Are you ever
confused when Republicans vote for more welfare spending?
Do you wonder why America’s wars always seem to start under Democrats?
During the aftermath of the Presidential election did it anger you that long-serving Republicans refused to take President Trump’s complaints about the election seriously?
Did their final betrayal of him hit you like a punch to the solar plexus, knocking all the wind out of your chest?
I can honestly say none of this surprised me at all. I know, bully for me, right?
Well, no, actually. It makes me sad to have been right for all these years.
I’ve seen
the pantomime in D.C. as both sides hand off control to each other every few
years but always ‘govern’ with the same over-riding purpose; to build an
unassailable wall of power between the political elite and the people they
rule.
This is true because there is no divide between the two parties in D.C. The GOP and the DNC are, in the great words of libertarian commentator Tom Woods, “Two wings of the same bird of prey.”
And one of the very best things that has come about from this election cycle, where clear and pervasive voter fraud occurred, is that so many more people have come to that same conclusion.
If you are one of them, believe me, it gets easier to accept every day.
I hear from
well-meaning, thoughtful conservatives all the time. They are good, decent
people and they are regularly so disappointed by the Republicans who campaign
on the correct rhetoric but get into office and give into the pork spending,
the assaults on our culture and never stand up to the Democrats’ insane ravings
about race and inequality.
It’s because they are part of The Club folks…
..and The Club exists for their benefit, not yours.
Team Red and Team Blue are constructs. They are false opposites. Yes, there are members who are more aligned with one philosophy than the other. AOC is definitely a crazy commie and Rand Paul a mostly principled libertarian, but they aren’t the party leadership.
Well, in AOC’s case, not yet.
The rank-and-file Republicans are either too weak, too compromised or just plain in it for themselves to do anything but put up token resistance on the Road To Serfdom described by F.A. Hayek more than seventy years ago.
The
leadership, however, of both parties are perfectly aligned and only pretend to
fight in public. This is why Mitch McConnell makes the “mistakes” he makes.
In fact, it’s why Mitch McConnell is still in a leadership position in the GOP, to ensure that no major policy program is curtailed.
And we’ve known this implicitly for years. The GOP was the false and controlled opposition to the Democrats who set the agenda the people who stand behind them wanted them to set.
In the
post-COVID world, we can see their plan very clearly and it is a frightening
one.
The slow realization that we don’t really control Washington lay dormant until awakened by Ron Paul back in 2008. It led to the Trump revolution in 2016.
A lot of people understood that there was something terribly wrong in Washington but, like Trump, didn’t realize just how bad things were.
There was a certain naivete in both the Bernie Bros on the left and the MAGA Dudes on the right. They both yearned for an America that gave them a fair shake, that didn’t pile burdens and guilt on them for being white or middle class or, worse, heterosexual.
I’ve talked to plenty of liberals who aren’t godless, gun-hating tyrants. They are just as appalled by what’s happening as the conservatives are.
Both groups believed that the system of America still, at its core, worked in their favor. That if they just picked a champion and made their voices loud enough the pols in D.C. would have to listen to them.
The Bernie Bros were disenfranchised in 2016 and, likely, in 2020 as well. And the MAGA Dudes just learned the same lesson on a much grander scale.
And that was my fervent hope for the 2020 election. Because The Club in D.C. told us how they were going to steal the election. They told us Trump would be ‘fumigated’ from the White House, in the words of Nancy Pelosi.
The only way to beat that would be a landslide of such immense proportions that it would force the cheating out into the open, exposing the lies.
That’s exactly what happened. Anyone with any shred of intellectual integrity or a basic understanding of math knows this. And yet, they stole the election anyway.
And this, to me, has created the perfect moment of transition for America.
Because this has now collapsed the false dyad of Red vs. Blue in the minds of millions. A country that has never been more divided is also now strangely united in their contempt for not only our government but also the media which openly supports its most brazen lies.
There are still plenty of people on the left side of the political spectrum who think that their “winning” this election will bring them everything they ever wanted.
They think, if the screeching on Twitter is to be believed, that a complete repudiation of Trumpism will usher in a new golden age of enlightened embracing of trannies, and the final dispersal of the vestiges of community and family in America.
And in the short run they may be completely right.
By the same token, however, the collapse of Red vs. Blue means the wholesale rejection of the GOP by tens of millions of Trump supporters. That destroys the myth they are the only viable opposition to the insanity of the Democrats.
Seventy-five million Trump voters were just cured of their Stockholm Syndrome to their GOP captors.
This was a necessary illusion which needed to be dispelled and could only be torn down with the GOP’s betrayal of Trump when the country’s future was on the line.
It paves the way for a new American political landscape, one bereft of the false hope of a GOP savior at the next election. The GOP only ever acted as the relief valve for the anguish and frustration of two generations of nominally conservative Americans to pour their money into and in doing so feed The Club even more power.
Trump brought the party Hispanics and Black people in record numbers. He appealed to their better angels and desire for an honest job and a stable community to raise their families in.
The Democrats will hold a sham impeachment trial with the Republicans’ consent to reinforce their dominance over the people — the Deplorables, MAGA Dudes and Bernie Bros who made the mistake of thinking they had hope of getting off their reservation.
For better or worse Trump blew apart the lie that Republicans stood for freedom and the Democrats for socialism. They both just believe in power, theirs.
Now that Red Vs. Blue has collapsed it’s revealed the far more sinister and dangerous reality that America is now the land of Us vs. Them.
And that is a fight Politics-As-Usual cannot settle.
https://tomluongo.me/2021/02/