When the Senate votes to not eject Trump it will be a watershed in American politics, it will prove, beyond any doubt, that from now on, the United States is not a fascist government only in years in which a Democrat is president and at least one house of the Congress is not in Republican hands.
With their acquittal of Trump, after mounting what will be a fraudulent, fixed pantomime of a trial in which Trump's attorneys stated that the presidency is a monarchy, they, notably Alan Dershowitz, their pantomime "Constitutional Scholar" but the rest of them as well, have declared that Richard Nixon was right, that as long as the president does it, that mean's it's not illegal. That is they are really saying when a Republican president does it, that means it's not illegal.
In the early days when I went online and discovered unedited comment threads, I almost immediately ran into opposition when I noted that the Republican Party was and had been for a long time an actual fascist party, I'm sure more than once I heard that line I associate with NPR - I'm pretty sure it was Susan Stamburg I first heard say it - that "the first person to say "fascist" loses." I know someone at Eschaton said that to me and I said that that was a very convenient rule for crypto-fascists who would never be called what they were. That was probably about 17 years ago, during the years when the Supreme Court acting in concert with FOX as George W. Bush's cousin ignited the Brooks Bros. Putsch that put the worst president in our lifetimes in office. Oh, and, it should never be forgotten, Jeb Bush and the Florida Republican establishment set it up with ratfucking ballots and the such. What Trump benefited from in 2016 and which the Republicans are set to redo, no doubt more efficiently, in 2020 was only different in details from what put the previous Republican in the presidency. That Rubicon was crossed 20 years ago, the "free press" playing its role in that, as it did in 2016 and which it will certainly, again, do in 2020.
It turns out that you can only have egalitarian democracy within a narrow range of limits. You have to have a reliably sufficient percentage of the population able to vote based on not only an adequate grasp of the truth, but with an adquate moral foundation which is, in fact, based in an effective belief in the source of that moral foundation. Egalitarian democracy is the politics of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, as both Hillel and Jesus noted, that is The Law and The Prophets. It can only exist if you act as if you love your neighbor as yourself, it you follow the Jewish Law that, when followed, does not result in grotesquely huge fortunes being amassed by some and others being left destitute.
That is what I have become convinced will happen in Western countries who have either had something like democracy or have at least the aspiration to be democracies when they buy into post-truth, post-morality, as atheists talk people out of believing that they have an absolute moral obligation to tell the truth and to do to others as they would have done unto them. Which I never thought is where I would arrive at when I started investigating why the American left had failed for half a decade when I started doing this, going on fourteen years back.
My greatest fear is that the satanic-Mammonist "Christianity" of the Southern Baptists, the TV hallelujah peddlers, the Catholic-fascist-neo-integralists, etc. will bring about the discrediting of the religious basis of egalitarian democracy due to the ignorance of the gulled and propagandized population who get their information from atheist-secularist distortions and lies. Without that moral basis of egalitarian democracy being believed in at that strength, over the entire population, it will not be as strong a force as needed to defeat Pharaonic, Roman Imperial style gangster-oligarchy.
I am not a great student of the period of the Roman Republic - one of the sources the "founders" consulted in founding the Constitutional system - but it was never anything like a democracy, it started out as a gangster-oligarchy, one of the reasons that even during the Republic, it was a moral atrocity and a political mess. It was in no way based on equality except in that way that gangster-oligarchs will make a pose of among each other, as they each try to get advantage over each other. It was never a good model for what the United States was sold as to the common people during the revolution, a promise of equality and democratic government.
But the role the Roman Senate played in corruptly establishing the imperial system stuck in my mind while watching the degenerate spectacle of Republican-fascism using the forms and rules of our government to make the degenerate Trump emperor. That was something I couldn't get out of my mind. It's as if they did so, not with Augustus, not even with Caligula, but with Nero or one of the even more mentally deficient rich boys who followed.
The American Republican Party is more degenerate than the parties that established the long period of degenerate dictatorial rule in Rome. And that is what the post-WWII regime of libertarianism has gotten us to. Trump, the Republican majorities in the Senate and on the Supreme Court are a product of their use of cable TV, broadcast media and the internet. They are the end product of freeing all of those to lie with impunity, the libertarian pseudo-liberalism of the kind that made Dershowitz famous. He deserves to know that his name will be on that particular form of hypocritical amorality that wrecked American democracy.
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