Pacific Letters

Dear American,

A novice in twentieth century history swiftly comes to understand the shared phenotypes of America’s modern right and fascism, and its ready embrace by our Christian zealots. Father Tizo was both a Nazi and a Catholic priest, after all. Franco, Mussolini, and even Hitler to a degree, benefitted from the stultifying effects of religious superstition. There is no human equation that can balance religious fervor with morality. If anything, the inverse appears true. For religious fanatics – America’s Christian right – the amenities of modern life have turned their morality into a periscopic inquisition. They only see a debauched and licentious people on what they perceive as the ‘left,’ a term that now must encompass all sciences, universities, functioning institutions, and successful corporations who happen to acknowledge things like racism or climate change. The periscope remains trained at these far targets, incapable of reviewing their own acts of spite, indolence, stupidity. Self-reflection is anathema to their project, as this sort of mindfulness tends to humanize others as much as promote a healthier psychology. The internet is a force multiplier, replete with its homemade experts in any field: anti-science, stupidity, politics, conspiracy – always conspiracy. This leads to a voting block that needs no political platform other than demagoguery. Why raise one man’s wages when you can direct him to the evil people who have stolen his wages, increased the cost of his foodstuffs, and eliminated his standing in the world. Modern media – maleficent algorithms – greatly exacerbates by funneling the fascism-curious to an endless feed of nativist, stupid, revanchist, and always misogynistic materials. If a person subsists long enough on this supply, they become dopesick without the hate. The ire becomes both the fuel and the flame. Everyone loses.

 Depravity is multiplied by a pride in wickedness, producing a surfeit of voters eager to feed upon a daily trough of venalities by their leaders. One need not labor over the behavior of these people to see the recurrent themes. There’s always a projection of one’s innermost desires on the political opponent. Thus, democrats want to ‘force’ us to accept their cultural views on race, sexuality, etc. They want to suppress ‘free speech,’ make our kids queer, steal our elections, oppress us with the deep state. It takes no Orwell to decipher this type of language. There are actions to match. Republicans are in the process of forcing a Christo-ethnic culture on us. They have infected the courts and institutions with reactionary cultists, many of whom are overtly racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic. Roe is gone. The Civil Rights Act is eviscerated and continues to be redacted by a bunch of right-wing men (and some women) with quixotic views and no real-world experience on any of the issues of civil liberties they so despise. There exists a generation of lawyers who slopped up a revisionist view of American jurisprudence that elides the legacy of slavery and demonizes any decision, no matter how well-founded, issued by a previous Supreme Court that wasn’t full of conservatives. The unwillingness to grapple with the racial oppression of others is racism. But almost half the public countenances this new benightedness. Their sundering of half a century of precedent is scarcely concealed by the frequency of non-political opinions they must write, which they conveniently intersperse between these regressive fiats.

This is the cultural dictatorship they seek. They have it underway and are desperate to finish the project. The only way a minority project like this succeeds is through propaganda and hate speech. Thus, democrats are the cultural whackos. Democrats are suppressing votes. The republicans would never, say, make it harder for black people to vote. They wouldn’t disenfranchise millions of Americans in sinister fashion. After all, it’s hard being a white person in this country. Mass incarceration uniquely affects the MAGA voter, does it not? This is the oppression they’re talking about, right? Of course not.

And when they talk about the deep state, they must be talking about the government that knew very well Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, his treasonous violation of the emoluments clause, his prostituting of American power to dictators, and then did absolutely nothing about it. Another example: the deep state would never drop news about a democratic presidential candidate’s mishandling of emails right before an election knowing full well the danger of the republican candidate. Then Hillary Clinton loses an election. The deep state has contorted its constitutional duties into an indecipherable polyhedra.  We know this because the deep state is against MAGA, right? An Assistant United States Attorney right-wing slavering about President Biden’s memory issues - “an elderly man with a poor memory” - just so happens at a time when he’s running against a convicted felon, rapist and traitor who has worse memory issues and dementia. But the deep state is against MAGA, right? The previous decade has done nothing if not show just how sycophantic these agents are to republicans.

Free speech objections by these fascists are even more laughable. The governor of Florida, a smallminded pissant with no principles other than self-promotion, seems to think the First Amendment allows the state to suppress speech, but individuals in their own homes or workplaces can’t tell others to not say ‘faggot.’ The First Amendment very clearly stands for the opposite, that the governor and the likeminded scum from his party have no say whatever on what a private person chooses to read, write, or say in a public or private place. They seem to view free speech as the capacity to say the most obnoxious things they want without repercussion, but also be allowed to suppress fact-based speech – the most important kind – about climate change or the fact that homosexuals exist. No such asterisk exists in Amendment One. If you’re a vulgar prick in your public or private postings and conversations, you can be treated as such. Sorry if the n-word gets you cancelled. There is a clear way for them to cancel climate-change speech: prove the science wrong. And as ‘originalists,’ the fanatics of the Supreme Court could remind some republicans what cancellation used to look like: execution.

Trump encapsulates this movement so well because he can only exist in momentary fashion, an insect constantly rebelling against negative stimuli. He has no memory – not only of the collective liberties and freedoms associated with common citizenship and the slow but enumerable achievements of this nation – but also of his own pathetic conduct. Like a self-ejaculatory synapse, he fires on repeat, over and over. This is why he exhausts humans who are basically decent, and why he will never win the popular vote. He is a schizophrenic shouting at neon lights, emitting a transmission that only the basest Americans receive. Me! Me! And some more of Me! Social media has primed the response: “He’s just like me. He understands that everything that happens on earth is about me!” And so, every personal failure is someone else’s plot against him.

Unfortunately for the republic, there are many more of these individuals than one would hope. Roughly forty percent of the nation, in fact. And they are ready for the next outrage. And they are ready to receive it by short video, text, screeching news anchor or amphibious meme. Hatred, bigotry, ignorance, these are traits society is meant to overcome. But modern times has vaunted these atavisms to the point of policy. Like Stalin’s repudiation of objective truth, the MAGA mind will arrive at a desired terminal point and then back-fill the facts. What Trump has learned, likely from Putin, is that if you do this at breakneck speed, the stink of your own bullshit never seems to catch up, even if all thinking folks are left vomiting in the miasma.

Now would be the appropriate psychological interlude. When you don’t have a political platform outside of total surrender to a monocrat, a fuehrer or autarch, then you’ve entered a totalitarian plane from which there is no escape. This is the state of the republican party. There cannot be a single dissenting voice against their leader because that is the official party platform. And every republican leader who is kicked out only further proves how right the leader is, because there are other stalwarts who remain but are willing to efface and demolish their personhood to a new type of savior, the democratic antichrist. If there was any other policy, it would invite a conversation about how best to achieve it, and the concept of autocracy would eventually erode. But because the policy is simply the political objective of giving absolute power to perhaps the least capable, intelligent, or competent human ever to run for political office, the disputations can’t arise. If you object to Trump, you’re out. The problem for the nation is that the natural extension of the republican-made culture wars is this existential chasm in half the nation who has been lied to, over and over again, about a political enemy that never existed, and nothing has ever been done about it. There has been no effective republican policy that helps its voters other than the dehumanization and defeat of their chosen enemy. The natural result… is fascism.

Fascism did the same. There is little the republican party is doing that is not so tired, predicted by novel after novel, echoed in the ugliest wells of history, for which we cannot find a laughable example in all the worst political movements of the prior century. 1984 is an exegesis on the mutilation of language in service of autocracy. The republicans have set upon, full sail, the censorship of books and the elimination of unwelcome words. Outlawing the phrase “climate change” for the purpose of battling the human phenomenon of scientific inquiry and planning is as risible as eliminating the word “death” from English as a way of achieving immortality. Wish thinking is religiosity. And if one has a deep-seated desire, with little moral compass for the search, then the vessel one chooses for the hunt ceases to matter. If Trump promises an elimination of the separation of church and state, then the fact that you truly believe yourself pure as white – color choice not coincidence here – allows you to vote for someone who’s sins are so numerous, it would make a Nazi youth blush (i.e. Pope Benedict). And so one of the least surprising features of this new American right is the contemptible hypocrisy of the professed values of its voters and its elected officials.

Political purges were key to the rise of the worst dictators. The night of long knives, the show trials and black mariahs. Without that bloodshed, Trump has purged the entire GOP. He and his cronies replaced the methodology of torture with that of public humiliations and the strangely underreported fear of real political violence. Indeed, almost every republican who once said a bad word about Trump later recanted, confessing privately like a repentant child molester that they had no other choice. In the case of the molester, the urge was irrepressible. In the case of the republican, the fear was too great (in other words, they were too craven and weak). It seems obvious that it’s not very hard to stand up to a bully like Trump, which is likely why roughly 66% of Americans find him revolting. He is, after all, fat, unattractive, stupid, narcissistic, splenetic, physically invalid and incapable of anything that would make him an competitive candidate for any job on earth. As an aside, it is a topic worth serious social research: is there a job the average person would feel comfortable hiring this man to task?

Then why are you considering him as your next president?