A CALL FOR SUCCESSION IS A DEMONSTRATION OF FEAR

This is a follow up to the earlier post on the real red/blue difference being urban/rural, not state vs. state.

Yesterday, President’s Day of all days, Marjorie Traitor Goon, shill for far-right conspiracy theories, featured speaker at white-nationalist/white supremacist/pro-Nazi rallies, supporter of political violence, and all-around complete nutjub, renewed her call for secession.

To wit, she tweeted:

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

There is one thing to look at here that doesn’t usually get a lot of thought: the sexualization of her complaint: “From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats...”

Fellatio is commonly considered by those who study the topic to be a dominant/submissive sex act, whether performed by women on men or men on men. And one part of the act that is completely dominant is the degree of penetration. The act can be mutual, with the performer doing only that which is comfortable to them - in which case it is primarily a sexual act - or it can get progressively further into dom/sub with the dominant forcing the penetration on the submissive, regardless of the submissive’s reaction. At that point it’s an act of power, not sex.

And that is why “shoved down our throat” has the connotations it does in a political context. It’s an admission by the person saying it that they are afraid they are the submisive, submitting to the dominant. That’s why the term is used as commonly as it is by right wingers in speeches.

While the temptation of many is to cast Ms. Goon as a leading character in America’s political freak show and then ignore her and dismiss her as an outcast, fringe, deranged figure about whom the less said the better, this is not a good idea.

Ms. Goon usually speaks from a stream of consciousness. She puts into public words that others keep private, if they say them aloud at all. If she is saying it, she is most definitely not the only one thinking it - whatever “it” may be.

A year ago, she was an oddity who many could agree needed removal from her committee assignments if not expulsion from Congress. Now, however, she is not just a member of Congress, not just a member of its Committee on Homeland Security and the House Oversight Committee, both places from which she can “make waves” with her public statements - she is now a confidante of Kevin McCarthy. “Mr Speaker” (for now) claims he has “forged an ironclad bond” with Ms. Goon. She really has taken on an outsize role, being confirmed by McCarthy himself as a “close advisor” She supported him during the 15 ballots it took for him to be confirmed as Speaker (for now) has in return he has lavished praise on her, bringing her from the fringe to what passes for the Republican “mainstream” - and she has done this without shedding her prior extremist views, as most people have done in moving from irrelevance to relevance. In fact, she has achieved this BECAUSE of her extremist views.

Thus, we know that she is not alone in her views, but is rather giving voice to widespread and growing sentiment in the 2023 Republican Party, which is not the Republican Party anyone has ever dealt with, even at the height of McCarthyism 70 years ago.

A poll last year revealed that, among Republicans in the South, support for secession was 66 percent in June 2021. That Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll found growing support for secession among every group on the Right over the months following the January 6, 2021 insurrection/attempted coup.

As their state convention last summer, Texas Republicans by an overwhelming majority approved a platform calling on the state legislature to authorize a referendum on secession from the United States. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Rush Limbaugh, at the time perhaps the most dominant figure on the Right, said, “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?’”

Limbaugh went on to point out that “a lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.”

Twenty-nine years of Faux Snooze propaganda, which a Fox News producer who was among those who actively looked down on the Fox audience told Briant Stelter in 2019 was so powerful he felt himself being “brainwashed” when he worked on “Fox & Friends,” the morning talk show also known as Three Dolts On A Divan. If it can affect a guy who knows the truth of what all the bullshit is about, it’s mainlining this shit to the prefrontal cortex of the ill-educated lumpenproletariat that is the Fox Audience.

Heather Cox Richardson, who studies the phenomenon of Civil War secession, has pointed out repeatedly that secession finally came about in 1861 as an admission of failure and political weakness.

In the decade before the Civil War, the enslavers were on the offensive politically. They pushed for and got the Compromise of 1850, which declared a new policy that the issue should be determined by a majority of the citizens in new states to be formed from the western territories, and seeing passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as the “proof” to the South that the northern states would allow that; passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act formally declaring “majority rule” on the subject of slavery to be the ruling ethos in forming states from that territory - which led directly to the “civil war before the Civil War” in “bleeding Kansas;” and finally the Dred Scott Decision that declared enslaved Africans could never be citizens of the United States, a supposed “deathblow” to Abolitionism.

All this action pushed an equal and opposite reaction, in the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, forged to fight the expansion of Enslavement beyond the territories of the South where it already existed. When the party nominated Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the Democratic Party fell apart, divided between Northern and Southern Democrats who nominated different presidential candidates, which led to Lincoln winning a plurality and becoming president, the Enslavers saw this as the “aggression” against them by the North they had been convinced would happen ever since the Constitutional convention of 1787. The result was that when the enslavers saw they did not have the power to enforce their ideas across the entire country, they withdrew from the fight by forming a separate country. It was an admission of weakness, not the strength they thought they were projecting.

Civil War–like secession isn’t going to happen in the contemporary United States, at least not anytime in the immediately-foreseeable future.

But all of the emotions attached to a desire for secession: seething resentment, existential fear, an unforgiving spirit, contempt and hatred for those who disagree with you, are present. They are stoked by the bullshit of Faux Snooze and the public rhetoric employed from Ms. Goon and the rest of the feral adolescents now in control of the MAGA Republican Party - a party that is nothing like its ancestral forebear.

This language is leading to further destruction of out political culture and is already leading to political violence which will only grow stronger.

We won’t be seeing a wave of Republican lawmakers or current and potential presidential candidates to get on the secession bandwagon. That is still too extreme even for Trump, at least for now.

But when Ms. Goon put out her tweet yesterday, the only “name” Republicans who called her out as a traitor were Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Liz Cheney. Even Mitt Romney and Larry Hogan, who have shown some integrity on this, were fairly muted in their responses; they are trying to ignore and thereby dismiss her, in hopes she will soon disappear. Most Republicans only offer gentle rebukes, publicly ignoring her and changing the topic, jumping to Whataboutism to try to redirect attention to Democrats. The truth is, they are as afraid of their base as their base is afraid of the majority of Americans. And by deciding not to decide, they make a decision to get what they do not want - the growth of this political kudzu.

What we learned during the past seven years of the Trump era is that a party led by cowards - some craven, some cynical, some true believers, but all afraid to speak out - end up normalizing the transgressive, unethical, and moronic. And there is nothing more trasgressive, unethical or moronic than secession.

As I pointed out in my previous post, casting this divide as being between Red States and Blue

States allows the enemies of democracy to cast the fight they want in terms of a “culture war,” rather than as a socio-economic struggle for national inclusion. If Rural America got what they need - the tools to join the 21st century and participate in the prosperity that would come from that - the authoritarians and anti-democrats would lose their power base. Just as the Southern enslaves of 160 years ago saw the admission of the western states as “free” rather than “slave” as the end of their power and an existential threat to their continued existence, so do today’s anti-democrats know that including Rural America in to modern prosperity and opportunity would end their politics of resentment that sees extended democracy as a threat to “values” that really aren’t very valuable

Trump committed a horrifying act at the end of his presidency, attempting a coup and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. We saw in the 137 Republicans who voted the night of January 6, after the insurrection had overrun the capitol, tht the majority of GOP officeholders now tolerated his threat in a way that wouldn’t have happened at the outset of his presidency. It took time for the corruption to fully take hold, for the lawmakers and the Conservative Entertainment Complex to fall completely in line. Butin the end, they did, out of fear - fear of losing what power they had. Trump may be losing his grip on the party, but Trumpism, the ideology of fear that an expansion of equality and opportunity will lead to the loss of power illegitimately held in the first place, remains.

MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Traitor Goon are adding calls for secession to their lies about the 2020 presidential election being stolen out of fear. They realize they were the losers on January 30, when their catcalls and disrespectful behavior at the State of the Union didn’t gain them more followers, but rather resulted in them being seen and called out by the majority of the country as the ignorant buffoons and fools that they are. They are acting from the same kind of weakness that was on display in 1861. More incendiary, more treacherous claims will follow.

Greene and McCarthy - one crazy, one cowardly - represent the two main factions of the modern-day GOP. A party that allows seditionists and secessionists public power without condemnation is morally and politically bankrupt and therefor extremely dangerous.

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