gracchusdixit

To anyone who has been paying even the slightest attention, it should by now be inescapably clear that one of America’s two major political parties, Republican Party, has sold it whatever was left of its meager soul to the devil of craven self-interest.  The bitter irony in the “Grand Old Party’s” moral collapse is that it was founded in 1860 for the highest of moral purposes:  to bring down the cruel institution of slavery.  Whatever grandeur the GOP may once have possessed is gone.  It has become little more than a grotesque side show, in which a congeries of political freaks, conjurors, and carnival barkers hawk their wares.  The present aim of these flimflam artists is to hoodwink their gullible followers into believing that genuine historical horrors like slavery, the systematic extermination of Native Americans, and the destruction of the planet by rapacious corporations are nothing more than “woke” fantasies designed to discomfit the cosseted children of privileged white people. 

The utter lunacy and corruption of modern-day “conservatism” has become so obvious that it can no longer be ignored.  Not only the chattering classes who are richly paid to proclaim the obvious, but the less-attentive among us who would rather avert our eyes, have little choice but to confront a spectacle that is only slightly less repugnant than being forced to watch a mouldering corpse decompose before it has had a chance to be decently buried.    

A similarly macabre spectacle was on full display a week ago at the annual gathering of an organization called CPAC,  which stands for “Conservative Political Action Committee”.   This confab provides an opportunity—one might even say a “safe space”—for a couple of thousand of the craziest people on the planet to kick aside their inhibitions, kick up their ideological heels, and show the rest of us just how crazy they actually are.  Think “Animal House” without the jokes.

Alas, there has never been anything even remote amusing about CPAC.  If  it weren’t for the flicker of respectability cast by its political pretensions, most its attendees would be locked up in a psychiatric ward, where they would undergoing treatment for the looney delusion that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election, his return to the White House would be the fulfillment of “biblical prophecy,” and those who think otherwise are doomed until and unless they repent for their sins.

This year’s outing of CPAC was not only loonier than usual but also considerably more low-rent. Near the top of the ticket was that moral midget, Donald Trump Jr.  Following in the footsteps of the fraudster who fathered him, little Don spent his time shilling for a “Christian cell phone” company—as if God in all his glory gave a hoot about digital networks or any of the Trumps, per or fils, worshipped any god but money.  Next on the bill was little Don’s perpetual “fiancé” in waiting, former Fox News anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle.  When the Kimster wasn’t flaunting her enhanced cleavage, she was cajoling CPAC’s oh-so-eager attendees to buy “precious metals” from a “conservative” huckster like herself, if for no other reason than to deliver a poke in the eye to all those “woke” liberals.  

I have no idea how many CPAC attendees actually swallowed this swill, and I harbor no ill will toward the benighted idiots who did.  On the contrary, I pity them.  They have been duped—are being duped—by a political party, and a political philosophy, that is nothing less than a scam.

If one had to pick the precise date when this scam began, a good choice might be March 4, 1869,  the day on which Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of Gettysburg, was sworn in as the 18th President of the United States.  Although Grant was a brilliant and courageous general and by all accounts a man of great personal integrity, his administration became the servile instrument of the most rapacious robber barons of the Gilded Age, moral monsters one and all, who flaunted their wealth, gloried in their greed, and were by any reasonable standard out-and-out thieves.  The sole aim of these crooks was to get filthy rich, no matter how filthy the means.  To that end, they bribed and bought virtually the entire establishment of the Republican Party.  Ever since that day, the Grand Old Party has served its plutocratic paymasters masters faithfully, cutting their taxes, distracting public attention from their crimes, and shielding them from punishment.

If this evil bargain were ever exposed in all its evil particulars, a vast majority of Americans, even those who call themselves “conservative,” would howl at the moon in outrage.  Republicans know this.  Thus, they have become preternaturally skillful in the satanic art of dissimulation:  of pretending that things are not what they are, of inventing virtuous-sounding euphemisms for a variety of economic and social cruelties, of “rebranding” moral wrongs as moral rights.  

The most egregious and offensive example of the latter may be the fiendish but fiendishly clever phrase, “pro-life,” which has become the rallying cry of moral and religious bigots who would gleefully burn desperate women and their doctors at the stake to protect the fictional “lives” of zygotes.   

The verbal prestidigitation of conservatism doesn’t stop there, however.  Out-and-out greed is hailed as “free enterprise”.  Employers who gouge and grind their helpless employees are heralded as “job-creators”.   The endless and pitiless calamities of capitalism—recessions, bubbles-and-busts, out-and-out depressions—are dismissed as the natural and necessary by-products of an anodyne fiction called “the business cycle”.

This con has been going on for decades.  It has been going on for so long that it has crept into every corner of our public and private lives.  From the hypocritical and racist pieties of evangelical hucksters like Billy Graham to the “voodoo” economics of political hucksters like Ronald Reagan, Americans have been anesthetized by an incessant drip-drip-drip of falsehoods.  In truth, we are not an “exceptional nation,” nor is ours “the greatest country on earth”.  Economic riches do not “trickle down,” nor does rewarding the rich do anything but strangle the rest of society, starving our fellow citizens of their most basic needs:  decent healthcare, a good education, the opportunity to live, and die, with dignity.  

I said earlier that I harbor no ill will toward those who have been duped by conservative falsehoods.  But every forbearance has its limits.  For a con to succeed in the face of mountainous contrary facts and evidence, its victims must consent to be duped, and if they continue to consent, they have no one to blame but themselves.