Violating Godwin
by David Atkins ("thereisnospoon")
Vacations are good for gaining perspective. I've been on the big island in Hawaii for the last week or so, which has done wonders for remembering what's important in life, as well as looking at the big picture rather than the petty immediate fracases that so often define politics.
So yesterday I was blissfully swimming off the green sand beach at South Point and hiking Kilauea Iki instead of watching last night's tea party debate. But when I checked my tweets, news stories and blogs about the event, I was struck by how rapidly the rabid rightwing extremes have taken over the mainstream Republican party. I know it's cliche to talk about this and it's been covered at great length before, but even so it's really stunning.
Last night America was treated to a spectacle of mass cheering for executions, laughing exhortations to allow 30-year-old accident victims to die on the street, the implication that vaccines against cancer-causing viruses are "government injections" harmful to little girls because they might lead to increased sexual activity, and rabid applause for accusing the Chairman of the Fed of treason, a crime which of course carries the death penalty these people so heartily support.
I must say that my reaction to this from out here in terrestrial paradise has been one of motivated anger, yes, but also gut-wrenching fear. At the risk of violating Godwin's law, never before in my 30-year lifetime, not even during the Bush years, have I felt this country was more keenly teetering on the precipice of totalitarianism than it is today. The people on that stage last night, and more especially the people in the audience, have murder on the mind. They have been whipped into a state of near frenzy against their perceived liberal, "freeloader" and "big government" enemies, and the bloodlust is running at a fever pitch. One of the candidates even openly advocated for eliminating social security based on the model adopted by Chilean mass murderer and fascist Augusto Pinochet.
There can be little doubt that if America were in the hands of these people, the country would already be locked in a pseudo-theocratic totalitarian death spiral. That's not the hallucinatory fantasy of a hysterical progressive blogger. That's just reality on its face. If these people manage to gain control of all levers of American power, it could very well mean the end of our nearly 250-year experiment in representative democracy.
There is reason to hope, however: first, most tea partiers are older and whiter than the general population. There is little in the way of a fascist youth movement that often accompanies such national descents into tyranny. In 25 years, most of the people clamoring for the blood of the innocent in that audience will already have shed this mortal coil, replaced with the much browner and much more progressive population they desperately fear.
Second, it is difficult to imagine that most deep blue states would walk willingly arm-in-arm with Rick Perry and friends to that bitter end. More than likely, we would see a rapid embrace of federalism on the part of both parties to let each state make its laws as it sees fit--a situation that may be the ultimate result of our ongoing political civil war, anyway.
Still, the warning signs are apparent about the bloodthirsty totalitarian direction conservatives are moving toward at breakneck speed. One wonders if the traditional media will ever take notice. Maybe they need to take a brief vacation (would America even miss them?) and look back at the situation with the clarity only fresh eyes can provide.
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