Walking back to Pharaoh

We, as a People, now deny the promised land. Many have climbed the mountain and seen our more perfect union. But today, a balance has turned to walk back towards Pharaoh by electing Donald Trump. In Exodus, the time in the wilderness was to burn the slavery to Pharaoh out of the people, to instill agency and responsibility over mere servitude and obedience to entitled human masters so as to enter the Promised Land. Our American Experiment, even with its clear historic failures, began with such a hope to cast off kings with divine rights and begin a journey to govern ourselves by respecting the dignity of all while we all together pursue happiness in the perfection of our union. But, our experiment, from its inception, holds a tragic flaw of near-genetic tenacity that constantly threatens to crack our apparatus and explode to end our hopeful project.

In the fight for independence, idealists who truly hoped for a human revolution made book with those who prospered by enslaving others to throw off a king. Those who strove to instill freedom and self-determination aligned themselves with landowners who sought a government structured on the domination of others for profit to win a war against an empire. In short, those who dreamed of democracy allied with fascists in a belief that freedom would prevail. So our country has a tension between these poles, which has driven the turbulence of our history and hounds us to this very day. Oppressing, then relenting to a point only to oppress from a new position then relent again. Denying then expanding the franchise in waves. Restricting then expanding rights by race, gender and age. Two steps forward, one back, but forward.

The Second End of Reconstruction Era

We have only seen two retrogrades for this progress in our history. The first was with the murderous end of Reconstruction, when the black community was forced from the public sphere into Jim Crow subjugation through lynching and riot, then legislation and national acceptance. A surrender by Congress to win a presidential election unleashed the southern white violence and oppression which built the “separate but equal” sham legal structure subsequently blessed by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Today, our loses flow first from a Supreme Court that eroded protections for rights before stripping them away outright. Steal a presidential election in 2000. Peck away at the defenses of civil rights and voting just recovered only decades before. Decide corporations can give limitless amounts of unregulated money towards elections. This cleared the path to Dobbs, a decision forcing women to be pregnant against their will in service of state policy. Gay marriage, contraception, equal pay, there are a plethora of rights on the auction block to be sold off to Privilege for its benefit. The aim is, ultimately, to create a compliant, supplicant, workforce, under-resourced and ill-equipped to fight against it.

This Supreme Court strategy wad only possible because the Republican Party, from Nixon onward, chose to harvest racism, sexism and authoritarian personalities to win elections. They gathered up everything on the wrong side of our founders’ initial ledger and fused it into a ball of hateful energy that now drives Trump and the MAGA movement. This need for domination has always been with us. From the KKK through to Father Coughlin and America First, onto John Birch to today. The difference in this era is the careful husbandry of this hate for decades. How it has been given sun and fertilized in some states while others are ignored. How its cultivation has been parsed, allocated into congressional and legislative districts by Republicans to elect more Republicans against the actual majority in a state. And now here we are, in second retrograde, thanks to the machinations of the Republican Party harnessing the lesser devils of our nature.

And this retrograde may well be as horrific as the end of reconstruction was. Our constitutional system made such injustice possible once and there is no reason to think such a change cannot happen again. Just as the Nazis looked at our Jim Crow system for their Nuremberg Laws, we can restore this terrible past to ourselves. This time women, LGBTQ, recent immigrants, as well as the traditional target of everyone not white are in the crosshairs of domination now. Later, who knows? Could be Mormons or Methodists. Certainly any who cares about workers more than the state. It is hard to stop oppressing when it has been successful and this hate will roil through our country.

Next year’s Senate will portend our future

What is the marker for our future? The Senate in 2025 is. If the Republicans capitulate to the entire hellscape of Trump’s cabinet nominees, we will face an arctic winter solstice for our democracy, just as southern blacks coped after the 1877 compromise with Congress, which traded their civil rights for one-term of Rutherford B. Hayes.

If the Senate cannot resists at all this obvious attempt to extinguish our democracy by corrupting and destroying the government built to promote our general welfare and secure blessings of liberty, we will instead all face a brutal, thuggish, vindictive kleptocracy hell bent on expansion and domination. Wrapped in a flag and holding a cross, we will be governed by Fascism.