Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Under Even Our Bill of Rights Freedom Does Turn To Slavery When Morality Is Suspended

It has been the great unlearned lesson of the Trump crime-family rule that the United States Constitution, itself and certainly as interpreted by the Supreme Court is incapable of protecting us from a concerted criminal conspiracy of the kind that produced the Trump regime.  

It is as great and perhaps an even more important unlearned lesson that, once one of those is in place, the Constitutional order not only doesn't remove one, no matter how serious the crimes, the incompetence the disaster they produce, the normal Constitutional order and the habits that has built up will act to keep them in place no matter how bad it gets.  

There are no prospects of removal of Donald Trump and the huge mob of crooks, thugs and sadists he has installed, he and they are protected by the Constitution that should have removed him and, even more so that "fourth branch" the media the "free press" which is where Trump as a public figure was gestated and grown and released onto us like a pandemic.  The media, the alleged last best hope for the United States has played the greatest role in promoting not only Trump but the Republican-fascist machine that gave us not only him but before him a series of increasingly disastrous Republican, morphing into Republican fascist administrations and congresses and Supreme Courts.  

"Normal" under the regime of the Constitutional system, has had that effect here as it has in a disturbingly large number of countries which have imitated our presidential system of governance, though parliamentary government is not guaranteed to avoid it, our system - with the machinery of "balance" allegedly to prevent that in place - seems to produce it easily most of the time in the past and, now, under current tweaks in the system by the Supreme Court using the slogan of "freedom" is making it happen, certainly, most of the time. 

The political culture that is, mostly, not a product of the beleaguered, underfunded, over-mandated public school system but of TV, radio, the movies and online gossip ("social media) has been corrupted by the flourishing of lies and the lazy habits of mind that come from watching entertainment constantly.  Trump is a product of, first the "entertainment" division and its corrosion into the "news" division, as if there's really a difference after broadcaster requirements were dropped as an extension of "freedom of the press".  

The media screens have the eyes, the attention and, so, the minds of The American People, what happens, what is allowed to happen on them is what constitutes the normal habits of the American electorate.  Under such a regime of laissez-faire civics education, even the alternative to Republican-fascism will give in to what has led us here and the incompetent boobs who have enabled that.  Charles Pierce recently pointed out how Biden will probably get the Democratic nomination despite his intentions of caving in to Republican-fascists.

For all the racetrack touts and analytics, Biden has one very strong political advantage going for him. People just want things to get back to normal again. They want a president who isn’t manifestly unqualified and clearly half-mad. They want their Twitter accounts to go back to featuring dogs and cute pictures of the grandkids. They want a Congress that can work smoothly enough so that they can go back to ignoring it again. In fact, they’d like a government that can work smoothly enough so that they can go back to ignoring it again. I am not one of these people and, very likely, you’re not, either. But there are a helluva lot of them out there, and I suspect Joe Biden appeals to them more than any of his rivals do. He is a president you can forget about, at least for a moment.


I wouldn't be surprised if that disgustingly low expectation in an opposition to the neo-Nazi-Trump regime and the Republicans who will continue it now that he has shown them the road happens due to a mix of the media sandbagging the other candidates, anyone with any aspiration of changing things in the dramatic way that Barack Obama most certainly demonstrated he, as a golden boy of the normal order of things, had no intention of even trying.   I think the Obama years were the last word in why that kind of Constitutional normalcy is bound to keep us on that track to hell.  He blew his best chance, his first two years, on his endless emotional need to please the "good" Republicans.  Biden was his choice for VP, a lot of that failure was the product of the kind of "help with the Senate" that anyone with a critical eye to Biden's career there would have seen.  Obama, a conventional product of acculturation into the high end of that Constitutional order, either would not see it or chose not to.  

Trump is a product of the normal Constitutional order as certainly as the previous low point that Pierce mentions in his piece, George W. Bush.  Pierce might see that far but he, a conventional admirer of "Jimmy Madison" and a full fledged member of the media that brought us so far down this nightmare ride will not really understand its causes in "freedom" uninhibited by a requirement to tell the truth, by facing the serious need for the American electorate to get fed serious truth instead of entertaining lies.  Much as I might like and respect him, I do not buy that even Charles Pierce is more "one of these people" than he'd ever want to believe. Just about anyone who makes their living from an American media company is.  You have to be or they wouldn't publish you.  The media that Pierce works for is part of what produced this state of affairs.

I think we are at or past the point where "freedom" goes from a desirable thing for people to enjoy under a regime of equality to where freedom, itself, is overtaken by the exigencies of seriousness and morality.  Freedom exists within a fixed boundary within which it can survive, those bounds being the necessities of life and the realms within which other people and the environment and their needs must limit the freedom of individuals.  There is no limit to the seriousness of those other exigencies impinging on freedom are not important or the moral consequences of allowing freedom to overtake those.   The existence of moral absolutes are never more obvious than when those consequences show the consequences of absolute freedom outside of moral restraint such as a regime when it is asserted there is a right to lie.  

There' a reason that the 1984 Ministry of Truth slogans, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, seem so eerily like art becoming life.  It has, and under the American Constitution.

2 comments:

  1. I think Charlie Pierce discounts the anger in America. I don't think the electorate wants a return to "normalcy," I think they want a return to the rule of law. That's what MeToo is about, in the end; that's what the outrage against Epstein is about (and anyone who even was in the same room with him at any time and anyplace).

    Trump is ignoring the law because it's worked for him all his life to do that. I think there will be a demand that a former President be prosecuted for what he did in office, for the first time in American history. And it will be a bad precedent, but a necessary one, since Trump himself sets a bad precedent.

    But people don't want "normal." They want correction. Joe Biden is the Gerald Ford of candidates. I really don't think he survives the first contact with reality (polls are anything but reality). Biden's never won before, and his time hasn't come around now (aside from the fact he's simply too old. That shows, too.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. RMJ, this is an excellent way of putting things, a return to the rule of law. I would go even further having thought about it, it's also that people want everyone playing by the same rules. A lot of the anger at the one percent is that they get to play by a different set of rules. For example, I slowly get to accumulate some money in my 401K tax free, but there are a whole bunch of limits on how that happens. With a lot of luck maybe I get to retire some day (which for almost everyone I know is way later than 65). Mitt Romney got to put funny "zero" value shares in his 401k and suddenly he has tens of millions tax free. The tax system is an obvious place where the rich and powerful get to play by different rules. It's a return of the rule of law, where the rules are the same for everyone. I agree that Biden will not get us there. My best hope is Elizabeth Warren, she seems to best understand how we are all playing by different rules and has many plans to address the issue.

    ReplyDelete