It’s been about a week and a half since our government was attacked. It was an American attack on America. It was based on a lie in service of a distorted truth. The lie, that the election had been stolen. The truth, that many establishments, including the operational core of the Republican party and most of the business community, do not care about the Republican voter and, even as they are happy to sell that voter worthless supplements, payday loans, and other manner of vile pseudocapitalist dreck, they were happy to see Donald John Trump lose in 2020.
I was also happy, more for Biden’s and Harris’ win. The fact remains that the attackers had some reason behind their beliefs, even while their methods and their beliefs are both horrible. That vague background reason, the lack of shifts needed in labor and law, in education and immigration, remain to be tackled today. They are rocks on the beach, standing among crashing waves that try to wear them away, to carry them out with the next tide. The opponents of progress, of breaking new ground on policy, they open the door to demagogues, incompetent or not.
But I still return to why Donald John Trump could trick so many fools. Why would they attack their own country for such a straight-up loser? In adding to my list of reasons, one more: he does look different. He does act different. To myopic conservative schmucks, that difference may have been enough: he certainly wasn’t a typical politician. He was a departure. A false messiah to some of them, to be sure.
If you’re told they’re all the same, and along comes something different, you have no basis for judging. Your average American voter doesn’t have the background, the history, the experience, to tell fool’s gold from the real stuff. As I’ve said somewhere before, that’s part of the reason it was so damaging to have the mainstream media rubberneck at him, and for the Republicans to have him stand on a debate stage with all those politicians: it gave him prominence. But to add to that, it also gave him contrast. They weren’t of the same cloth. He did glitter differently. And always ready was that same kludge, when nothing else worked: ‘Your kind has run this country for decades, why haven’t you fixed it?’
That’s one of the lessons for Republicans: the stonewalling of legislation, always blocking deals on immigration, on other useful bills, plays right into the hands of a mobster like Donald John Trump.
America does need to help the kinds of people who attacked it. Not by doing what they ask, by capitulating to them, but by building better programs and systems both public and private to help everyone get more education and more stability. Things like a major increase in the number of representatives so that there will be more House members able to give voice to more individuals.
In short, the government must legislate in ways that it should be doing anyway. But if it continues to stall out the known solutions to known problems because some rich fucks like collecting rent on broken-ass systems, we’ll keep seeing dysfunction in the citizenry.
Next Wednesday Biden and Harris are sworn in, become president and vice president.