IF the United States is to retain even the small measure of egalitarian democracy we have had won through the long struggle against the original, slave-owner-slavery-profiteer written 1787 Constitution of the United States we will have to look really hard at the parts of that Constitution which the fascists, the Trumpzis and the "civil liberties" lawyers and scholars and scribblers used to empower violent fascists. Violent fascists who have grown powerful enough so that they installed one of their own in the presidency, put enough of them into the legislative branch, in state houses in, yes, a majority of the old Confederate states but in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania and, I'm disgusted to say, Maine, so they really are a continuing danger to even the pose of democracy.
I listened with interest to the CBC Sunday Magazine show interview with Tom Ginsberg in which he pointed to several of the really dangerous features of the American Constitution. He specifically mentioned the Electoral College, the baroque certification system that is a product of the Electoral College and allowing the States to run elections, the absurdly long period between the election and the inauguration of a new president, especially absurd when the Voters have thrown out the sitting president, that there is no real accountability for a criminal president or, as will become obvious in the coming weeks when the traitor House and Senate members won't be removed in the congress. He also pointed out that there is no stable independent institution within the government that is not open to political corruption and a devotion to maintaining democracy.
That's a pretty involved list of ways in which our quasi-democracy has been too weak to protect itself against the enemies of democracy, including the vast majority of the Republican Party who are, in fact, opposed to anyone winning an election other than themselves. Voter suppression measures have been installed in the majority of states in which Republicans have control of the State Government, even in Georgia where the great Stacey Abrams has managed to pull off two miraculous wins for democracy has a state government which has sought to suppress votes, largely on the basis of race. That is as old as the goddamned Constitution, itself, with the appalling 3/5ths provision, by which the Founders installed not only non-democratic provisions but grotesquely anti-democratic provisions into the thing.
I will point out that what we are, collectively, in danger of losing, a government that is elected and an embodiment of the just consent of those governed by it was exactly the thing which the writers of the Constitution explicitly rejected, disenfranchising women, Black Americans, Native Americans, even the majority of white men who were not property owners. What the Trump fascist attack on the Capitol is, it is an attempt to prevent Black votes from counting, the votes of those who want equality and democracy. The anti-democratic system they want was what the Constitution provided through out most of its history, only being made anything like equal or democratic through the most difficult of struggle, a struggle whose past success has been under attack with great success through the Supreme Court overturning that progress and enabling its enemies through their "free speech" rulings.
I have all of my adult life, once I'd really thought critically about the dangerousness of the United States Constitution against which all of that is best about American history has been a struggle, been entirely opposed to the conventionalized, required religious worship of the Constitution and the fictitious cult of the Founders because they are dangerous to the equality and so freedom of the large majority of Americans. The fetishizing of the document with those terrible flaws, the stupid granting of privileges to lies and to the buying of elections by millionaires and billionaires founded in the inadequate language of the Constitution and its earliest amendments has been what destroyed the greatest step forward in fixing what the Founders intentionally put in place to prevent equality and democracy during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. That the language of "civil liberties" talk is so seductively simplistic that it has become the favorite tool of Proud Boys, white supremacists, Republican-fascists as they destroy equality and democracy proves that.
And there is a large component of entertainment media in this. There is a straight line between the hate-talk comedy of the late 1970s and 1980s, alleged people such as Andrew Dice Clay to Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys. People who knew him said that all Gavin wanted was to be a kew-el stand up comedian. McInnes like so many of the male would-be comedians starting with the stupidly deified and totally unfunny Lenny Bruce wanted to be funny and when they found they had no talent for that, they used ourrageousness, instead. Even starting with Bruce using racist language in his stand up act to shock the idiot kewl-kids into laughing. As there is never much original in show biz of that kind, as it developed,they depensed with the pretense of ironic use of racist language and went directly to the hate talk instead. And the idiot civil libertarians claimed that it was a great thing for liberty. I have come to get my gard up when I hear someone use the word "liberty" because it comes so much out of the mouth of fascists and Nazis and their enablers these days.
Deport Gavin McInnes, deport Gorka and all of the others. If it were possible I'd say deport Ted Cruz, only Canada has its own problems with its indigenous fascists and a Supreme Court which is following the same idiotic enabling of hate speech that the U.S. Supreme Court has practiced.
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