This Hair Cannot Be Split

THIS HAIR CANNOT BE SPLIT

By Deborah Long

Today I received a friend request from a guy named Joe Tiernan whose FB cover photo image is shown below.

As I read through his appalling postings, I clicked on his cover photo and read a screed that was so loathsome, so twisted, so deplorable that I decided to write this post. His choice of photos was taken from another site: Real News Network - https://www.facebook.com/TierneyRealNewsNetwork/. This is essentially a hate site that cynically exploits the old cliché that “everybody is entitled to their own opinions”, while promoting the hate policies of the Republican Party: its white supremacy, its casual cruelty, and its malignant racism.

I thoroughly understand that politics is as much about strategy as it is about ideals. And Democrats have, as a result, chosen to campaign on what are bread and butter issues like jobs and healthcare. Thus, no emphatic impeachment speeches, no party sanctioned outrage at the criminality of this president and his complicit congressional Republican apparatchiks.

But incrementalism will not rid us of a political party that is effectuating a soft coup in the United States.

• The Republican Party is entirely responsible for the Great Recession of 2008

• The Republican Party is entirely responsible for the calamitous policies of blanket deregulation that enabled Wall Street to gorge on our national treasury with unregulated financial instruments and shadow banking that required a federal bailout to stave off another Great Depression.

• The Republican Party is entirely responsible for the tax fraud perpetrated on Americans through its risible supply-side economic theory – a theory that has been thoroughly denounced by all economists.

• The Republican Party is entirely responsible for its decades-long opposition to civil rights, women’s rights, and human rights.

• The Republican Party is entirely complicit in an historic obstruction of justice intended to maintain Donald Trump’s presidency while aiding Russian national interests.

This is a party that wrote its party platform to support the national interests of Russia, a hostile foreign state, during its 2016 nominating convention. It is guilty of violating our constitution with its kidnapping and persecution of immigrant children. It is committing unconstitutional voter suppression through its racist legislation to purge voter rolls and intimidate minority voters. And it refuses to perform its constitutional duties to protect the citizens of America.

But if we fail to hold a mirror to the supporters of the Republican Party – to this angry community of Republican sympathizers - they will eventually take America to another version of America: “One Reich, One Volk, One Führer”. Sound hyperbolic? Not anymore.

Here is Hillary Clinton’s full speech (http://www.latimes.com/…/la-na-trailguide-updates-transcrip…) concerning the supporters of Donald Trump – her “Deplorables” speech. Perhaps, as Charles Blow wrote in 2016, her characterization of these Republican voters was impolitic. But surely at this point we can all agree that what she said was both prescient and indisputably correct.

And it appears that our party’s abandonment - at the feet of political expedience - of Clinton’s truth has led us to the politics of today.

The GOP is neither grand nor old anymore. It’s a hybrid of plutocratic interests and 20th century fascism. Donald Trump is not a legitimate president, and the GOP is not a legitimate party in America. It is a malignant cancer – a political party that intends to dismantle our democracy, institution by institution, and replace these buttresses against tyranny with a vicious plutocracy of proto-fascists.

While I hear the strategic arguments made by party leadership to campaign locally about bread and butter issues like jobs and healthcare, I ask myself how winning back the House will quell this soft coup that is taking place.

I ask this question: Why didn't our Democratic Party -why didn’t we - defend Hillary Clinton’s depiction of these Republican racists as a “basket of deplorables” in 2016? By ceding this moral space, we cede our future as a liberal Democracy. By failing to condemn this incipient fascism, we have given this movement oxygen. Our silence has made them stronger. The Democratic Party is guilty of going for a temporary win instead of a victory. If we don’t start calling these fascists out now, we could bear witness to the words of Martin Niemöller, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me”. In failing to condemn those we know support this Republican Party with their vote, no matter how big the Blue Wave in November is, we will lose.

As Charles Blow wrote, “This hair cannot be split”.