an idiot anarchist that if they wanted to find out what an absence of civil authority is really like, they should go to some of the neighborhoods here or the towns in Northern Mexico where there is no real civil authority.   They'd get their stupid asses shot within a week.