gracchusdixit

The death of the right-wing activist and provocateur, Charlie Kirk, unleashed some of the most toxic aspects of our country’s disintegrating public and political culture.  Within hours of Kirk’s death, Donald Trump and the slavish sycophants who surround him rushed to declare, without a shred of evidence, that Kirk had been the victim of “radical left violence,” and promptly used that canard to justify a legal jihad against all those who might even so much as suggest that Kirk was not the moral and ideological knight in shining armor they proclaimed him to be.  Even worse, they have done their utmost to turn Charlie Kirk into MAGA’s equivalent of Horst Wessel, the vicious Nazi storm trooper who got himself killed in the tumultuous years before Hitler came to power and was thereafter lionized as a martyr by the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

Rather than exposing this attempt to sanctify Kirk for the shameful political maneuver it actually is, the so-called “mainstream media” have contented themselves with platitudes, bemoaning Kirk’s death as the result of political polarization, as if that polarization were spontaneous in its origins and bipartisan in its expression.  Instead of condemning Kirk’s toxic opinions, they have spent their time lauding his accomplishments as a conservative “influencer” and fund-raiser, with no regard for the utterly amoral implications of those accomplishments.

Even more depressingly, Democrats have offered little in response to Kirk’s death but timid and vacuous pieties decrying violence and extolling the right to free speech, all the while they know full well that, for demagogues like Charlie Kirk, free speech is a one-way street and political violence is entirely acceptable as long as it leads to right-wing hegemony over every facet of our public and private lives.

No decent person should condone violence, either personal or political, and the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk should, if found guilty, be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  The fact that Charlie Kirk was murdered, however, does not make him a martyr, let alone a hero. Victimhood does signify virtue, nor does it entitle the victim to a moral get-out-of-jail-free card.  Not only is it possible, it is absolutely necessary, to condemn the manner of Kirk’s death and, at the same time, to condemn the manner in which he lived his public life—because the record of that public life is painfully clear.

Judged by his own words and actions, Charlie Kirk was a bigot, a racist, and a liar.

He heartily endorsed one of the most barbaric passages in the Old Testament, calling for gay people to be stoned to death.  He blamed Jews for funding a conspiracy to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.  He lectured and hectored the singer Taylor Swift with the words, “Reject feminism.  Submit to you husband…you’re not in charge.”  He condemned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a “huge mistake”.  He impugned Michelle Obama, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and other brilliant Black women as “affirmative action picks” accusing them of stealing “a white person’s slot”.  And just in case all that was too subtle, he added:  “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be, like, I hope he’s qualified.”  He called the epidemic of gun violence in our country a “prudent deal” worth making to protect his absurd misreading of  the Second Amendment.  And in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, he dismissed climate change as “complete gibberish, nonsense, and balderdash”.

There have been countless attempts to “contextualize” Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric and to minimize or disguise its malign intent.  Unfortunately for those attempts, social media “influencers” inevitably damn themselves, because they are so self-righteous, prolific, and vociferous.  True to form, Kirk left behind a long trail of venomous opinions that cannot be elided, explained away, or erased.

Not only was Charlie Kirk a bigot, racist, and liar, he was also, like so many of his ilk, a hypocrite and a huckster.  Shortly after his death, his widow held a press conference, during which she said the following:

Two days ago, my husband, Charlie, went to see the face of his savior and his god. Charlie always said that when he was gone, he wanted to be remembered for his courage and for his faith. One of the final conversations that he had on this earth, my husband witnessed for his lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Now and for all eternity, he will stand at his savior’s side, wearing the glorious crown of a martyr.

Apart from the oily and repugnant sanctimony of these words, they are transparently false.  If Charlie Kirk truly wanted to be “remembered for his courage and his faith,” why did he work so enthusiastically to elect as President of the United States a convicted felon, serial adulterer, and sexual abuser?  Why did he embrace members of that gangster’s family as “close personal friends”?  And why did he advocate public policies that violate every moral tenet propounded by the “Lord and Savior” he professed to believe in.  Charlie Kirk’s right-wing catechism simply cannot be squared with the Sermon on the Mount.

Which brings us to the ultimate and most unseemly reality.  Whatever else he may have been, Charlie Kirk was a money-making machine—for the radical right, for the Republican Party, and for himself.   He died at the age of 31 with a net worth of $12 million, a $5 million estate in Arizona, and a million dollar condominium in Floria; and, as the head of the purportedly “non-profit” organization, Turning Point USA, he paid himself an annual salary of more than $400,000.  To think that a community college drop-out with no professional skills or real-world experience acquired all this lucre based on hard work and merit beggars belief.

When Kirk’s widow declared, “Now and for all eternity, he will stand at his savior’s side, wearing the glorious crown of a martyr,” she neglected to mention one of her savior’s most important admonitions:  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  

Good luck with that, Charlie Kirk.

As millions of Americans, not to mention countless others around the world, woke up this morning, the first image they saw on their phones, televisions, or newspapers was the glowering, red-eyed visage of Donald J. Trump, staring menacingly into the camera. It was, of course, the long-awaited and instantly infamous “mug shot” of the one-time President of the United States, taken as he “surrendered” himself at the Fulton County Jail in Georgia, where he has been indicted in a sweeping “RICO” case alleging that he led a criminal conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election.
There is little doubt that this image will define what the world thinks of Donald Trump for ages to come. The only question is how it will be received. To some, Trump’s pugnacious stare will signify the threat he poses to any and all hopes we may have of political decency. To others, it will be proof positive that he is the courageous son-of-a-bitch they imagine him to be, a fierce demigod ready and willing to bring down the liberal “pussies” they simultaneously admire, abominate, and envy.

When this corrupt demigod wormed his way into the White House seven years ago, having lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes, he did so in no small measure by smearing his opponent with the bogus accusation that she had committed but one of the nearly one hundred crimes he has now been indicted for. The mantra of the hooligans who attended his rallies in those days was the chant, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

This vicious nonsense was fueled by Trump’s vacuous claim that “thirty thousand emails” containing classified information had been lodged on the private server of Hillary Rodham Clinton and, as a result, a distinguished former Senator, Secretary of State, and First Lady of the United States could not be trusted with the nation’s secrets. No amount of desperate dirt-digging by the sycophants in the Trump administration was ever able to find a shred of evidence to support this slander, and it was ultimately dismissed as a nullity by his own Justice Department. That so many of the slavering nincompoops who hang on the great pumpkin’s every word nonetheless continue to swallow this malarkey beggars belief—or at least it would, if their gullibility weren’t so embarrassingly obvious.

A month ago, the craven idol these credulous fools worship was dragged into a federal courthouse in Miami, charged with crimes far more serious than any he once leveled against poor Hillary Clinton, including the misappropriation and mishandling of the nation’s most sensitive classified information, a conspiracy to cover up those crimes, and the obstruction of a lawful investigation into his unlawful behavior. A few weeks later, the same malevolent buffoon was hauled into court a second time, charged with conspiring to betray the Constitution of the United States by attempting to overturn the results of a lawful election and inciting violence to achieve that end. And just days ago, he was indicted yet again, by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, which charged not only Trump himself but a long list of his enablers with participating in a “criminal enterprise” designed to steal that same election.

Although these indictments stop short of accusing Trump and his minions of “sedition”—a charge that would open a Pandora’s box of legal and political complications—“sedition” is precisely what they are all guilty of. No matter how you look at it, the January 6th assault on the nation’s capital was nothing less than an attempted coup d’état, which Donald Trump and his gang of desperadoes instigated, egged on, and declined to quell, knowing full well that their actions threatened the lives of police officers, members of Congress, and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence. In particular, the latest indictment reveals in stark detail that earlier efforts by these gangsters to intimidate and browbeat public officials in Georgia and other swing states were merely a run-up to the feckless coup d’état of January 6th. That the plot failed in the end, does not make it any less seditious.

Our legal system—as we are constantly reminded by the tut-tutting and finger-waving bien pensants of the media—requires that every defendant, no matter how dastardly his or her alleged crimes, must be presumed innocent until proved guilty. That may be the case inside a courtroom, but it does not apply outside a courtroom, and it certainly does not apply to those of us who are neither judges nor jurors but merely citizens.

As citizens, we are entirely free to reach our own conclusions based on the available facts, and in the matter of The United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump, the facts are utterly damning. As citizens, we are also entitled—indeed, I would assert, we are ethically obligated—to conclude that Trump and his co-conspirators must be “presumed guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” until or unless they are able or willing to provide evidence to the contrary. Failing that, they deserve to be “locked up” for as long as the law allows.

The greatest threat we face, however, does not come from Donald Trump and the gang of low-rent ne’er-do-wells who surround him. It comes from the political movement he embodies and the political party he now controls. That movement and that party—the Republican Party—have become nothing less than a traitorous fifth column in our midst, determined to seek and retain political power, no matter the cost, even if that means eviscerating our constitutional, legal, and political institutions, even if it means destroying democracy itself.

With precious few exceptions, the spineless leaders of the Republican Party have bent the knee to Donald Trump as if he were their anointed king. Having sworn their fealty to a man regardless of the cost to their country, they now swear to back him against any and all challenges, to forget or forgive his innumerable crimes, and, if worse comes to worst, to side with the existential enemies of the United States, as long as those enemies promise to help the leader they revere get reelected. To achieve this end, Republicans across the land are moving to suppress voting rights, rig elections, and disenfranchise or criminalize those who disagree with or might threaten them.

It’s time to shed the illusion that it’s possible to reason with such people in the vain hope of reaching a civilized compromise grounded in mutual respect. There is no compromise to be reached between those who believe in democracy and those who don’t, between those who are prepared to defend it and those who seek to destroy it. No reasonable agreement between two parties is possible, when one of those parties denies reason itself.

Sad to say, this is not the first time we we have faced this situation. One hundred and sixty three years ago, the slave-owning secessionists of the Old South betrayed the country, turned their canons on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and ignited a civil war, the most savage in our nation’s history—all, in the name of defending their “right” to own, exploit, and torture other human beings.

Now, 163 years later, we face the grim reality that one of our two major political parties is no less seditious than the slave-owners of the Old South, no less intent on achieving its political purposes regardless of the consequences, and no less treasonous.

To stop this treason in its tracks, before it tears the country apart, it will not be enough to “lock up” Donald Trump and his henchmen. Until or unless those who excuse or defend the man and his movement stand up and condemn everything they represent, they will deserve the same fate.

Until that day arrives, I say: Lock them up. Lock them all up.

As the credibility of Supreme Court of the United States crumbles before very our eyes, the conservative ideologues who control it appear to be either blind or indifferent to its vertiginous fall. There are two reasons for the court’s woes, neither of which those ideologues care, or dare, to acknowledge.

The first reason is the blatant corruption of several members of the court’s conservative majority. Even as that right-wing junta has abandoned every semblance of the judicial and institutional probity the court has long pretended to embody, its most vocal members insist that they are abiding by the highest ethical standards. Those protestations have become increasingly preposterous, as, with dizzying speed, we have learned that several of the court’s most staunchly conservative members have engaged in behavior that is not only unethical but may also be illegal.

The most outrageous offender (thus far at least) is Clarence Thomas. Which should surprise no one. Thomas has always been an ethical train wreck and should never have been appointed to the court in the first place—though few are prepared to say so because he is the beneficiary of the “affirmative” racial discrimination he pretends to deplore. His confirmation hearings thirty years ago were a disgrace, in which he pretended to be the victim of what he dubbed a “high-tech lynching,” egged on by complicit senators on both sides of the political aisle. The performative tantrum Thomas ginned up for the cameras back then achieved the desired result. His sexual abuse of Anita Hill was swept under the rug, and his intellectual failings were ignored.

Thirty years on, it is no longer possible to pretend that Clarence Thomas is anything but the self-serving grifter he has always been. For decades, he and his lobbyist wife have, like hogs at the proverbial trough, been gulping down bounties from rich Republican donors. One such donor, a dodgy Texas billionaire named Harlen Crow, went so far as to purchase the home of the Thomas’ mother, doing it up in fine style, and allowing her to live there rent-free, all the while tucking a tidy bit of cash into the judge’s pocket. This cornucopia, we have been endlessly told, is an innocent expression of personal friendship, having nothing whatever to do with the powerful perch Thomas occupies on the court.

Even if such a preposterous proposition were true, the tasteless extravagance of such a “friendship” should, long ago, have caused anyone with an ounce of shame to crawl under the nearest rock. However, right-wing hucksters like Clarence and Ginni Thomas have no shame, and the Harlen Crows of the world, safely cordoned off from the rest of humanity behind the walls of their exclusive gated communities, simply do not care what the sans-culottes may think.

Thomas is not the only grifter on the court. Its other certifiably crazy right-wing-nut, Samuel Alito, has been treating himself to goodies provided by the rich and powerful for years. When it was suggested that his insouciant greed might somehow be inappropriate, Alito took to the ever-compliant editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to huff and puff, whine and snivel that he was being unfairly attacked. Alito, like Thomas, is a revanchist Catholic, animated by a perpetual and fictional sense of persecution and martyrdom. Thus, he justifies his victimization of others by claiming that he is the victim.

Then, there is the prissily sanctimonious Neil Gorsuch, who, more than any other member of the court, has curated a public persona of nose-in-the-air judicial rectitude. Sadly for the noble jurist, this precious pose crumpled like papier-mâché with the news that the head of a major law firm with regular business before the court paid Mr. Nose-in-Air several hundred thousand dollars for a piece of low-rent real estate the high-minded judge had been trying to dump for years.

Finally, there is the Chief Justice himself, or rather, the Chief Spouse, Jane Roberts, who has been paid millions of dollars as a head-hunter for the country’s biggest law firms. Although Mme. Roberts is a lawyer with an adequate pedigree, she is by no one’s account a legal supernova. To believe that she would have been paid such sums had she not been married to the principal legal officer in the land, strains every synapse in even the most credulous brain. As the John-and-Jane duo surely know, conflicts of interest do not require an explicit quid pro quo; it is enough that they invite suspicion. If that duo is now enveloped in a cloud of suspicion, they have only themselves to blame.

To give them their due, the right-wing crazies on today’s court did not start all this. They are merely following in the hallowed footsteps of that ideological hero of judicial conservatives, the late Antonin Scalia. It was Scalia who championed the bogus concept of “originalism” that has poisoned constitutional decision-making for two decades. And it was Scalia who drew his last breath in a lavish room at a luxury “ranch” owned by yet another dubious Texas billionaire, having spent several days slaughtering innocent animals. Whether Scalia ever paid for the room or the evil privilege of butchering the creatures made by the god he pretended to worship, we will probably never know.

What we do know is that Scalia’s tawdry end has taught his right-wing legatees on the court exactly nothing. Given the tsunami of ethical embarrassments they now face, one might imagine that the Chief Justice would seize upon any opportunity to clear his own name, the reputation of the person he is married to, and the crumbling reputation of the institution entrusted to his care.

But no.

When John Roberts was invited—not subpoenaed, mind you, but simply “invited”—to testify before the Senate committee that is constitutionally empowered to oversee the court, he “respectfully declined” on the grounds that accepting the invitation would compromise the court’s “judicial independence,” the “separation of powers,” and the principle of “checks and balances”. This rebuff was a breathtaking example of hypocrisy.

More importantly, it exposed the true scandal of the court, which is the intellectual incompetence of its conservative majority and of the Chief Justice himself.

Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States will you find the phrases, “judicial independence,” “separation of powers,” or “checks and balances”. Although these concepts have been discussed by political thinkers from Montesquieu to Mill and should not be disregarded lightly, they are not now, nor have they ever have been, the law of the land.

What is more, no credible interpretation of “judicial independence” has ever implied legal immunity; the “separation of powers” has never been construed to insulate one branch of government from being challenged by another; and the very idea of “checks and balances” does not forbid—on the contrary, it demands—that each branch of government must answer to and be held accountable by the rest.
None of these principles gives the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court the right to snub the Article I branch of government, the powers of which get far more attention in the constitution than the paltry and limited powers of the Article III branch over which he presides. That John Roberts chose to ignore, or is ignorant of, these facts, tells you all you need to know about the dishonesty and intellectual vacuity of the man himself and the conservative members of the court over which he presides.

Just weeks ago, the court handed down two decisions that are painful to read, because they are so deliberately cruel, because they are so illogical and contradictory, and because they reveal for the whole world to see the intellectual incapacity of the Supreme Court of the United States.
One of those decisions disallows “affirmative action” programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, on the absurd grounds that the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which was enacted to reverse the inestimable horrors of slavery, prohibits any preferment or discrimination on the basis of race. The other decision, issued a few days later, gives an evangelical Christian “web designer” the right to deny her services to gay Americans because of her “sincerely” held belief that homosexuality is a “violation of biblical law”. This, despite the fact that no gay customers have even asked for those services.

Thus, in the perverse view of the Roberts court, secular discrimination designed to foster a more inclusive and tolerant society is ipso facto wrong, whereas religiously grounded discrimination designed to exclude and condemn sexual minorities is condoned and protected on the grounds of “religious freedom”. It does not take much imagination to anticipate where this twisted thinking goes next.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when “sincere” religious belief was used to justify slavery, to assert the racial inferiority of “negroes,” to prohibit inter-racial marriage, to criminalize gays and lesbians, and to rationalize the extermination of millions of Jews, Muslims, and Christian “heretics”. And yet, if you read the decisions of the conservative majority that now controls the Supreme Court of the United States, you would never know that such a time ever existed or that such atrocities ever occurred.

There was another time, a better time, when truly great-minded jurists—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Thurgood Marshall—sat on the dais that looms over the majestic chamber of the Supreme Court of the United States. For all their failings, and they were many, they were public servants, and public intellectuals, of the first order. They understood that part of their obligation as public servants was to think, and think deeply, about the issues confronting democratic societies. They took to heart the ancient admonition, lex injusta non est lex, “an unjust law is no law at all”. In their judicial decision-making, they asked: Will this decision advance justice? And before they reached their decisions, they strove to answer the question: What is just?

Compared with such giants, the conservatives who control today’s court are intellectual pygmies. Worse yet, they are moral monsters, who will, if they are not stopped, send us back to the dark ages.

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.

In the wake of the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Ian, millions faced days or even weeks without power or water, and now, the state of Florida and the United States of America are confronting the prospect of paying for what will undoubtedly be billions of dollars worth of damage.  Again.  Although this particular storm was more destructive than most, it was not the first nor will it be the last to bring such catastrophic consequences.   On the contrary, the cascade of climatological catastrophes is growing more daunting by the day.

Perhaps it is finally time to ask ourselves whether all these ultimately futile attempts to fend off the depredations of nature are worth it.  Perhaps we should discuss the hitherto unspeakable possibility that the people of Florida, along with all those who knowingly choose to live in places perched on the razor’s edge of climate change, should be asked to accept responsibility for the choices they have knowingly made.  Perhaps, in short, they should be left to fend for themselves. 

Before you howl in horror at this admittedly cold-blooded suggestion, hear me out—because there are at least two reasons to consider it seriously.  The first is practical, and the second is ideological.

Let’s begin with the practical reason.

After decades of refusing to accept the reality of global warming, it is no longer possible to evade the obvious.  How many times and at what cost can a sprawling conurbation like Houston, which sits scarcely 50 feet above sea level and lacks even a dollop of rational zoning, be rescued from the malfeasance of its public officials or the delusional irresponsibility of its citizens?  How many times can a city like New Orleans, no matter how precious its history, architecture, and culture, be saved from its untenable geography?  How many times and at what unimaginable cost can an entire state like Florida—which is and always has been a Ponzi scheme cooked up by the real estate industry—be bailed out by the rest of the nation?  The time is fast approaching when such follies can longer be paid for if we are to have any chance of surviving an increasingly perilous and uncertain future.

The climatological chaos caused by human greed and folly is going to affect us all, but it will hit some much harder than others.  Among the hardest hit will those who choose to live, against all reason, in states like Florida, which once upon a time was little more than a pestilential swamp, dismissed by the first Europeans who “discovered” it as all but uninhabitable.  Indeed, in the not-so-long ago year of 1900, the population of Miami was a mere 1,681 souls.  

Then, the great American con euphemistically called “real estate development” came along.  Subsidized by vast expenditures of public money and spurred by the invention of air conditioning and countless tons of DDT, the tropical swamp we now call Florida became a dreamscape in which the fantasies of countless suckers were to be realized, no matter what Mother Nature might ultimately have to say.  

Like other concoctions of this con—the artificial desert oases of Las Vegas and Phoenix, the once arid ranch-lands of Denver and Dallas, the boggy bayous on which the multi-million dollar mega-mansions of Houston now sit—most of Florida is a complete fabrication, less a place or a state than a delusional state of mind.  As the planet burns, as glaciers melt and sea levels rise, such fantasy-lands can no longer be sustained without vast expenditures of public money.  

It is only fair for those who have not been gulled by such fairy tales to ask why they should be compelled to subsidize the deluded fantasies of those who have.  Why should a penny more of public money be squandered to bail out the self-indulgent multi-millionaires of Naples, Palm Beach, and Boca Raton or to rescue the humbler fools who have been duped into thinking that they could get something for nothing by squatting in a swamp?  The same question, of course, can and should be asked of Rocky Mountain and West Coast “liberals” who insist on settling in waterless deserts, where every summer brings voracious wild fires, or continue to build lavish homes perched on little more than sand dunes, which slide into the sea every time it rains.  The truth of the matter is that all of us, no matter what our politics may be, are running out of time.  

Do not mistake my point.  I wish no harm to the inhabitants of the increasingly uninhabitable parts of our country.  What is the purpose of a human community, after all, if not to help those who are victimized by the vagaries of nature or history?

But that is not the issue here.  Those who choose to deny climate change and suffer as a result are not “victims” in any meaningful sense of the word.  By virtue of the choices they make, they bring disaster upon themselves and have no claim on the sympathy or the wallets of those who choose more wisely.

Which brings us to the question of ideology.  

Liberals and conservatives alike may be guilty of failing to come to grips with the realities of climate change, but the burden of guilt does not fall equally, and to pretend otherwise would be absurd.  There are, to be sure, liberals who skirt the issue and do so hypocritically, but conservatives have turned its denial into a rallying cry.  Indeed, for many conservatives, the denial of climate change has become a shibboleth, an article of ideological faith.  And that, alas, is where their ideology crumbles.

The most fundamental tenet of the conservative political catechism is “personal responsibility”.  Thus, the beneficiaries of so-called “welfare,” particularly when they happen to be black, brown, or poor, are lectured and hectored to “make better choices,” “get off the dole,” “get to work,” and “pick themselves up by the bootstraps”.  This sanctimonious sermonizing has been going on ever since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.   Indeed, it has become so ubiquitous that even tepid liberals like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama chimed in, either because they believed it or because it served their self-interest.

It’s time for this sanctimonious chorus to put up or shut up.  If such people truly believe in their preachments about “personal responsibility,” it follows that the inhabitants of environmentally doomed states like Florida should suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions.  No decent person actually wants such people to drown; I certainly don’t.  But it’s time for them to learn how to swim and, if they truly believe what they preach, to learn how to swim on their own.

The death of the longest reigning monarch in British history, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, has been remarked upon so often and so expansively, that to add even a word may seem superfluous.  Her elaborate funeral was watched by who-knows-how-many millions and, if you will pardon a tasteless expression, has been analyzed to death.   It is perfectly reasonable to ask:  what more can be said?

One answer is that the passing of this surpassingly ordinary woman, who was thrust onto the public stage by a perverse accident of history, cries out for more serious judgment than the simpering platitudes of so-called “journalists” who make a living by gushing over every trivial detail of the comings and goings of the British royal family.  The death of Elizabeth Windsor is more consequential than all that.  In fact, her death is more consequential than her life.  The passing of Elizabeth II signifies more than the passing of a particular person, it marks the final milestone of an entire age.

On her 21st birthday, in 1947, then Princess Elizabeth visited South Africa with her sister Margaret and their parents.  As the heir to the throne, the princess was called upon to make a radio address to the British Commonwealth and what remained of Britain’s dwindling Empire.  Toward the end, she declared:  “My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family, to which we all belong.”  

These bravura words have been quoted so often that they might well serve as the late queen’s epitaph. I have little doubt that they were sincerely meant and even nobly intended—just as I have no doubt that Elizabeth Windsor was a decent person who tried, throughout her long life, to do “the right thing,” at least as defined by the standards of the time and world in which she was brought up.  

The important questions, however, do not concern Elizabeth herself.  They concern that time and that world, challenging the political institutions she embodied, the social system she symbolized, and the enormous injustices produced by both.  Elizabeth Windsor’s responsibility for those injustices is more substantial than is commonly realized, not because she deliberately chose to do wrong but, rather, because she dedicated her life to a political institution—the monarchy—that could not help but do wrong.

Unlike most of the other democratic countries of the world, the United Kingdom has no written constitution.  Rather, its governing principles are a congeries of traditions, customs, and practices cobbled together over time, venerable, to be sure (which in Britain is no small thing) but not binding in any sense that the rest of the world would call “constitutional”. 

That is where the monarchy comes in.  

The Victorian political journalist Walter Bagehot famously described Britain’s unwritten constitution as having two parts, one “dignified,” the other “efficient”.  The “efficient part,” he declared, is Parliament, where all real political power resides.  The “dignified” part is the monarchy, the role of which is to provide enough mystical pomp and circumstance to hold an otherwise fractious nation together.  If one is prepared to accept this thesis, the United Kingdom, without a written constitution to go by, is left to depend entirely on the political equivalent of magic, with the monarchy being the magician.  

The problem with magic is that it can quickly turn into voodoo, with consequences more malevolent than benign.  Which is precisely the problem now confronting the British monarchy.  When all the pomp and circumstance come to an end, when all the made-up “ancient” ceremonies and rituals are stripped away, what is left is an institution that cannot be justified on rational, democratic, or moral grounds.  The British monarchy is the apex of a social and economic pyramid that is both anachronistic and fundamentally unjust.  

Before he became King Charles III, Charles Phillip Arthur George Windsor was not only Prince of Wales but Duke of Cornwall, a gift from his mother the Queen that gave him an annual income of more than £20 million.  Whatever you may think of the way Charles has spent this largesse, he did nothing whatsoever to earn it.

The revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall are nothing more or less than the product of a thousand-year-old theft, which began with the invasion of Britain by William, Duke of Normandy, a hooligan descended from Scandinavian Vikings whose stock in trade was rapine and rampage.  That a crime is a thousand years old does not make it any less a crime.   By what moral standard should a violent act of medieval conquest be accepted as the governing principle of a modern nation?

As with Charles, so with much of the British aristocracy, whose wealth and privileges go back centuries but are completely without justification in the modern age.  Consider the example—take a deep breath and try not to laugh—of Richard Walter John Montagu Douglas Scott, who is simultaneously the 10th Duke of Buccleuch and the 12th Duke of Queensbury.  

This “double Duke” is a rarified decoction, with a pedigree that goes back to William the Conqueror, an education at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, and a hereditary seat in the House of Lords, not to mention that he is a first cousin of the late queen.  “Richard Scott” owns more than 200,000 Scottish acres and five “country houses,” which you or I would probably call “palaces,” has a net worth of more than £200 million, and enjoys an annual income even greater than the bounty provided to King Charles by the Duchy of Cornwall.  For all this, the “double Duke” does little more than sit on the boards of the various charities he patronizes and a commercial company the sole purpose of which is to manage the fortune he inherited.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury is a wicked person any more than Elizabeth II was anything but a decent person.  On the contrary, they both seem to be, or to have been, entirely decent people.  Personal decency, alas, does not justify the fundamentally unjust system such people exemplify and, however unintentionally, help to perpetuate.

A few days ago, we were presented with a starkly different example of not only personal but public decency from the last remaining European queen.  After 50 years on the throne, Margrethe II of Denmark decided to do away with the princely titles accorded to those of her grandchildren who are not in direct line of succession, on the grounds that they should be free to get on with their lives without the expectation of royal privilege.  

There was, as you might imagine, a howl of protest from the parents of those grandchildren—who, I might add, have chosen to live their privileged lives in Paris rather than Copenhagen.  Confronted with their outcry, the monarch of Europe’s most egalitarian nation apologized for hurting the feelings of her second son and his family but held firm:

My decision has been a long time coming. With my 50 years on the throne, it is natural both to look back and to look ahead. It is my duty and my desire as Queen to ensure that the monarchy always shapes itself in keeping with the times. Sometimes, this means that difficult decisions must be made, and it will always be difficult to find the right moment.

If the British monarchy hopes to survive, if Britain itself wishes to shed the burden of an unjust and anachronistic past, both might heed the wise advice of a humble Scandinavian monarch by shaping a future “in keeping with the times”.  

To anyone who isn’t on intellectual life support, it should be obvious that the relatively brief reign of homo sapiens as the evolutionary übermensch of planet earth may soon be coming to a end—and perhaps more quickly than the Cassandras of catastrophic climate change once imagined.  For thousands of years, our species has roamed and raped the earth as if it were ours for the taking and with little regard for the consequences.  It is becoming abundantly clear, however, that consequences eventually have a way of catching up.

It wasn’t very long ago that even the gloomiest of doomsayers was suggesting that we still had time to stave off a global melt-down, thereby saving ourselves from living in a world in which rising sea levels submerge cities from Miami to Mumbai, drought reduces the most fertile regions of the planet to barren desert, and famine stalks the land.  This grudging glimmer of hope now seems to have been at best naive.  Those who once consoled themselves with the heedless notion that climate change was something for their children or grandchildren to worry about are now condemned to watching their lawns die, their energy bills soar, and their prospects for a comfortable future wither.  

The technical explanations for the galloping pace of climate change—”feedback loops,” ‘tipping points,” and so on—may be of academic interest to some but won’t matter to most of us in the end.  The only thing that will matter is the results.  And by all accounts, they are dire.  

What the experts did not anticipate or declined to tell us was that pent-up natural forces, once unleashed, have a nasty propensity to grow ever more ferocious until they can no longer be contained.  In the roiling-broiling case of climate change, no amount of recycling, conservation, or technological “innovation” will be capable of sparing us from the whirlwind that is already sweeping across the earth.  It may simply be too late.  

In fact, we are already getting a glimpse of what “too late” can mean.  Large swaths of the planet are quite literally on fire.  The vast ice fields that once covered the two poles, which have for eons regulated the natural pendulum swings of the climate, are melting.  The glaciers of Greenland and the Alps are, respectively, falling into the sea or crashing down on anyone clueless enough to come too close.  Europe’s most important river, the Rhine, is so depleted that commercial barge traffic is about to shut down.  Italy’s greatest river, the Po, which has for centuries sustained the fertile agricultural regions of Lombardy and the Veneto, has been reduced to a trickle.  The most iconic and economically important river of Asia, the Yangtze, has turned into a bed of mud, baked as hard as bricks.  The Colorado River, on which most of the American West depends for its water and hydroelectric power, is so dry that, in a matter of days, the federal government will soon be forced to intervene and ration both.

The implications of all this are inescapable.  Envision a future in which the cornucopia of California’s Imperial Valley, which supplies the bulk of the nation’s fruit and vegetables, reverts to the sterile desert it once was.  Contemplate a future in which the wheat fields of the American Midwest, which have fed much of the planet for more than a century, turn to dust.  And finally, prepare for a future of sustained social, economic, and political turmoil.   

The desperation caused by climate change will drive millions of the world’s poorest people to abandon the increasingly uninhabitable parts of the planet they presently occupy in the hope of escaping the worst of what is to come.  They will head north, to Europe and the United States.  The nations of the so-called “developed world” will then face a stark moral choice.  After centuries of colonial exploitation, after living lavishly off the fat of once captive lands, they will be forced to justify to themselves and to the rest of the world why they should be allowed to lock their borders against peoples they so recently oppressed.  The only possible justification would be cruel indifference, callous self-interest, or the suicidal delusions of fascism, nativism, and race.

We can already see which way this brutal wind is blowing.  In Poland, Hungary, and Russia, in Turkey and India, in France and Italy, in the United States and the United Kingdom, large swaths of the population are rushing to embrace authoritarian “populists” who promise a glorious future in exchange for the license to govern through fear and exclusion, tyranny and oppression.  The answer served up by populist demagogues to the moral dilemma posed by environmental catastrophe is:  let “them” suffer—in other words, those who don’t look like us or speak like us, who don’t think the same thoughts or worship the same gods, who don’t “qualify” as citizens or even as human beings.

It will not matter that no right-wing strongman on earth will be strong enough to save his own people from the catastrophe sweeping the planet, that neither Trump nor Putin, Orbán or Erdoğan, Berlusconi or Bolsinaro will be able to skirt the all-consuming wrath of nature.  By the time their deluded followers wake up to their utter impotence, it will be too late.  When the end finally comes, as it inevitably will, it will sweep away not only the false and feckless dictators but their gullible victims.  We can only hope that it does not drown the rest of us in its deadly undertow.

There are those who still cling to the fantasy that our Faustian bargain with technology—the bargain that got us into this fix in the first place—will somehow get us out.  This fantasy is as old as humankind:  a line that runs straight from Icarus to Los Alamos, from Prometheus to the atom bomb. 

After World War II, we were assured that a new era of “atoms for peace” would provide a limitless supply of clean, safe energy; instead, it gave us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima.  In the dawning days of the internet, we were told that a new age of democracy was about to be born; instead, all we got was greedy manipulators like Mark Zuckerberg.  

Even now, well-intentioned environmentalists argue that nuclear plants should be reactivated because they emit no global-warming co2, but they have no solution to the problem of toxic nuclear waste; proponents of “green” technologies urge that we shift to solar and wind power, but they have no plan for reconstituting a global economy based almost entirely on petroleum and its byproducts.  

The unpleasant and unspeakable truth is that none of these “solutions” will allow us to live as we have lived for the last hundred years.  Our much vaunted “way of life”—which depends on global capitalism’s demand for limitless growth and insatiable consumption—cannot possibly continue.  If we hope to survive, our “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” must come to an end.   

This is not to say that humankind faces mass extinction, a la Hollywood or H. G. Welles.  Nor is it to say that the catastrophe that imperils us will be as sudden and decisive as a thunderbolt.  It is entirely possible that our species will, in some form or fashion, survive for millennia to come. 

The same, however, cannot be said for our current economic and political systems.  They will eventually collapse in their impotence.  When the dust finally settles, if it ever does, there will be fewer human beings, and those who remain will have to make do with less.  Whether the future we face turns out to be the “nasty, brutish, and short” existence once described by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes is anyone’s guess.  But it certainly won’t be the self-indulgent and luxurious existence now enjoyed by the most prosperous people on the  planet.  

For them, and for all us, the jig is up.