Well, I’ve rarely been as happy to be proven wrong, but Trump left DC on January 20th, just as he was supposed to. I was surprised, and apparently I’m not the only one. The Trump acolytes were ready to commit a mass act of sedition in order to keep him in office and missed their goal by a relatively small margin. Will this be enough to break the Trump party?
My sense is that the end of the GOP has not happened yet. But the end of the DNC isn’t far away. I’ve suspected since 2012 that the Republican faction of the ‘Country Club’ Repubs would break away from the party of Trump. The Reagan Revolution involved opening the party to the crazies. If you’re confused, the ‘crazies’ were the evangelicals and conspiracy-mongers of the John Birch society. William F Buckley had no stomach for them, and such people were banned from the pages of his influential NATIONAL REVIEW. And Mike Bloomberg came to the ‘rescue’ of the DNC in 2018. But did he really? The congressional freshmen he came to the rescue for had to keep eschew support for Green New Deal, Medicare for All and ESPECIALLY avoid income inequality as a talking point. Don’t trust me? NPR’s 2018 report on an aspiring congressperson has some insights. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/649/its-my-party-and-ill-try-if-i-want-to . Stripped of support for those issues, the D’s are what used to be called moderate Republicans (think Nelson Rockefeller or Jacob Javits). Considering 2020 was the year Bloomberg once again tried to run for President as a Democrat, it shouldn’t surprise us. Are the ‘moderate’ Republicans jumping ship? Because to me the rumbling noises from ‘centrist’ Republicans like Kasich and Romney (and the overt hostility of the DNC leadership to people like the Squad) indicate that Schumer and Pelosi would be really happy to run a minor Republican party.
And the crazy wing of the GOP was a relatively new phenomenon. People like Bill Buckley worked assiduously to keep the crazies out of the GOP. That was the evangelicals and John Birchers. All that changed when Reagan opened the gates for the Religious Right. And Trump wasn’t just offering platitudes–I have no doubt that Trump wanted to revisit decisions against prayer in public schools. The various Religious communities looked the other way on Trump’s racist, adulterous ways because he was making a case for tax deductions for tuitions in religious based private schools. Trump had mentioned this repeatedly to his religious followers, and after the election, he tried to use the pandemic as an excuse:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/28/trump-private-schools-pandemic-451757
President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order allowing states to use their share of money from a federal anti-poverty program to provide vouchers to help “disadvantaged families” pay for private school tuition, homeschooling or other educational expenses during the pandemic.
The move comes after the $900 billion coronavirus relief deal, H.R. 133 (116), that Trump signed on Sunday excluded many of the school choice provisions that his administration and GOP lawmakers had sought to include in that sweeping legislation.
I wonder if Biden can change this (or already has changed it) through executive order.
The next point for lefties/progressives to fight for (and it has to happen). The indictments for Trump have to start rolling in. It can be from New York Attorney General Letitia James, or it can come from the Southern District, which received boxes full of evidence from Robert Mueller that he couldn’t act on. It has to happen. We received the clearest message of creeping fascism since the Reichstag fire, and if people who facilitated it haven’t been sent to court soon, we’ll be refighting all this in a few years or less.
The Brooklyn Culture Jam 