During the 2020 election some adherents of the Republiscum Party have drawn back in horror at the actions of the Orange Führer and collected themselves into a sort of political kaffeklatsch called "The Lincoln Project". This Neo-Fascist Liberation Front is opposing the re-election of the Orange Führer in a fuddled flurry of regret and crocodile tears. They are the precise equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein recoiling in horror at the monster he has created.
Many years ago one of my dearest and oldest friends had to put up with meetings her partner held with his friends to discuss Marxism and other Lefty ideologies over wine and snacks. She called them "The Bourgeoisie Liberation Front". Basically they were pretentious "Limousine Liberals" who couldn't afford a 10-year old Volkswagen Beetle but had hopes. The Lincoln Project recalls that to me because they seem to be the Neo-Fascist right wing's answer to that old group of chit-chatters.
Let me say at the outset that all opposition to the Orange Führer has been and will continue to be good opposition regardless of whence it comes. I applaud their advertising and interventions on behalf of the Orange Führer opponents. The enemy of my enemy is definitely my friend...through November 3, 2020. Yet while I am pleased to get in the proverbial bed with these folks I think a "bundling board" is necessary lest we get too close and I become infected with the syphilitic Neo-Fascism of which they are carriers.
As usual with these blog posts, let me take you on a brief and admittedly jaundiced (Because it's factual) view of history.
The Republican Party (they hadn't yet become scum) came together from four disparate groups following the election of 1852. In that log cabin in Ripon, Wisconsin were "free soil" westerners, abolitionists and representatives of the essentially defunct Whig Party. Their candidate in the 1856 presidential election, John Charles Fremont, carried the Whig and free soil strongholds of New England, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. He also carried New York despite New Yorker Millard Fillmore's candidacy that claimed only Maryland's electors. Fillmore, who had started his career in the bigoted, conspiracy drenched Anti-Masonic Party, was the candidate of the American Party. Democrat James Buchanan of Pennsylvania became president and perhaps our most ineffectual holder of that office. Once the American Party better known as the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and racist Know-Nothings showed an ability to win votes in the east and border states the nascent Republican Party quickly allied themselves with that rabble.
The rest is, as they say, history. Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with but 40% of the popular vote in 1860 yet he got us through our Civil War, preserved the Union, established that we were once and for all United states and ended all slavery within our nation. After his assassination in 1865, at the very moment of victory, the Republican Party began morphing into the Republiscum Party of today.
The Republican Party inherited from the defunct Whigs a tradition of putting forward candidates who were war heroes (some with thin claim to any heroism). In the aftermath of our Civil War Republican candidates for national office continuously "waved the bloody shirt" which, beside claiming wartime service and heroism, also pointed out that Democrats were not the Party that "saved the Union".
The other major result of the Civil War was an officer corps which started off as politically connected, gained the friendship, counsel and support of the business men who greatly profited from the war and ensuing Reconstruction, and who later advanced the veteran officers' post-war careers. This situation created a cadre of staunchly Republican, exceptionally wealthy men who always had ambitions to wield power and often had ambitions to front for that power as office holders.
Not that ambition is an inherently bad thing or, contrary to the proverbial, that money is inherently evil. No insentient and insensible object is inherently evil though such objects do frequently bring out the evil in those who desire and accumulate them. Fighting to the death (usually someone else's) to keep increasing one's wealth, power and serve ever expanding ambitions, that is the very definition of evil. So it came about that cadre of staunch Republicans in the decades following the Civil War morphed inexorably from the Republican Party of Lincoln into the Republiscum Party of Mitch McConnell and the Orange Führer.
As the Republican Party morphs into a club for monied, elitist scum you get the violent suppression of voting and civil rights of Afro-Americans through segregation, Ku Klux Klan violence and "Jim Crow" Laws once the Republican Party turned their backs on the black folks they'd just fought to free, so that they might get Rutherford B. Hayes elected president in early 1877. You get the murderous suppression of workers' rights both with private armies of "Pinkerton Men" and with Federal troops in multiple cases and even the aerial bombing of strikers in the 1920s. You get often violent suppression of the rights of small farmers seeking fair prices for their goods and agricultural workers seeking fair wages on industrial farms. You get financial scandals involving government officials, major banks, public funds and massive corruption every 3 to 5 years and major Depressions about every 20 years. You get a political party that represents an ever diminishing portion of the population that seeks to stay in power by sowing fear, hatred and division between religious, ethnic, racial and economic groups with common interests in order to keep their opposition fragmented and weak. Throw in a generous helping of suppressing the voting rights of non-whites and you get, by 1920, The Republiscum Party.
Yes, I will admit that there have been individual bright spots in the Republiscum Party's record of darkness over the last century but all of them have flashed brightly only to be enveloped in darkness and amnesia. Robert M. LaFollette, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick, Elliot Richardson, William Ruckelshaus, Pete McCloskey and a number of others. Besides a love of their country and Constitution and a profound sense of decency the other thing that these Republicans, except Pete McClosky, have in common is that they are all dead.
The Republiscum Party has relentlessly moved to positions that would be familiar to the fascists of the 1920s and '30s, Benito Mussolini or Fransisco Franco. At the same time they have adopted the vilest tactics of the Nazi Party's rise in the 1928 to 1933 period. Take any speech on immigration by any Republiscum office holder over the last 20 years and substitute the word "Jew" for "immigrant" and you will find something entirely consistent with Brown Shirts goosestepping by torchlight at Nürnberg. Compare the tactics of Nazis in the Reichstag before the fall of the Weimar Republic with Mitch McConnell's tactics of obstruction since 2011 and you will find what I wish I could say is an uncanny correlation. A sizeable number of Republiscum supporters style themselves as "Patriots" in much the same way as a majority of evangelicals style themselves as "Christian" though in neither case do their alleged patriotism or Christianity relate in any substantive way to the tenets of our nation or the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
From out of this noisome cesspool of fascism called the Republiscum Party now rise some "Never Trumpers" and newly annointed "Not Anymore Trumpers" like Jeff Flake and Ben Sass, Bill Kristol and George Will and the "Team" at The Lincoln Project. I am happy to find that there are members of the Republiscum Party who reject our Orange Führer. With any luck at all some or even all of them actually support our Constitution and have a modest belief in democracy though those qualities have been in drastically short supply amongst Republiscum for the last 60 years.
These are people who have polluted the airwaves with their right-wing screeds, who have worked to steal the 2000 election, which is, by the way, the only presidential election in the United States that has been stolen from its rightful winner since 1876, who have sewn the seeds that the Orange Führer has been reaping. To say that the Orange Führer is an aberration, something inconsistent with the Republiscum Party that has sought to ruin our nation and destroy democracy itself since the 1920s is to be blind to history and those in The Lincoln Project that have worked mightily to bring a neo-Nazi scum like the Orange Führer to power. These are the very people who have derided progressive taxation as an assault on enterprise when it is the very source for enterprise. These people in The Lincoln Project have promoted the insane theory that giving ever greater wealth to the few raises the standard of living for the many. They have promoted authoritarian approaches to policing, justice for and decency to the poor and middle classes setting the one against the other. They have sewn division of region against region, race against race, religion against religion and neighbor against neighbor for the sole purpose of fragmenting an electorate that might otherwise rise up against their failed and self-serving policies. They have promoted and enacted a militarization of local police forces turning those who should protect and serve all our citizens into an occupying army that murders the poor and minorities with impunity.
Now, at long last, when their vicious, anti-democratic policies have reached the goal for which they have worked so mightily to achieve, now they expect us to forget their rush toward totalitarian plutocracy has achieved its goal and a piddling, mewling sop to the democracy, in which they do not at all believe, will make us forgive all their fascism.
On leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Benjamin Franklin supposedly answered a call from the crowd asking, "Do we have a republic or a monarchy?" by saying, "A republic if you can keep it." If we simply thank The Lincoln Project's founders and adherents and welcome these vipers back into the life of our nation we are not only failing to keep our republic but failing to deserve it as well.
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