Friday, January 26, 2018

Even The Genuinely Great Charles Pierce Won't Tell You How Bad It Is But I Will

As almost always, Charles Pierce tells the hard truth in the piece he posted yesterday about the origins of Trumpism in the Republican Party,  he diagnoses it as a prion disease that entered the Republican brain when Ronald Reagan became president and his insanity - he fingers supply-side economic bull shit and "splinter protestantism" - became common received wisdom.   After a list of the recent shocked! shocked! Republican staffer of such administrations and campaigns as preceded Trump who just can't believe how things have fallen so low after the glories of one Reagan and two Bushes (including Bush II, imposed by Supreme Court fiat and previous holder of the title of Worst President In Living Memory If Not In History*)  not to mention the campaign of McCain-Palin, Pierce says:

But my most serious reservation is that the dynamic being engaged by these wandering spirits tends to make the inevitable an anomaly. The prion disease has been at work for decades and Trump is just one of its most egregious symptoms. Earlier ones include the strangulation of the nomination of Merrick Garland, the nomination of Sarah Palin, the disinformation regarding Iraq, the U.S. Attorney scandal, the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, TravelGate, FileGate, Whitewater, Iran-Contra, supply-side economics, and the ensemble encroaching on the institutions of government by organized plutocracy and organized theocracy. All of these things, large and small, led inexorably to the presidency* of someone like Donald Trump.

and pointing out why this can't be made to be a mere passing era, remembering the hundreds of thousands left dead in the wake of the now rehabilitated Bush II (Cheney) regime, the seeds of such forgetting appearing on cabloid shows such as that of Lawrence O'Donnell most nights:

That presidency*, believe it or not, one day will end, and, when it does, the country cannot be allowed to go back to the status quo ante. The damage done by this presidency* can’t be swept out of the national memory the way the damage done by the last Republican president has been. The Republican Party has to be purged of the prion disease, all of it. Because the prion disease has sickened the entire nation now. The progress of the disease is now so advanced that the Republican powers within the national legislature are unable to check the powers of a president* that a good portion of the country believes shouldn’t be within 200 miles of the White House, a form of ideological enfeeblement that may be the final stages of the disease. That there are people who were involved in the disease’s earlier stages who are unnerved now seems to me to be yet another manifestation of it. At least, with kuru, the cannibalism comes at the beginning.

All to which I say a very Catholic and Protestant and Jewish, and Islamic AMEN!  even as I know it doesn't actually get to the real root of the disease which is embedded in the Constitution and the line of supposedly liberal First Amendment rulings that I doubt Charles Pierce is willing to seriously challenge, not to mention the ACLU and liberal members of past courts have brought and joined in.  If you want to read something that demonstrates that, consider this passage from a self-congratulatory piece on the 40th anniversary of Buckley v. Valeo by Joel Gora, one of the ACLU lawyers most responsible for creating the conditions that Pierce decrys as inevitably producing Trump.

Some thought the restrictions on campaign giving and spending violated the very core of the First Amendment’s protections and undermined the essential role of free speech in safeguarding democracy. They organized a “strange bedfellows” coalition of liberal and conservative politicians and groups to challenge these new Draconian restrictions on political freedom in America. The group of plaintiffs included conservative Senator James L. Buckley, liberal anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy, the American Conservative Union, and the New York Civil Liberties Union. They claimed that, as outsiders and underdogs challenging the establishment and the status quo, they would not be able to get their messages out without being able to raise and spend a modest number of larger donations from friends and supporters. Their lead counsel was Ralph K. Winter, a Yale Law School professor, who would go on to a long and distinguished career as a United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit. Another key attorney for the challengers was John R. Bolton, who would later serve in top foreign policy positions and is now a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Yes, that John Bolton, mustache lunatic who was put first proposed to Trump as Sec. of State - Trump didn't like the retro mustache - Ralph K. Winter, one of Reagan's first appointments to the federal judiciary,  Eugene McCarthy, who by that time had become a bitter Naderesque  enemy of a Democratic Party which would, somehow not nominate him as president, and James L. Buckley, brother of the genteel fascist, William F. soon to be member of the Reagan administration and then, also, put into the federal judiciary by him.  And you really could tell what the results would be from the company that Gora and the ACLU kept in that case. 

And it's hardly the only time the icon of pseudo-liberalism has kept such company to such oligarchy advancing effect. In the same piece, Gora gives credit to his and that motley crew's victory in the putrid Buckley v. Valeo ruling for it leading to Citizen's United:

That principle would also be the basis for the Court’s more recent and highly controversial decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), holding that these First Amendment rights also allowed corporations, unions, and non-profit organizations to use their funds to communicate their views on government and the politicians who run it.

The principle being that money equals speech, and, by so doing so turns speech into a measurable commodity.   Eleven years ago I put that in the form of an equation, mP=s  in which m is "money," s is "speech" and P is the constant "Person" with a value of 1, though such a "person" is either one real, human citizen or one gigantic corporate entity.  As should surprise no one, when the "P" has billions of dollars that "Person" either a billionaire or billionaires amassed in a boys club or the "Person" is a mega rich corporation, they will have billions of times the "speech" of people without that money.  The results in our politics has not benefited We The mere People or the unions or the non-profit sector that Gora was using as a fig-leaf to cover up his shame at enabling oligarchy.   If you doubt that's the case then let me ask you how's this going in the laboratory of real life. 

Reagan was product of the country produced by the First Amendment rulings that the ACLU and lawyers like Joel Gora got from the least democratic of the branches of government, staffed by a largely Ivy League trained elite appointed for their service to the elite or, in the past, at least not generating waves that would have sunk their aspirations to the federal judiciary.  The fact is that that goes back in the past right through the "corporate personhood" insertion and right back to the the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention that produced the potential for this to happen.  Charles Pierce is absolutely right to suspect that the same country that went from Reagan to Trump will go right through Trump and on down into whatever degenerate demagogue the Republican primary voters will choose.   Just as it went from Nixon - the first beneficiary of that road to oligarchy which began in 1964 with Sullivan v New York Times. 

The Trump regime, if it were incompatible or inconsistent with or unacceptable under the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights would have been aborted weeks into it.  That it hasn't and well may not be ended, even as blatant treason and high crimes, theft, looting, oppression, racism and insane depravity are its hallmarks is proof that the Constitution contains the seeds of Trumpian fascism and no real inhibitions that will be a reliable prevention of it.

* But who is now a Famous Artist, perhaps a little like what Adolf Hitler would have been if Adolf Hitler had led The Curious Life of Benjamin Button. 

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