True or False, Are Always Revealing

Every now and then, when the stars align, the internet gives us the chance to gain some actual insight amidst all the cacophony we subject ourselves to.  Over the last week-and-a-half, there've been three articles published that give us a rather unguarded look into the current conservative mindset, so it's worth taking a look into them.

The first is an article from the Tucker Carlson owned Daily Caller, where one its editors, Virginia Kruta, went to Missouri rally for gubernatorial candidate Cori Bush with special guest star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  By now, you may have the seen Kruta's hilarious money quote where she says,

"But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided."

We'll get to the full unpacking of this in a second, but I think it's also important to note how Kruta closes the piece: "I left the rally with a photo — in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I."  Kruta's been the butt of many a joke over her gut reaction to hearing that the government could indeed see to it that she could live a life free of the suffering caused by not being paid enough for her work so she wouldn't struggle to pay her bills, or that she would have to stress out over whether she'll go bankrupt if she has a medical emergency, or if her children want to go on to higher education they wouldn't have to take on a crippling amount of debt to do so is sheer abject terror, but, while she deserves all of that, it's important to note why she feels that way.

See, the amount of of suffering people experience in today's economy isn't an accident, it's the whole point of it.  If a student comes out of college with an advanced degree but mountains of debt that means they can't leverage their education to get better pay because they need whatever they can get to start paying back those loans.  The threat of medical bankruptcy is used as a way to keep workers stuck at whatever job they have because if they leave that job, they lose their insurance.  The whole point is to create a meager existence that keeps people obedient and cowed out of fear of losing what little they have if they stand up for themselves.

So why do people who are products of that system want to keep it going?  Why wouldn't they want to change things for the better?  Because in this style of system, the brutality of it is legitimized when one generation passes the suffering they went through down to the next.  This is sold as a way to reclaim a sense of  agency- they survived this world and became tougher for it so they now get to pass it on to their children and their children after them.   If younger people seek to end or change they system that causes all that suffering, then its treated like older generations- like Kruta's - are being cheated because if it's proven that all that suffering is entirely meaningless and unnecessary then, well, maybe all those times she sacrificed or went without so she could scrape by one week to the next, were unnecessary and meaningless as well.

In this system, suffering is the point.  The whole point of that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" nonsense is that you know you've "made it" when you stop being the recipient of beatings and degradation and start administering those things to other people.  If, all of sudden, people have the means to live without the indignity of working full-time living paycheck-to-paycheck or the stress of staying at a shitty job because they'll lose their benefits or they'll get the same shit pay everywhere else, then all of a sudden people like Kruta and her ideological brethren lose a lot of their power.  They don't know what to do in the face of someone legitimately offering a better way forward, all they have is that fear and a feeling of "Thank god I don't believe people should live with dignity like those whackos."  It does really go to show that they don't think that a fair days work should come with a fair days pay, or whatever other platitude about the value of hard work that drizzles out their mouth is true, at the end of the day, they just want to make sure as many people as possible are absolutely miserable so they can condescend to them when they dare think they deserve better.

Next up is this hilariously incompetent polemic against single-payer from The Hill.  Written by Dr. Deane Waldman from a Texas think-tank, Waldman's piece is a greatest hits of anti-single-payer arguments conservatives have trotted out for years now.  Classics like "it costs too much!" make their early and obligatory appearance: "Most people thought the cost of Obamacare, $1.34 trillion, was excessive, but that’s peanuts compared to the $18 trillion price tag for Bernie Sanders’ — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s — Medicare-for-All."  True, recent analysis has put the price tag of Bernie's plan at $32 trillion over ten years.  Considering that we spend about $3.2 trillion right now on healthcare, keeping our current level of spending with even more coverage is actually a pretty successful plan.  If we keep the law as is, then by 2026 we'll be spending $5.7 trillion a year so... tell me again how single-payer is too expensive?

Next up, Waldman trots out the oldie-but-goodie "people die waiting for care" scare chord,

"There is death-by-queueing in single payer systems, where sick persons die from treatable conditions because they could not get care in time and succumb “waiting in line” for care. You don’t even have to go outside the U.S. to see these avoidable deaths. In our own single payer or Medicare-for-All system, the VA, “307,000 veterans may have died waiting for medical care.”

Yes, it is an unfortunate reality that, especially in recent years, more people are dying because the NHS cannot handle the sheer amount of people they need to treat. Likewise with the VA, that 307k number was the cumulative total of veterans who died while they were waiting for their applications to be processed.  That number came from a 2015 report detailing problems with the VA's patient intake process and some of the deaths go as far back as 1988.  Obviously this presents a lot of problems for how VA documented and kept track of the veterans seeking to get care which do need to be solved, but just dropping the number without any context over how many years it took to reach it is misleading to say the least.  That Waldman also tries to make the problem of patients dying because they can't get access to care an exclusively single-payer problem by omitting the 50,000 people who die a year here because they don't have insurance is a signal that he's not using these numbers in good faith.  Lastly, a significant reason why the NHS and VA have these problems keeping pace with their patients needs is that they have been subject to massive budget cuts and under-funding for years on end.  Apparently when you don't give doctors or hospitals the resources they need to keep track of or properly care for their patients, those patients end up dying.  Odd, that.

But we haven't gotten to the best part of Waldman's little screed.  Here's Waldman's utopia healthcare scenario:

"In 2017, the U.S. spent $3.4 trillion on healthcare for 323 million Americans, or $10,526 for every man, woman and child. Imagine if every family of four put $42,105 in an HSA every year! and simply shopped for and paid for their health care. No government stealing our money to pay its bureaucracy. No insurance company delaying or denying care. Just the old but right doctor-patient relationship with no one and nothing in between.

The answer isn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rebranded socialism. The answer is for us to turn away from government dependence and rely on ourselves."

This is fantasy.  It'd be like if Waldman said that if men wanted to save money on their colonoscopy's, they should look into alien abduction because they don't bill for their time.  Even if we indulged the absurd notion that the average family of four just has $40k laying around doing absolutely nothing, let's see how far that actually gets people.  The average stay in a hospital here runs people $5,220.  So, if you stay in a hospital for eight of the 365 days out of the year, hope you don't need any other care.  Keep in mind, that's just the cost for laying in bed.  You want even more bundles of joy for your family?  Be prepared to pay $10 grand if you go the natural route or $16k if you need a C-Section.  Need a heart bypass?  Kiss $28,000 of those savings goodbye.

Reading this idiocy, I was reminded of this article by The American Conservative from last year which said that within five years conservatives will either directly offer or quietly assent to a universal healthcare policy.  The reason, they said, was because it was the only way to effectively cover everyone at the lowest possible price.  Which, yes, that's true as any Google search comparing our healthcare costs with the rest of the world will tell you.  As far as they where concerned, "[t]he objections to socialized healthcare crumble upon impact with the reality."  Which, again, is 100% true.  My objection to this article is that it assumes that the conservative movement as a whole actually gives a shit about reality or is capable of recognizing it.  Because right here, in the face of ever-growing popularity for Medicare-For-All single-payer system, we have a man contorting himself to put forward a solution which depends on not only turning away from government health programs but the entire concept of insurance itself.  He's committed to something so abjectly ridiculous because that is what he is paid to do so.  Waldman, and all the other hacks along with him, will only double-down on their farcical positions opposing single-payer healthcare the more popular and inevitable it  becomes, expecting them to examine their beliefs and adjust them in response to evidence is a fools errand.

Which brings me to the last article I wanted to talk about, because when it comes to ignoring reality in all its forms, no one has anything on religious fundamentalists.  This story from the Washington Post covers one evangelical congregation in Alabama and how they handle the supposed moral crisis that would come from being a Christian and a Trump supporter.  Their pastor, a guy named Clay Crum, is even doing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments and just got to the one about adultery.  I guess there's supposed to be some sort of tension in whether or not Crum will say something in his sermon condemning Trump as an adulterer, but if you're able to remember a year back when the good Christian white folk of Alabama did their damnedest to elect a child rapist, it won't come as a surprise when Crum says nothing or how easily the congregation is able to wave away something as petty as philandary.

The article does try really, really hard to act like there is a serious conundrum that Christians are trying to solve, which, I guess they get points for trying?  The Post sets things up like this:

"In poll after poll, they have said that Trump has kept his promises to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, fight for religious liberty, adopt pro-life policies and deliver on other issues that are high priorities for them.

At the same time, many have acknowledged the awkwardness of being both self-proclaimed followers of Jesus and the No. 1 champions of a president whose character has been defined not just by alleged infidelity but accusations of sexual harassment, advancing conspiracy theories popular with white supremacists, using language that swaths of Americans find racist, routinely spreading falsehoods and an array of casual cruelties and immoderate behaviors that amount to a roll call of the seven deadly sins."

All I can really say here is that "awkward" is one hell of a word choice here.  Maybe if we have a sit down with Sheilia Butler, a member of Crum's church, we can better understand this issue, (apologies for the wall of text)

"we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians...

“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in."

 She continues:

Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.
“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.”
Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.”
Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.”
“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”
            To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”
“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne.
“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?”
“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila.
It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives.
“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”
She thought an all-out race war was now in the realm of possibility."

So let's just do a quick run down, shall we?  Here we have conspiracies popular with white supremacists (the idea that Obama was a Muslim), language that swaths of America would find racist/spreading falsehoods (the slavery wasn't that bad trope, citing the time of  Montgomery Bus Protests as a bad thing), and casual cruelty (the complete dismissal of even the idea that she should show compassion to immigrants).  Huh, it's almost as if she supports Trump because she's exactly like him.  Weird.

What makes this unintentionally hilarious is that the congregation is under the umbrella of the Southern Baptists, whose leadership is a little sensitive to the faith's staunch support of Trump since they have a history of- as the article so euphemistically puts it- "whiffing" on major social issues of the time.  During the Civil Rights era, for example,  the Southern Baptists either supported or said nothing against segregation, so when it comes to supporting a man who's putting people in concentration camps, you could see how they might be aware of history repeating itself.  Not that they're going to so anything, mind you, but they're aware this time that supporting Trump makes them look bad, which I guess counts as growth, if you want to really abuse the term.

What really gets me about all this though is how just painfully obtuse all of these people are.  They honestly believe that because they live in a world where black men get to be president, gays can get married, and they're called out for being the hypocritical pieces of shit that they are, that all of that somehow makes them oppressed.  Crum says of the election that "[i]t encouraged them that we do still have some political power in this country," which, my only response to this is: Are you fucking kidding me? Conservative Christians have been the bedrock and sole dictator of Republican's social policy for almost forty years.  You can't be a Republican politician at any level without mentioning how much you love Jesus, every presidential candidate has to make the obligatory promise to nominate judges who will strike down Roe vs Wade; these people have one of the two major political parties in this country by the balls and they still think they're disenfranchised? Honestly, what world are these people living in? (That's not a hard one- they live in the world where Muslims are coming to kill them in the night by sneaking in with Mexicans while simultaneously stirring up black unrest to keep the police busy and since Democrats took all their guns away, they'll be helpless to defend themselves in the religious war waging all around us)

What's ironic about all of this is that Crum left the church for a time when he realized how morally bankrupt it was.  As he put it,

"He saw the pastor of his childhood church stealing money, and as he got older, he saw deacons having affairs, Christians behaving in hateful ways and finally he came to see it all as a big sham.

“I thought it was very hypocritical,” he said. “That they pretend. That it’s all a show.”

Unfortunately, Crum is now just another cast member.  He's taken to wearing this lapel pin of tiny baby feet with the tagline that the pin is the size of a fetus' feet at ten weeks. It's all part of his (and the churches) commitment to being Pro-Life.  But that's just as hypocritical, pretend, and performative as everything else that lead Crum to leave the church in the first place.  It's easy to care about a fetus- it's not a real person yet so it hasn't had a chance to do anything disagreeable like being black and angry, or being born on the wrong side of a border, or gay, or pro-gun control, or for whatever other reason these people come up with to say that they don't have to follow through on their god's commandment to love their enemy as they love themselves.  That hypocrisy isn't unique to this one congregation- it's the cornerstone of the Pro-Life movement, after all- but it serves one of my larger points that you can't expect people to turn away from Trump when he gives them everything they want.

Christianity for these people ultimately isn't a philosophy for them to live their own lives by or seek comfort in during troubled times; at the end of the day, their faith is a weapon to bludgeon everyone else into submission.  It's why they don't mind that Trump denigrates every other aspect of society while telling them that they're the rightful heirs of America, it's why they don't care when he throws non-white people into cages or tears children from their parents arms.  This is the world they want to live in, where they're told over and over again how special they are and all the threats to their power-real or imagined- are mercilessly crushed by the state.  All Trump has done is remove the illusion that they were ever anything else.  I can understand why they would want to perpetuate that illusion, but we're not under any obligation to go along with it.

And Now You Know

It's been a running thing between my brother and I for the last two years that, whenever Trump does something, to say "If you ever wondered how the Nazi's sold their ideas, well, now you know." From his wholesale demonization of an entire minority group from literally day one of his campaign, to his talk about how the press is the enemy of the people, to his promising to use official state power to go after the supposed enemies of "righteous" white conservatives, all of it has followed a very predictable pattern. He jumped the gun a little on concentration camps, but we all make mistakes when we're eager to get things done. Right now, we're in the period were the Administration is actively trying to expel immigrants from as many aspects of public life as they can- like purging the military of immigrant service members or having ICE find whatever pretext it can to strip naturalized citizens of their green cards so they can then be deported to countries they haven't lived in for decades.

For anyone still asking, "How could this happen here?" well, hate to break it to you, but the lines dividing America from the Reich were always much thinner than we've been lead to believe. For one thing, the U.S. was a direct model that the Reich copied on their way to gassing millions of people. The Jim Crow segregation laws were what the Nazi's used as a baseline for the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their property, businesses, homes, establishing curfews and the ghettos they were then forcibly moved into. The eugenics movement that started in America provided the language of what a "pure" society looked like once it had been purged of all undesirables. And Goebbels learned most of the propaganda techniques he would use from American advertising. Considering how fervently America clung (then and now) to the idea that the only "real" citizens are the white ones, it's not too surprising that the Nazi's would find a lot to appreciate in a culture like that.

We've kept other aspects of fascism alive and well in our culture, too. The unquestioning, compulsory patriotism and fetishistic worship our military are both easily exploitable for anyone with Fuhrer ambitions. After all, how weird would it really be to for kids to say a pledge of allegiance to the flag and a picture of the Beloved Leader every morning? How strange is really to "force" public displays of national pride and servitude when the National Anthem plays before literally every single sporting event, and at almost every public gathering in general? Add to that the Republican party has spent the last 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act slowly but surely turning itself into a haven of white nationalism with its own media ecosystem that actively gaslights its consumers into believing that the "Mainstream Media" is merely a front for leftists to undermine their culture by letting the blacks, women, Mexicans, gays, and the (((globalists))) but they were safe now, safe to hear how the Feminazis, and the PC Police where all working to implement the gay agenda of a Islamic Communist New World Order. All in all, we were a country that kept itself primed to accept a fascist paradigm, all we needed was the right circumstances.

And then the 2008 crash happened. The pillaging of the middle class to feed the rich that started under Reagan and refined under the Clintons finally came due as all the credit funding the gambling racket that had become the housing market collapsed under its own weight. Suddenly there were millions of people jobless, homeless, and coming to the quick realization that the government would only give them half-hearted and poorly executed mortgage relief plans while it was busy dumping trillions into rescuing the banks that broke the world in the first place. With the economy so terrible for so long, I figured it was only a question of "When" Republicans would cough up something like Trump, not "If."

So, while America becoming the fascist hell-hole it secretly wanted to be is depressing but not all that surprising to me, what I underestimated was how strong the "civility" response would be. I mean, I've read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail a lot, had shaken my head at the false empathy King lays out when he talks about the White Moderate and how their council to the Civil Rights movement was to suffer their indignities until they, the White Moderates, deemed the appropriate time, place, and methods for black people to be treated as actual people. It made sense on an intellectual level that society would be made up of people who were complacent with the way the world was set up and didn't want to rock the boat because, hey, they got the perks of being automatically higher in social hierarchies and if they had to actually earn that spot, they might not be able to. Even then, seeing these people up close and personal is a hell of thing to behold.

What makes them so dangerous is that these are the people that autocratic and repressive systems depend on the most to sustain themselves, but they get to pass themselves off, both in their minds eye and to the public at large, as the voices of reason, people who are just trying to find a way for all the disparate pieces of society to come together and comprise on their differences. This is fine when you're trying to figure out what movie to go see or what kind of food you want for dinner, but when you have a group on one side saying, "we think immigrants are an infection that needs to be eradicated to keep our country pure" and the other is saying "This is literally how shipping people to gas chambers starts," it's somewhat... lacking.

Their plays at compassion are nothing more than cowardice, no exceptions. If you think that a woman who speaks for the administration who is taking people's children away by saying they're just going to give the child a bath, or that their children will be in a camp nearby where they'll be able to visit, then whisk those children away never to return- again, exactly the same thing the Nazi's did- if you honestly believe that the woman who defends and justifies the administration that does this suffers the same indignity because a restaurant wouldn't serve her, then your moral compass is downright pathetic. The separation  policy- and the straight indefinite detention plan that replaced it- are  monstrous things that makes anyone who supports them, carries them out, or defends them monstrous in turn if they weren't already. Hemming and hawing your way out of condemning those actions and those who champion them isn't a mark of highly developed sense of empathy, it's just complicity.

Part of this stems from how we're taught about the evils of the past, or, more specifically, the kind of people who perpetrate them. We’re taught that the Nazi’s or the racists in power during the Civil Rights Era were always cut from obviously evil cloth who used their power to stomp down all who would oppose them until finally, heroic virtue had its rightful triumph. The image of screaming crowds surrounding black children while they walk into school or the cheering crowds at Hitler’s speeches have all been used to make us think that the only people who openly support these things are the virulent, frothing hordes that we can then safely Other.

What gets left out is all the seemingly perfectly polite people who treated the denigration or extermination of entire sections of society as natural as the sunrise. They are otherwise perfectly sociable, naturally bigoted without any of the obvious stink that comes with say, marching around with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Again, these are the people oppressive regimes live and die by because, when push comes to shove, they’ll be the ones fighting to block any measure of progress or reform by tut-tutting protests as being too disruptive and how they’d be much more effective if people conducted their marches in such a way that they’d be easily ignored. Deep down, these people understand they benefit greatly from “the way things are” and that if they change, they run the risk of losing those benefits which they'd rather not do, thank you.

The other part of this comes from the White Moderates friends, the ones who go to the same clubs and dinner parties but who feel a stronger urge that Something Should Be Done when they watch the news. These are usually the people bemoaning the lack of civility because they don’t like seeing their social circle lumped in with the open bigotry of people in Make America Great Again hats. These are the people who have “Injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice, everywhere” on at least one placard in their home or office and always told themselves that, if they ever lived through a time of moral crisis, they would no doubt be on the side of justice and freedom etc. etc. Now that they find themselves in the that position, they’ve found out that calling out the villainous Other means calling out their mimosa brunch clubs, suddenly standing up for the equality of all mankind against bigotry gets slightly awkward or, horror of horrors, possibly even rude.

So instead of living through that dreadful reality, they start chanting out America is and always has been a land of great compromise; we should all learn to see things from each other’s point of view to find the hallowed middle ground. They keep pushing this idea so that they never have to confront how they’re much more comfortable defending the despotic people than they ever wanted to believe. They think there’s some way to go back to the time where the subtle bigotries and quiet authoritarianism of their social circles could be easily ignored.

Except that’s not going to happen. ICE has already separated an American family by “accident” in their rush to be the new Gestapo, and the time will come where that isn’t a mistake anymore. Don’t brush off the idea that it would never happen because it already has. We’ve already been the land where one ethnic group monolithically ruled over everyone else through direct or state sanctioned violence and executions. Returning us to a time where the state would actively punish or suppress anyone who threatened the white hegemony was the explicit platform of candidate Trump which he’s spent the last year-and-a-half carrying that promise through. You can’t shut the door on that now that the people who wanted to live in that world again know it’s perfectly acceptable to demand it loudly and publicly with the hope that they’ll back off once they rediscover their alleged decency.

Yes, I know the policy was shut down by the courts, as was part of Trump's new plan to hold families together indefinitely. but these will be talked about as obstacles to be overcome by finding judges and Congressmen who will alter the laws so that they can punish these criminals as they deserve. When that moment comes, it'll come to cheers, it'll be made into a galvanizing force for the Republican base, which they will respond to. There isn't going to be a moment where they go "Wait, are we the baddies?" Anyone still riding the Trump train is in it for the long haul, wherever it takes them.

I’m sure someone somewhere will say that I should still give all these people the benefit of the doubt, but, what doubts am I or anyone supposed to have this point? Trump has been doing all his Trump things for three years; everyone by now has had a chance to figure out where they stand. If literal concentration camps aren’t enough of a warning bell that maybe we’re headed in a bad direction and that we shouldn’t be willing to extend so many good graces to the people who support that, I don’t know what will be. There aren't any complicated reasons or motives left for us to discover, there's just the question of what are we going to do.

My bet is that we'll try to sweep all this under the rug of hyper-partisan polarization so we can pretend there's nothing to worry about, or anything to do, because it's just the usual Democrats and Republicans, always calling each other names. We'll retreat into complaining about how the internet has made everyone so much more disconnected, more willing to be mean to one another rather than connect to find a compromise like we did in mythic days of yore. And then, when someone worse than Trump gets the nomination and possibly the presidency, we'll start to wonder all over again how our strategy of doing absolutely nothing to fix our problems could have gone so wrong.