I knew a number of Republicans who left the party as the crimes of Richard Nixon were made public. Apart from one here or one there, all in lower offices or just private citizens, I don't see any similar abandonment of an even more blatantly criminal Republican party now.
This has been an ongoing, planned destruction of American democracy for at least a half a century, in which an effective margin of people would be lied to, their regional and racial animosities channeled through television, radio, the movies and other media to destroy egalitarian democracy. It was a plan funded and promoted by billionaire dynasties, oil oligarchy and their fellow billionaires wherever they've accumulated their billions. That is the real source of the stinking wreckage of democracy and it was participated in by the pseudo-liberals who sought, got and enjoyed the ability to lie with impunity and to make money off of porn and degenerate messaging in entertainment. That is what produced where we are today. You have to corrupt an effective majority of voters to pull off this kind of destruction of a democracy and the way you do that is through the mass media. That is something that has been known since the aristocratic attacks on semi-democratic Athens four centuries before the common era, it is something which was successfully done in the age of yellow journalism and the emergence of mass, nationwide media with the coming of radio, then television, using it to lie people out of democracy became even easier. That is something our idiot-complicit judiciary and legal system and those most complicit of idealists in the "civil liberties" racket and their duped supporters among the would be educated class of the United States went along with on the basis of a few slogans, "free speech absolutism" "The First Amendment" etc. We all loved the idea that we were so smart in falling for that stuff even as it was clear that a population which has been successfully sold lies, not even a majority but a minority which could deliver elections to Republican fascism, would lead us where we are now. Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, the Bushes, and now Trump and the would-be liberals are still suckers for that strategy.
You're going to hear more and more that we are in a "Constitutional crisis" as Trump and the Republican-fascist party destroys the rule of law and democracy, on both a state and national level. The truth is that the shaky democracy produced by the Constitution has been in continual crisis for the entire history, the florid ante-bellum period, the Civil War, the florid corruption of the gilded age, . . . right up to now, the age of Trumpian fascism are a product of a Constitution that was set up by slave owners and their Northern commercial interest partners to thwart the possibility of democracy. Whatever democracy we've gotten has been a product of constant struggle. That struggle depended on people knowing the truth in sufficient number and having a general sense of moral obligation which the left was suckered out of by fashionable ideologies of the 20th century.
It's a mess that one blog post or even an encyclopedia wouldn't comprehensively document but it all starts with those two things, a relativization of the truth and of morality which means that neither of them has the power to steer a nation out of danger. The ideology that talked otherwise good people out of that is how we got here. The billionaires, a few oddballs among them excepted, used whatever we handed them in that regard. Like Putin, they were looking out for the things we did that they could use and they used them.
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