Monday, October 8, 2018

A Response

I can't recall who it was I read over the weekend, some member of both the Clinton and Obama administrations shunning the idea that Democrats should play as hard hard ball as the Republican fascists are playing because it's just not nice.  It was pointed out that it was another way of saying what Michelle Obama said so loftily, that when they take the low road we'll take the high road.  She said that not long before Trump was installed by lies, by the actions of James Comey, the New York Times and the Electoral College. 

Just look where that niceness has gotten us.  

The idea that because the segregationists and the Republians who were already in the process of taking them in during the 1964 presidential campaign were saying mean things about Earl Warren that we should let the Roberts-Kavanaugh court have free reign without pushback strong enough to thwart them and their masters' power grab is absurd.  It's the kind of lofty, high-toned scrupulosity that is a lot easier for affluent white people with degrees from elite schools and high paid careers love to strike a pose over as it costs those without money, without credentialing, without prospects who pay the price of their preening self-righteousness.  

Anyone who thinks that that pose of scrupulosity is going to shame Republican-fascists into giving up their power plays and that they would not revert to calling for the impeachment or lynching of a Democratic Chief Justice (which, by the way, we have not had since September of 1953 and Earl Warren Republicans being as extinct as he is so we'll never see his like again) is an aristocratic idiot who should be shoved aside, politely if that will do it, rudely if necessary.   So many of those who cover the court beat or who bloviate about it in the media as "liberals" are such aristocratic idiots. 

People like to pretend the Supreme Court isn't political when it has been political all along.  It has, even under most of the minority of Democrats who have been on it, been an institution that has favored the wealthy, the powerful, the established order.  The most basic divide in our politics is not partisan, it is a class divide, even as the Republicans sucker so many of the lower class to vote against their own interest and the Democrats contain those whose real devotion is to maintaining class inequality in service of the elite, such as Eric Holder and, yes, Barack Obama.   

We have got to stop falling for them and the phony civic piety they spout and have to demand radical change such as the ones I advocated this morning.  I think as the Roberts-Kavanaugh court destroys the mitigations adopted to correct Gilded Age and antebellum inequality and depravity we are going to find that such radical measures will become the only thing that saves us from serfdom and slavery.  
They've already managed to destroy the post-war middle class, to negate the conditions that created and nurtured the most radical redistribution of wealth through the G.I. Bill, the expansion of labor rights, and the radicalism of the FDR and Truman administrations.  They're working on destroying everything else that has been won by Civil War, by the blood shed by the martyrs of the Civil Rights struggle, the struggle for the rights of workers, the rights of Women, etc. which were the only things that made life under the U. S. Constitution tolerable. 

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