What’s Happening?

To start at the beginning, in which all of Trump’s hatreds are harnessed and become the deeply sick raison d’etre of Republicans everywhere. Here, nothing needs to be added: everything that has to be known about them was vouchsafed to us this week by the worthless specimen of cowardice Jodi Ernst, who should be in Leavenworth for the rest of her life, provided with copies of the Uniform Code of Military Justice to serve as toilet paper.

At a town meeting of her Iowan constituents, they raised and raised and raised the only issue on which they have total agreement–that is, that thousands and thousands of people, deprived of Medicaid will die, just as many from MAGA as not, to feed the insatiable greed of the billionaire class. What was her answer do the despairing, plaintive questions from the floor: “everybody dies!”

In the Army a bunch of us developed what we called the “Next Foxhole Test.” (Not that any of us were ever near one). What can I say here? This: for anyone in combat, Tammy Duckworth, without legs, would take precedence over a hundred cowardly Jodi Ernsts.

Yes, Everybody dies. So fuck you all, human beings; you’re mortal shit. Why? Everyone dies. Trump would have been a good beginning.

The sad truth is no one we’ve ever heard from the GOP speaks with any meaning or concern about or encounter with reality: only cruelty dictates their confrontation with the world of hard facts, at which they but sneer. E.g., Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, lies with every word she says, because in her world, as is true of everyone who speaks for the President, the truth is what he says. In the world of Leavitt and Ernst and Rubio and Hegseth and: why go on?

There is no recognition of facts or truths. Whether in a courtroom or on the White House lawn. So everyone who stands only for power can only speak in the lies dictated by an ideology of power, and the self as its conduit.

The fact here is that the reality of Fascism can’t be mistaken; it is not just silence about but revelling in the pain of others. The ability to inflict pain becomes the reality of the self, and the cheerful reflection of their pain. Marco Rubio defending genocide and starvation–look him up, look up his interrogation by Patti Murray: the inability of her or any Senator to get answers to a simple question, a refusal to say whether the law is the law.

No. Asked a difficult question about law, and truth, they just look the other way: with an angry sneer, as though above all considerations of truth, law, and justice, which they treat as though dealing with despicable assertions of the Constitutional order that they are trying to destroy.

So, not another word about the Not another word about…not another word. Instead, I want to look at a different question that comes to me over and over from readers: What the Democrats doing: Why aren’t they doing anything?

There are three parts to any answer. The first is the worst: that Chuck Schumer threw everything away by voting for the viciously destructive House bill in the name of “bipartisanship,” carrying several Democrats with him. I have been trying to think of what might have been the worst, the stupidest, the most thoughtless surrender in our political history: our version of Pétain. There is really no recovery from this perfidy. And as for the one-vote loss in the House: to paraphrase Lord Tennyson on the Light Brigade, “Back they rode, back, but not the two hundred.”

However, with such judgments we always have to remember that people get caught up in situations not of their own devising. The general rule for everyone is the chart we discover in the Times of Saturday, May 31st. The paper reproduces two charts which I don’t have the capability to capture.

But to describe them at best, they compare two maps of the United States, one of which shows an overwhelming torrent of little red lines tilting from West to East like the map of a hurricane: that is a graphic depiction illustrating that “Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations,including some of the country’s bluest strongholds, including New York, Philadelphia, Honolulu.”. Bye-buy…blackbird.

Conversely, a loose grouping of barely visible and pitifully thin blue lines also tilting from West to East showing counties that have gained the support of more educated voters. In summation, “Mr. Trump’s party is still losing in those places, but by significantly less. At the same time, Mr. Trump has driven Republican margins to dizzying new heights in the nation’s reddest bastions.”

What’s a pro-Democrat, or pro-democrat to do? When you’re going down, down, down, how do you rise up?

The simple truth is that before Schumer’s un-coup there might have been a Party–but after it, definitely not. There are only Democrats, many worth mentioning but adding up to nothing in the sense of “Party” that the Rightist fascists have commandeered on behalf of the Plutocracy; and to which, with the possible exception of Lisa Murkowski, they swear utter fealty–killing thousands upon thousands (at a distance of course) with the loyalty of beasts to a King. Of whose ascension not a single voice has indicated doubt.

At this moment, then, there are only a few helpful comments to be made. The first is that the traveling road show of the Democratic Socialists Bernie Sanders and AOC drew in one venue 34, 000 attendees–way more than any MAGA rally has ever drawn; even though they muted the take-aways to “social democracy.” That is something to think about.

Otherwise, the wit and no-holds-barred slashing of Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff; who call-them-by-their-rightful name; as does Jasmine Crockett’s live-television demolition of Kash Patel; ; Cory Booker’s moving speaking of the unspoken; Elizabeth Warren’s continued pursuit of an honest sentence that will never be spoken; and perhaps above all Chris Murphy’s devastation of the Fascist policy agenda. There are also trenchant social critics, mostly on MSNBC. Yes, I’d like to have the audience of Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Nicole Wallace, and their guests–most especially Paul Krugman and his calling out of sadistic zombies — but to what end are they laboring?

What we are facing instead is all too appropriately summed up by Masha Gessen in The Times:

“The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chainsaw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms,

“Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough — or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook — the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.”

The one branch of government that has stood out in defiance of the Fascist state is the appellate arm of the judiciary. But will the Supreme Court defend us–or the U.S.? The signs, as law Professor Kate Shaw points out, are not always hopeful.

“The Supreme Court quietly blessed, in an unsigned order, some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority in the executive branch.

“The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the order noting concerns about the “disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.”

As Shaw points out, the decision (or non-decision), overturned a century of precedents, on no ground other then “disruption.”

Since when, we might ask, does the Constitution threat “disruption” as a disorder? Nowhere that one can find.
Disruption is the name of the game. The creation of the National Labor Relations Board; the overthrow of school segregation; the extension of equal rights to women: all hated by their various oppositions, who found them intolerable. I could go on like this forever. For an example just look at the critique of Brown vs. Board of Education by the “liberal Southerner” William Fulbright.

And, looked at from the other side, what the hell is DOGE if not totally disruptive; or Pam Bondi, throwing away the rule of law to do whatever the President dictates? Shaw calls its decision and opinion “radical.” I’d go farther than that: not all but some of them dishonest as a three-dollar bill. And where now, does it leave us where we began, with what used to be denoted as the “legitimate opposition?”As such, dead in the water. the President and his lackey’s controlling all avenues of contrary action.

To sum up, there is at this historical moment three is no place in the social and political order that makes room for critical thought or action on a concerted basis. When you control nothing, you get nothing down: a 25-hour speech, as lovely as it was, is but a sentimental substitute.

Neither, I’m afraid, do all those angry town halls and the minimal effect they’ve had; nor the angry placard wavers everywhere Rachel Maddow looks. To change the dynamic, you’ve got to make things happen: and so far that’s not happening: like trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

What can be done, then? Sadly, Joe Manchin was quite right when he told Chuck Schumer, “you need to elect more liberals.” How else to slow the runaway train that is now rolling downhill with democracy, like the wreck of Old Ninety-Seven in its tow.

Our best hope, initially, is the ’25 midterm, where there may be enough seats at stake in the House to turn it over to Hakeem Jeffriies and the Democrats. That Mike Johnson is the stupidest and most loathsome Speaker ever makes that possibility one of necessity: to turn what is now a variable mass into an actual party.

In a democratic republic, even a constitution is no substitute for getting out the vote and so preventing further destruction. Meanwhile, the forces of hope and anger have to keep up the protests and town halls: only our anger can possibly turn into action, and turn red lines into blue. Beyond that, of course, getting out the vote is absolutely necessary: nothing else will suffice. And so, in some way and in some sense, the party must become a Party, and overcome its division: At a CPAC of the Center, “Democratic Moderates Beat Up on the Left At a wonky gathering in Washington, centrist Democrats argued that they were the majority-makers the party needed to take control of Congress in 2026 and beyond.” That won’t get it done.

Finally, as Gessen tells us we must be prepared for the President’s hatreds to turn into his retributions and so to call Fascists by their rightful name, and be prepared for their unhinged and murderous behavior, and resist it in every one of its manifestations. Otherwise. if we do not persist, he will not stop unless he is stopped, and 2024 will have been the last fair free and fair election.