The unsuccessful insurrection in Brazil, drawing inspiration from and showing similarities to the Trump inspired and coordinated insurrection here a year ago, is another reminder that the rise of right wing authoritarian and fascist movements and governments – not least in Putin’s Russia – is a global phenomenon. To ignore its rise in the name of fighting U.S. imperialism is analytically mistaken and politically/practically counterproductive.
If you think last week in the House was disuptive, last week was but prologue. Besides a slew of investigations, Republicans in the House – not only the Freedom Caucus – will attempt to hold the government and country hostage to their austerity and anti-democratic demands, including massive cuts in social mandatory programs, like Medicare and Social Security.
The renewal of the debt limit in August will likely be the stage for this titanic clash. Bear in mind that the Republican Party no longer fits on what is considered the normal continuum of U.S. politics. As the Janurary 6 insurrection revealed, the GOP – and the House Republicans are an advance guard of their party – are political outliers and arsonists, albeit in a metaphorical sense. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, anti-working class venom and contempt for democracy and democratic righs are at the core of their politics. These fascist like extremists, bankrolled by billionaires and millionaires, would lay waste to our democracy, economy, and goverment without any hesitation if it advanced their agenda. And this isn’t rhetorical inflation in the least.
January 6: Let’s make sure that it is another day that Will Live in Infamy!
The writer is half right in saying, “At heart the GOP is now a burn-it-down party. They want to break things.”
Fair enough!
But it is also a party that acutely wants to govern, to command the ship of state, to rule by means fair and foul. And in that position, it would, if allowed, dismantle the “administrative state,” erase democracy and democratic institutions, and turn the “social welfare state” into a fading memory from what they say was an earlier debauched time. If there are differences in the GOP – and there are as we saw this week in the heated infighting among House Republicans over Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be the next House speaker – they are largely of a tactical nature. In other words, the intra party clash turns more on the pace and methods of struggle, and not so much on its overarching aims.
Does that make these differences unimportant? By no means, past experience tells us that factional fighting on tactical matters can tear a party apart as well as shift advantage to its adversaries. Of course, no one on the democratic and Democratic side of the main political divide in the country can count on such a turn of events. And no one is as evidenced by the election results in November.
