[The 2024 election] is the last stand of the nationalist “Christian” white right, as their support is eroding in absolute and relative terms, and of all those who believe that white supremacy across all U.S. institutions needs to be protected, even at the cost of giving up on democracy.
—Herbert Kitschelt, quoted by Thomas B. Edsall in “This Is Going to Be the Most Important Election Since 1860,” New York Times, September 27, 2023.
In America, the Republican party has departed the reality station.
As a group, “conservatives” always lived in an alternate dimension. Since the creation of modern “conservative movement” in the 1950s, its adherents have always lived with the delusion of a past golden age of prosperity, virtue, and simple-minded “patriotism” that was slipping away from them. In their “minds,” it was an age of white privilege, of religious conformity, of male domination. It was an age free of government regulation, an age in which individuals could waste resources and energy, pollute and despoil, and extract profit from workers without fearing any consequences. It was “conservative” heaven.
Until late in the twentieth century, the Republican delusion stayed fairly close to the reality station. It stayed close enough to convince many reality-based citizens that the delusion could become reality if only Americans would elect leaders who would cut taxes to nearly nothing, gut government regulations, and run the federal budget like a “conservative” (male) would run his family’s finances. Sure, it was simple-minded and delusional, but it had enough verisimilitude to seduce large numbers of uncritical Americans that there was something desirable in it.
Republicans started to depart the station when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. That ignited the racist and white supremacist element of the “conservative” attitude. By the 2010 midterm election, Republicans had already stood up the Tea Party faction, which still tried to pretend that their frantic animosity was about “conservative principles” rather than their racist resentment that a black man could ever be president “over” them.
By the 2012 election, the Republican establishment had to beat back the racist Tea Party element to nominate Mitt Romney, a pretty good symbol of the old-fashioned Republican delusion. Romney was needed at that time because the party was still trying to stay close to the reality station. But Romney failed to resonate with the then rising racist strain. This combined with Obama’s popularity led to his defeat in 2012. And this ignited the explosion among Republicans against reality. Two terms of a black president was just too much for “conservatives.” They needed a racist, authoritarian figurehead who would lead them out of the “Babylonian captivity” of reality into the promised land of their white supremacist “conservative” delusion.
Enter Trump.
That was when Republicans departed the reality station. They finally found a figurehead who would tell them what they always wanted to hear—that their delusion was not insane, that their imaginary heaven of white supremacy and ruthless capitalism and unrestrained exploitation was actually attainable here on earth. They raised him up, and he led them where they wanted to go. He tore up their tickets on the reality line and boarded them all on the crazy train. And they were only too happy to change lines, because that’s where they always wanted to be.
This is the recent American experience. Of course, the rise of Trump was not just an American phenomenon. It was both an example of a worldwide movement and the most influential instance of that movement. Because of America’s dominance on the world stage, the feedback loop fired up as soon as Trump became president. His outrageous authoritarianism inspired authoritarians the world over to leave the reality train. Suddenly they started believing that their delusions of world domination could also become reality. Putin in Russia, Chi in China, Orban in Hungary, Netanyahu in Israel, Erdegon in Turkey—by the time Trump was gone, his example had emboldened all of them to revolt agains the post-World-War-II world order. The world is now a much more “conservative” place—and therefore more delusional and dangerous—than it was before Trump.
But these cause-and-effect relationships are only on the surface. They are all true, but there is another cause, one that is deeper and most explanatory of the current worldwide roiling of “conservatism” and authoritarianism.
All this is happening because history is approaching the final confrontation between the Enlightenment and humankind’s atavistic, lizard-brained “conservatism.” The final battle is coming, after which humanity will either go forward into a reason-based future of peaceful co-existence, solving our problems and disputes rationally or will degenerate into squabbling tribes vying for power and domination.
The political manifestation of the Enlightenment was led by the creation of the United States and concretized by the passage of its 1787 Constitution. Although many of the Framers were doubtful that their experiment in rational self-governance could succeed, after fifty years, Adams and Jefferson on their deathbeds saw that it had. The Civil War showed that the Union could survive a nasty, recalcitrant minority and continue to govern according to reason.
World War II brought the world to the brink of disaster. The forces of authoritarianism, fascism, and “conservatism” reared their heads against the tide of rational self-governance. Led by the United States, the world beat them back. The post-war order created by the Allies, rooted in human rights and rule-based international relations, has expanded Enlightenment principles across the globe. And there is nothing that power-hungry “conservatives” hate more than rational principles.
No less an Enlightenment figure that Immanuel Kant foresaw that the future of rational human governance would inevitably lead to something like a rule-based international order. His vision of such a thing is laid out in his 1795 philosophical essay called Perpetual Peace. In another essay called “Idea of Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent,” Kant pointed out that the people of the world could not even imagine how to behave rationally because their leaders, whom they look up as examples, behaved like grasping, selfish, power mongers. Only when a rational rules-based world order arrived would the peoples of the world being to see that the same rational rules-based approach to their lives made sense.
When World War II ended, “conservatives” the world over could see that rational self-governance, led by the victorious Americans, was making the international order reasonable. That was intolerable. Reason dictates that selfishness is harmful, that self-control is virtuous, and that the welfare of all is far preferable to the welfare of the wealthy. In a well regulated, rules-based order, the wealthy would have to relinquish some of their privileges to the commons. They would have to learn to limit their desires in order to care for their fellow citizens. In short, they would have to unlearn much of their “conservatism.”
It was opposition to rational self-governance that led to the creation of the “conservative movement” in the 1950s. For thirty years, they fought Enlightenment progress until at last they managed to get a “conservative” Republican elected president—Ronald Reagan. For the past forty years, “conservatives” have been trying to undo the gains made by Enlightenment forces in politics. The emergence of Trump has inflamed their racist, white supremacist, greed-fueled, and power-hungry rebellion against reason, stoking it to a fever pitch.
January 6 was the first outbreak of the “conservative” violence that has been waiting to burst out. If Trump has anything to say about it, the 2024 election will be a violent affair, with neo-Nazi “conservative” thugs trying to stop decent Americans from voting. They and Trump know that if decent Americans are able to register their decent choices, 2024 will mark the end of their rebellion. So they will do anything they can think of—and that means violence, because thinking is not something they do—to stop a free and fair election.
But even if they attack and kill some of us, if we come out in numbers we can take their political “leaders” away from them. If we vote against all Republicans everywhere and remove them from the halls of power, we can squash “conservatism” once and for all. We can send “conservatives” back to the permanent minority where they belong and where they cannot effectively block Enlightenment progress any longer. We can finally begin to make good on the promises fought for by the great liberal leaders of the 1960s. And we can take up the Enlightenment banner once again, leading the world to real rational governance. And that will lead people to rational self-governance. And that will usher in a golden age that could never have existed while humanity has been weighed down by selfish “conservatism.”
Even though this is a worldwide struggle, the final battle will take place in America. This is because the Republican party represents the most power “conservative” coalition in the world. It is still a minority in our nation, but one that has usurped much more power than it should have.
If it is beaten, the downtrodden people of the earth will see that “conservatives,” authoritarians, and fascists can be crushed. And America will lead the world into a new era—the era of Enlightened government that will save us from the worst among us.
The time is now.
The majority is ours.
The election is ours if we overwhelm the polls.
Let’s pour out and put an end to the Enlightenment wars once and for all.