Only Decades Of Violence Can Fix What Republicans Have Broken

"The violence I'm speaking of is not going to come from the left"

by Justin Rosario

America is broken. Not a little broken but very broken. It's broken in vast, fundamental ways that are, if you examine it, by design.

Republicans have spent decades waging a war on the very concept of democracy to the point where the only thing that can fix this country is decades of bloodshed. The Tree of Liberty is going to be watered and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

If you're alarmed that I've suddenly become a radicalized militant, take a breath. I'm not going to blow up my local chapter of the RNC. The violence I'm speaking of is not going to come from the left.

America is broken and two things are happening in response to this:

1. A great deal of the country, women, minorities, Millennials, Generation Z, even Independent voters, are pushing back against the Republican Party and its politics of greed and hate and rage.

2. The far smaller hardcore base of the Republican Party, seeing the writing on the wall, is radicalizing itself for a civil war that will never come.

Republicans, aided by an all-too-willing press, have spent decades rigging the economy for the ultra rich while destroying it for everyone else. Democrats are not blameless in this but it's hard to fight against a party that lies about everything all the time when the media only holds you accountable and rarely the other side.

I know that sounds like sour grapes but think about the last several presidential elections. Bush won in 2000 because the press allowed him to lie about pretty much everything while they crucified Gore for things he never actually said. In 2004, the press let the Swiftboat smear campaign against John Kerry go unchecked long enough to give Bush a narrow victory (with a little help from some convenient voting machine "malfunctions" in Ohio).

The press didn't much care to look into those Ohio shenanigans, either. But they sure did love looking into Hillary's emails. And her foundation. And her health. And her past. And everything little thing she said about everything except policy. Trump, on the other hand, well, he was great for ratings so the press showed hours of an empty podium in breathless anticipation of what crazy thing the showman would do that day.

Sure, Obama won in 2008 and 2012 but we all watched the Republican Party lie for 8 years straight about the economy and the Affordable Care Act (and so much more) while they openly worked to sabotage both. We even saw Chuck Todd flat out admit that it wasn't his job to call out Republican lies. The press even allowed Birtherism to go on for years because something something "both sides."

The press even struggled for over two years to call Trump, the most dishonest president in American history by orders of magnitude, a liar because, you know, that's just not a nice thing to do. They're mostly over that now but it's weird how quick they are to pounce on Democrats who are less than honest compared to Republicans. It's almost like one party is held to a different standard.

If you think I'm being oversensitive, Chuck Todd literally just blamed Obama for not uniting the country this past Sunday. As if a black man could bring white nationalists to the table and work out a compromise. 3/5s, perhaps?

The bad news is that all of this sabotage is working. The economy is great. For the rich. The stock market is booming. For the rich. Corporate profits are up. For the rich. Everything is looking pretty darn awesome as long as you're not the the 99%.

The good news is that the rest of us are pissed off enough that we've stopped blaming "both sides" and tuning out. We can thank Donald Trump for that. He's been so singularly awful and Republicans have fallen in line behind him so willingly that the contrast between the two parties is the starkest it's ever been. Even people who prefer the laziness of "both sides do it" are struggling to equate the bottomless corruption and cruelty of Trump's GOP with any iteration of the Democratic Party, much less one lead by Nancy Pelosi with up and comers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The midterms saw a massive upsurge in voters from the left. Over 60 million people voted for the Democrats and that's presidential election levels of engagement. As long as Trump and the GOP continue to motivate the country by being completely horrible (and they will), 2020 will be a rout worse than the midterms.

After that, the younger generations will have developed quite the taste for winning elections. Especially if even a moderately progressive candidate becomes president or Bernie gets within spitting distance of winning the primary (or if he actually goes all the way). Millennials are already the largest voting demographic with Gen Z poised to surpass even them. Boomers, on the other hand, are dwindling as they die from old age and with them goes the power of the right wing that depends on older, whiter, angrier voters. The Millennials and Z are far more diverse and far to the left and Boomers are...not. Millennial and Z women in particular are rejecting the Republican Party by ahistorical margins that, if they maintain, are the end of the GOP for a generation or two.

And that brings us back to the coming violence. Most of the things Republicans broke can be fixed by breaking the GOP. With a working government, we can undo the legislative damage done by Republicans. Even the extremist judges they forced down our throats by unconstitutionally stealing seats from Obama will only last for another few decades before they age out (or are replaced for being corrupt). None of it is permanent.

The only thing keeping the country from running properly is a minority political party dedicated to destroying the process in a mad scramble to hold onto to power. If enough of us vote, they stop being able to throw sand in the gears. It won't be fun and it won't be easy but it can be done. This country has been in the thrall of corrupt oligarchs and politicians before and we broke their power to take America back. We'll do it again.

The part that can't be fixed without decades of violence, however, is the American right wing. This is something the Republican Party has broken beyond all repair. Decades of virulently racist propaganda has stripped white Republican voters of the capacity to think. They have been trained to react with fear and rage. Donald Trump did not seize control of the Republican Party because he was clever or because he was charismatic; he seized control because the base had been reduced to a frantic mob of racist imbeciles and Trump told them the lies they wanted to hear.

An individual white Republican voter can sit down and tie their shoe, drive a car, and do their taxes. But when they vote, they do not vote like someone who can operate heavy machinery. They've been programmed to believe obvious lies and exist in a perpetual state of terror rendering them incapable of rational thought. Fox News, AM Hate Radio, and right wing hate sites are sophisticated propaganda beyond the dreams of the Nazis and Cold War Russia (or Cold War America for that matter).

Millions of Americans believe, quite literally, that hordes of Latinos and blacks are going to break down their door and murder them unless white men keep being elected to the White House. When this doesn't happen, and continues to not happen as the Republican Party contracts into the party of open white nationalism, the rage we already see gushing from the right will feed on itself like we just saw in New Zealand. Over 50 dead in a matter of minutes. That will be nothing compared to what we will see in America, a land filled with so many guns and white nationalists, we have hundreds of militias training to murder thousands.

The domestic terrorism will go on for years. Every move made to crack down on it will further feed the persecution complex that drives the right. That, in turn, will drive them to escalate the violence in the name of "freedom" or "patriotism" or whatever excuse they come up with to justify slaughtering hundreds of people.

There will never be a civil war, although the white terror cells will insist that's what they're fighting. The only way it stops is when the atrocities pile up so high that the right finally snaps out of it and takes responsibility for the carnage they have created. When that happens, there will be no place for white terrorists to hide and they'll wither on the vine. The question then, is what that threshold will be and how long it will take.

Personally, I am not optimistic. We have geared so much of our society towards protecting white Republican voters from the consequences of their actions, it will take a seismic realignment of the country just to even begin to hold them accountable. After that, it will take decades for them to accept even the tiniest iota of responsibility for what they've done much less do something about it. And that's only if we can manage to stop the ongoing propaganda that is driving them insane with fear and rage.

All the while, white terrorists will be cutting a bloody swath through the country even as we struggle to clean up the mess Republicans have left behind.

But in the end, they'll burn themselves out and the country will move forward as it always does. At least three generations will have grown up watching the destructive power of rightwing hate mongering and greed and be repelled by it. The Tree of Liberty will have been watered, not by the blood of tyrants, but the blood of the innocent murdered by a monstrous ideology that will inspire millions to find a better way than rampant hate and greed. Conservatism as we know will be the last victim of white terrorism.

It's not the path to a better tomorrow that I would have chosen, but this is the path Republicans have laid out for us in their insane quest for power at all costs. The choices ahead of us will be difficult but staying the course and not allowing them to drag us down with them is the only way through.

America is broken but anything broken can be fixed and, with a little hard work and faith in humanity, made stronger.

Read the latest for Banter Subscribers:

Bob Cesca: "Bernie Sanders Is The New Third Rail Of American Politics"

The new unspoken rule of Twitter and Facebook is this: mention Bernie at your own peril.

by Bob Cesca

For those of you who’ve never traveled by subway, the third rail on the track carries around 625 volts, powering the engines and making the whole thing go. They used to say Social Security was the metaphorical third rail in American politics. Touch it and die. That might still be the case in some circles, but following a couple decades of the Republican effort to privatize it, threatening to reform, cut or kill Social Security isn’t nearly as dangerous as it used to be….