Life in the Fast Lane

“She’d say, ‘Faster, faster…The lights are turning red.’” The Eagles, Life in the Fast Lane

“There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience

Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a dictatorship.

· Trump has refused to comply with congressional subpoenas.

· Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate have packed federal courts at all levels with conservative judges who, in many cases, were deemed unfit. Their sole qualification is that they are loyal to Trump and the Republican agenda.

· Trump, through signing statements, has rejected congressional oversight of billions of dollars of coronavirus emergency spending.

· Trump has fired IG inspectors and whistleblowers.

· No compliance with subpoenas, no congressional oversight, no inspector generals, and no remedy in the courts. Trump has destroyed political and constitutional safeguards and unilaterally consolidated power into his own hands. Republicans in the House and Senate either cheer or are silent. With a few exceptions in the House, Democrats in both chambers offer weakly murmured objections. Most of them don’t know where Sanders keeps the pitchforks, or what to do with one if they did find them.

· Trump has an adoring fanbase who respond enthusiastically to calls for violence. In their desire for the psychological certainty they imagine a flag-waving, white-dominated America will bring them, Trump’s base simply does not recognize that Trump and the Republicans have made their economic lives more precarious. Further, Trump’s inaction and Dunning–Kruger effect lies regarding the coronavirus pandemic, faithfully amplified by the Fox Mendacious Network, directly threatens their physical lives. The cognitive dissonance between Trump’s promises and their lived reality must bifurcate their frontal lobes, but Trump hates who they hate and that’s good enough for them. But their economic desperation may finally become too great for them to ignore, and their reaction will then be uncontrollable. This is an opportune context to remember that in many states gun stores remain open as “essential businesses” during the “safe at home” shutdowns.

· The Senate is dominated by Republicans who are Ayn Rand and Revelation-obsessed fundamentalists. But they are more fearful of Trump and the wrath of his base than they are of being found “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” so they do Trump’s bidding. Republicans should experience their own bout of cognitive dissonance as they support Trump’s ill-considered actions (except for tax cuts, of course), but the Remain in Power Categorical Imperative has congealed their brains into shapeless jelly. This enables them to quickly wrap their brains around Trump’s non sequiturs as if they were words of wisdom handed down from Mount Sinai.

· The Republican voter suppression operation is working in overdrive mode, most recently in Wisconsin, where voters risked their lives during the coronavirus pandemic to vote for a Democratic Party primary candidate and (more importantly) a state Supreme Court judge To remain in power, Republicans must deny the vote to as many non-white people as possible, so they are working flat out to legislate disenfranchisement at the state level and to capture state court seats.

· Trump and the Republicans in the Senate have filled the Cabinet with wealthy lobbyists who pursue an agenda of enriching themselves and corporations.

· The elimination of health, safety, and environmental rules increases corporate profitability.

· In the reverse of trickle-down economics (it’s always been in reverse), tax breaks funnel money upward to Trump’s corporate supporters. The wealthy and the C-suite of corporations are happy. Their power and money will be used as a battle axe during the 2020 political campaign.

· Most of the coronavirus emergency economic relief package flows to corporations with little or no accountability.

· FEMA is seizing PPE and ventilators purchased by states and other countries, then doling them out after electorally “at risk” Republicans request them for their states.

· Another Republican operative formed a company to sell PPE and ventilators. When asked by a reporter where he obtained his supplies, he said, “I know people.”

· Is FEMA seizing supplies so that well-connected Republicans can sell them at price gouging profits?

· One misstep: Trump’s ham-handedness with regard to the military, evidenced most recently when the Acting Secretary of the Navy summarily dismissed the captain of an aircraft carrier seeking to protect his crew from an outbreak of COVID-19, will reinforce the idea that the military swears allegiance to the Constitution, not the president. Military officers are unlikely to support an aggressive move by Trump against the citizens of the U.S. I write “unlikely” with some trepidation. A few changes in senior military leadership could fracture loyalties, with some leaders opposing Trump and some supporting him. It’s happened elsewhere, and yes, it could happen here.

· One wild card: No one knows how the coronavirus pandemic will play out. Will it debilitate most of the population? Will the economic suffering caused by a prolonged national shutdown weaken Trump’s support among workers (remember, the middle class are workers)? Will it cause a revolt against Trump and the Republican Party? Will it cause a revolt against the whole rotten core of government — both political parties and the judiciary?

· A second wild card: Will the economic suffering caused by the coronavirus lead to a revolt against capitalism? Capitalism, in many respects, is responsible for the both the pandemic and the near-absolute failure of governments to adequately respond. Globalism allowed the highly infectious virus to quickly spread to virtually every nation on earth. The endless and ruthless push for profits led to the creation of vulnerable global supply chains for medicines and other supplies. Governments and hospitals, determined to minimize costs, refused to stockpile supplies for emergencies. In the U.S., an insistence on private insurance meant that segments of the population couldn’t afford it, so they were in poor health prior to the pandemic; consequently, they have a higher percentage of catastrophic COVID-19 infection outcomes. “Safe at home” policies mean that jobs and businesses have vanished. Millions of people suddenly no longer have private health insurance, but without an income, they can’t afford to purchase it through the ACA exchanges. Decades of wage suppression by corporations and governments mean that most Americans don’t have emergency funds to last two weeks, much less several months. People who still have jobs work without adequate personal protection, risking infection for themselves and others. Major corporations have engaged in price gouging. Will people revolt against capitalism?

Aside from the two wild cards, what are we left with? Electorally, Biden, a man long past his prime, with #MeToo issues most Democrats ignore, and who has been known to lie and plagiarize almost as regularly, if not as spectacularly, as Trump. Biden is either senile or deluded (or both) when he asserts that he can restore collegiality to Congress; McConnell will ignore him just as he ignored Obama. Biden’s notion of a good time is to restore the nation “back to” the period before Trump, which essentially means enthroning the economic and social conditions of rising inequality and environmental devastation.

But he is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. Primary voters chose him. Or perhaps not: the election results in several states varied wildly from exit polls, which should have prompted recounts, but none were forthcoming. The DNC, of course, didn’t want recounts, but Sanders also failed asked for them.

The left considers Biden wholly unacceptable, but we are just talking — shouting — among ourselves. A national strike. Mass mobilization. A third-party bid. A refusal to vote.

No one is listening to us.

It is in the person of Joe Biden that we must find emergency action to preserve the tattered remnants of our democratic republic. We must use Biden to dislodge Trump. It’s not quite a last-ditch effort — taking to the streets is that — but it is an act of desperation, because Biden is qualified to be president only because Trump is the most recent performance standard. We must oust Trump while it’s still possible to do so (at least on paper, as the saying goes).

And so. A less-than-heroic old white man who is not even aware of what’s going on, who couldn’t inspire a cat to eat a mouse. He has no ideas, no policies, and even if Sanders wedges his ideas into the Democratic Party platform, Biden has no intention of implementing any of them.

Unless there is some precipitating event, some great revulsion arising from the misery and uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, some act by Trump that causes Americans to become “ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm,” we must fight fascism by electing a doddering old fool to the office of the President of the United States.

Once the election is over, though, Democrats must choose to join the Republican Party (which, through voter disenfranchisement, has a few years of life left in it, but it’s demographically aging into irrelevance) or join a true left party. Because we must destroy the Democratic Party, with its deceptions and false hopes.

The lights are turning red. We must step on the gas hard.