This is the Last Election
Republican candidates are trying to hide their anti-democratic beliefs but if they win the Congress, they won’t hide them any longer.
The Republican Party has gone fully Trump/MAGA/QAnon/extremist. Candidates nominated by the party at this point will be from those circles. In terms of their histories, their policies, their past statements, they will “feel” a little off as they struggle to hide their more extreme beliefs.
Lee Zeldin, candidate for NY Gov, is trying to hide his direct links to the insurrection, his open support for Trump’s big lie and his extreme anti-abortion positions by railing about crime in NYC. What he can’t hide is the white supremacy threaded through his and other GOP candidates’ hyperbolic, anti-urban, crime wave rhetoric.
GOP politicians DeSantis and Lake are pushing the language of authoritarian politics, attacking voting, LGBTQI folks, immigrants, their language interwoven with “freedom,” guns, and attacking the media. The tension between book banning on one hand and protecting constitutional freedoms on the other hand creates a weird hysteria in Republican candidates and their supporters. The tension they carry is almost too much for them to bear.
The flex it takes for Republicans to angrily defend our sacred individual rights as framed in the Constitution while also telling little girls they must give birth to their rapists’ babies, leaves GOP candidates wild eyed angry, seeking to batter the electorate into submission.
Young people have long ignored elections. No more. Young people are registering to vote in huge numbers. The overturn of Roe has brought GOP extremism to their very bodies. The GOP’s anti-democratic hysteria that sounds like a new American patriotism to baby boomers is quite clearly seen as impending violence by young people.
Young people are quick to recognize the weird bullying hysteria of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump. They recognize the threat of the frenetic energy of GOP free speech/book burning, the ugly hypocrisy straining to the breaking point leading inevitably to violence.
The Republican Party built its immense power and influence by herding its white boomer base incrementally towards authoritarian extremism, one Rush Limbaugh, one Tucker Carlson at a time. The GOP rage farmed a generation via drumbeat messaging seeding white victimhood.
But the progress towards authoritarianism is always an accelerating spiral, picking up speed as new leaders seek to one up each other, to model their willingness to dominate others in ever more extreme ways. We saw this dynamic as Govs Abbott and DeSantis competed to show who could bus more exhausted confused Latin American refugees north.
While children are gunned down in their classrooms and hurricanes rip up uninsured neighborhoods, Republican candidates like DeSantis and Abbott rant about groomers and trans surgical mutilations, push anti-vax hysteria, deny climate change, gin up fictional crime waves.
Young people are quickly and easily recognizing the twitchy energy of trauma damaged Republican sociopaths. The rest of us are less ready to see it for what it really is. We cling to the tinny illusion of normalcy offered by both sides journalism and shiny plastic consumerism. We’re desperately pretending what is happening right in front of us, is not.
GOP candidates are telling us they will come for all who do not support them. If Democrats don’t win this election in overwhelming numbers what comes next from the GOP won’t be twitchy at all. The twitchy tension we see in Republican candidates like DeSantis, Abbott, Lake, Vance, Oz, and all the rest, is born out of the pretense of election year civility. They’re hiding their true selves and it causes them distress. If they win, that distress will be gone.
If Republicans win a majority of the Congress the irritating tension they have had to hold will be released as a wave of political, economic and physical violence against every population that is a threat to their power. The illusion of election year civility will be gone, likely forever.
This is not a normal election. These new Republican leaders are not normal politicians. They are accelerating towards authoritarianism and their rage at being obstructed by our Democratic institutions will know no bounds. They will destroy all of our rights. They will end much more than just the right to gay marriage, abortion and birth control. They will come after after right we have. Happily.
This is my last article before Nov. 8th. So, in closing let me say this. If you have not voted yet, get the fuck up and go.
