Robert Kagan has written a powerful account of what I’ve been saying for years: Republicans are an organized party for the promotion of indecency.
Kagan’s article called “We have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it?” ought to be required reading for everyone who wants to understand the danger we are in as the next election approaches.
Kagan explains clearly the history I discussed in Asshole Nation and Scum America—that there has been a power-hungry, selfish, anti-Federalist faction that has tried to use any means to destroy American democracy. From the very beginning of the American experiment, the wealthy and the powerful have been using their privilege and pandering to the worst elements in human nature to try to take power away from the people and return it to themselves.
Indeed, in the beginning, the equality preached by the Declaration of Independence and established by the Constitution was merely an aspiration. The slaveholding aristocracy of the South rigged the system for their benefit and milked it until decent people just couldn’t stand it any more. So then they tried to secede and had to be beaten into submission.
But even that didn’t stop the indecent minority. They quickly figured out how to rig the new system. For another hundred years, they ran roughshod over equality with Jim Crow, segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and lynchings. Being the indecent monsters they were, they were happy with their ability to harm minorities.
Then came the fifties and sixties. The majority finally decided again that the indecency of the white racist minority could no longer be tolerated. The Supreme Court, populated at that time by relative decent, intelligent, and rational justices, could not deny the justice of the many causes that challenged the indecent minority, and had to admit that the logical consequences of the Constitution’s principles demanded equal right and decent treatment for all Americans. The laws began to restrict the ability of the indecent minority to treat others indecently.
That’s when the rich and powerful launched a co-ordinated and sustained attack to undermine the Constitution. They stood up think tanks to produce fake rationales for indecency. They created a “legal” organization to produce fake jurisprudence arguing for indecency and to inject fake judges into the nation’s judiciary to rule in favor of the fake arguments. Six of these fake judges now sit on the Supreme Court. They are doing everything they can to undercut the Constitution before the next election in the hope that the indecent minority will get away with more violence against decent voters and politicians.
As Kagan points out, the indecent minority no longer even try to pretend that they support the Constitution. The ignorant majority of the Republican hordes don’t see any conflict between their viciousness and the Constitution. Being profoundly ignorant, they are not disturbed by hypocrisy or self-contradiction. They simply think that anything they want—no matter how vile—is Constitutional.
But now the indecent “intelligentsia”—those who were tasked forty years ago with creating anti-Constitutional arguments that appeared Constitutional—have given up the pretense. Here is Kagan’s account of the “ideas” of Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute, a “conservative” think tank, who has declared that the founders’ legacy is at a dead end:
According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”
They don’t even want to be decent. They don’t even care to appear decent any long.
This is the end of the line. Decent America just has to stand up and beat these bastards. We must trounce them at the polls, replace their fake Supreme Court, undo all the damage it has done since Obama was elected, and sweep the country with laws that prevent the indecent minority for having their will.
Here is how Kagan finishes his piece:
If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.
Only the people have the power to stop this intolerable eruption of indecency from destroying everything good and noble in America.
Let’s just get out in November and terminate the political power of these monsters.
We are our own best hope.