Not doing it.

I thought I'd revisit this post from a year ago, in which I noted that:

"...the GOP in it's present incarnation really offers only two policy "things":

1. Working for open oligarchy, and
2. Comfort for white nationalism, Christian theocracy, and fear of the "others" (whether those others are gay, or brown, or Muslim)

I know that sounds harsh, but...that's really it, isn't it? It's all tax cuts and privatize and deregulate and unshackle Wall Street and shove the homos back in the closet and no abortion and open carry everywhere. "Small government"? Sure...unless you count the DoD. Or the NSA.

There's no GOP vision of a future United States that doesn't really come down to a return to the Gilded Age, is there?"

For which I was castigated as "...unpersuasive and mean spirited."


Well.

Now that we've had a year of open corruption on a scale that would have made U.S. Grant pale with disbelief and Warren Harding green with envy, a year of fire and fury, blowhard tweets and idiotic name-calling, a year of selling off the national patrimony to crony capitalists, of trying to yank medical insurance away from poor people, a year that included a tax measure that prohibits you from deducting your home mortgage, medical expenses, state taxes, and what your kid's teacher spends on crayons but lets me deduct the cost of my private jet, a year dominated by a federal government run by people who seem to have carefully watched the vile doings of every cartoon villain ever scripted and then turned to Skeletor and announced "Here. Hold my beer."

Is there really anyone who still thinks I was "unpersuasive and meanspirited"?

Jesus wept. Yeah, in one sense I WAS unpersuasive. I honestly didn't think these people could be this appalling. Yep. I didn't see that coming. I didn't think that it was possible for a grown human with a functioning hindbrain to WANT to act like a fucking cartoon movie villain.

And here's the thing.

It's pretty damn easy to destroy a social contract. And that's what's going on right now.

For about fifty years we lived with the social contract hammered out by the New Deal. The wealthy would give up a little of their wealth, the middle class a little less, and in return we'd get labor and social peace. Since the old and sick didn't have to fear dying penniless they could stop fighting the ownership class' greed. So our country still had very few rich and many poor, it just wasn't quite so vicious about it. The sort of riots and strikes and radicalism that tore the country in the 1880s and 1890s and Teens and Twenties. The sort of thing that produced the Russian Revolution and then Italian fascism and then the Spanish Republicans.

And that's going away now, folks, if the people who run things in D.C. have any say about it.

You and I are going back to the future, to a New Gilded Age where the rich do what they can and the poor suffer what they must.

And you know what's so infuriating about that?

It's that that's not even good for the idiot plutocrats that are pushing it.

You think "regulations" are the problem? Try going back to the time before the Clean Air and Water Acts, when you could dump anything and everything into the air and water and not give a shit who it poisoned.

You think financial regulations are a problem? Try going back to financial "panics" every other decade, as used to slam the nation in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

I'm here to warn you. I'm here to be MORE unpersuasive and meanspirited. Dammit, people, this isn't just a political disagreement. The Trumpkins and their allies have turned out to be far worse than anyone every thought they could be. They are demolishing the very society built on the social contract of the New Deal. They're doing the goddamn best to return the U.S. to the social, economic, and political environment of 1890.

And if that happens, assuming that rising seas and violent storms don't do the job first, we're going back to a time that almost none of us can conceive and no living American remembers.

But for those of us not in the two-yacht family I can tell you - it was NOT a good time for us.

I wish I had faith that We the People would recognize this and band together to defeat and destroy it. But then I see that damn near two-fifths of my "fellow citizens" think that the Tangerine Toddler, Crock-o-bile Dumm-ee, is doing a heckuva job and I despair.

As we used to say about Dubya's Great Mess-o-Potamia:

Unless We the People, unless you and me and him and her get together and kick these damn Trumpkins dead square in the ass, we are all so, so, SO fucked.

...the fun is having lots to do and not doing it."

I don't want the 'Pub to become a political commentary blog, but this election has me worried, and not (like Lisa) because I seem to becoming objectively Trump-curious or (like PF) I'm worried that Hitlery will invade Poland.

No.

I'm worried for what I see as the long-term implications for the United States' system of government.

First, let's agree that it is blindingly obvious to anyone that hasn't drunk the wingnut Koolade that the GOP in it's present incarnation really offers only two policy "things":

1. Working for open oligarchy, and
2. Comfort for white nationalism, Christian theocracy, and fear of the "others" (whether those others are gay, or brown, or Muslim)

I know that sounds harsh, but...that's really it, isn't it? It's all tax cuts and privatize and deregulate and unshackle Wall Street and shove the homos back in the closet and no abortion and open carry everywhere. "Small government"? Sure...unless you count the DoD. Or the NSA.

There's no GOP vision of a future United States that doesn't really come down to a return to the Gilded Age, is there?

Now...don't get me wrong. I'm not in love with the mainstream corporate-whoring Democratic Party. The Dems' neglect of the horrible effects of capital flight, economic inequality, and crony corporatism are a yuuuuuuge part of why we're in this mess right now.

But.

The Sanders movement shows that the Democrats CAN be pulled to the left.

Not only can the GOP not go there...it's obvious that it won't even let the corporatist centerist Democrats go there - it won't let them be corporate centerist Democrats because they're insufficiently fucking nutzoid for smacking homos, luuurving Jesus and snowflake babies, hugging rich people and big corporations, and bombing the shit out of darkies and fuzzy-wuzzies.

The ugly parallel that jumps to my mind (and I’m not the only one, given the spate of articles about this…) is the rise of Jacksonism in the 1820s.

And the reason that scares me is the damage Jacksonism did; the next thirty years of American politics were dominated by Jacksonians and Jacksonian policies like internal minority genocide and external aggressive war. Plus the malign neglect of slavery (or the outright approval of and expansion-encouragement of it). A whole bunch of our worst Administrations were Jacksonian, culminating in Buchanan. Basically Jacksonism was the bedrock on which the Civil War was founded. One of the worst features of the politics of Jacksonism was that it helped made it impossible for the United States to simply outlaw slavery as Great Britain did between 1830 and 1845. Jacksonism wasn't the only reason, or the main reason...but it was a reason, and not a small one.

The upside of GOPism (call it "Trumpism if you want, but can we accept the the Donald is just the inevitable culmination of 40 years of what the GOP has asked for?) versus Jacksonism is that we no longer have a franchise limited to white males.

The downside is that the GOP’s propaganda machine has done a helluva a great job pulling in the “white male allies”; Christian theocrats, people fearful of imaginary jihadis under the bed, and the plutocracy into a coalition that looks like it represents about 40% of the public.

And the downside of that is that this hard nut of "conservatives" is dead-set against allowing the United States any government but the one they desire.

Do I think that we will see “another Jackson Administration” anytime soon? Probably – and hopefully – not.

But I think that the GOP has become a self-licking icecream cone; I think that regardless of whether the media comes down hard on the Trumpeters after November that this hard core of Jacksonians will not dissipate, and the United States will be, in effect, dealing with the same situation that broke the nation in 1860; there will be a large, indigestible, irredentist minority that will never, NEVER accept the legitimacy of their opponents. No non-Jacksonian/Trumpter will be allowed to govern. Obstruction will be the order, not just of the day but of the week, the year, the decade.

And let's not even start into the nightmare place the GOP is taking us with it's "vote fraud" and "rigged election" fantasies.

And the problem with THAT (beyond the problem of a dysfuntional U.S. government) is that I think, eventually, the American public will get frustrated with the dysfunction. And, as now, there won't be an acceptance that one of the two major parties our first-past-the-post system allows us is a craven lickspittle for corporate power while the other has gone utterly Jacksonian-batshit-nuts but anger and frustration at "both sides".

We the People will writhe and fume - not at the oligarchy we have become, but - that the oligarchy itself no longer "works".

We the People will look for a “savior”, and in my horrified imagination that "savior" will be a Man on Horseback.

And then all the sort of worrying and fretting and discussing things like policies and strategies and politics that we do here will be over and done with, and I hope I am safely dead long before that happens.

Trump is No Andrew Jackson

Trump needs less press, not more, so this will be brief. 
Recently, I've heard some folks that want to do the comparison between Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson.

Over at Sic Semper Tyrannis: Is it 1828 again? and Jackson Part Two By Richard Sale
And also at Fabius Maximus: What the press won’t tell you about Trump and populism
Also the NYTimes: Donald Trump's Secret? Channeling Andrew Jackson

The similarities between these men is so superficial that I find the comparison more illuminating of those making the comparison than of Donald Trump.

Just consider this 'similarity' from the NY Times Article

In an 1806 duel, he shot and killed a man who had insulted him in a newspaper. Mr. Trump’s Twitter broadsides at his critics are gentle by comparison.

Really? 'Twitter broadsides' vs shooting a critic? 
Here's what I learned of their similarities from these articles. First, they focus very much around the 'nationalist' / 'populist' nature of Andrew Jackson and Donal Trump.  They are 'vulgar' and 'of the people' and are opposing sclerotic party apparatchiks.  They appeal to southern whites in Appalachia more than elsewhere and promise to support the common man and protect them from harmful elites.  They are all of a single 'style' nature.

Now let's explore just one of the incredibly important and massive differences between the two.

Andrew Jackson, before he ran for President, was a war hero and a general who fought several important battles and secured a huge amount of territory for white settlement in the American South. He came from abject poverty, built a fortune on the edge of civilization, was a huge part of erecting government services and spent many years in public service.  Jacksonville, FL and Jackson, MS are cities that bear his name because of his importance to those states. Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida owe him a huge debt.  Native American tribes rightfully see him as an archenemy.  The slave economy would not have been possible without him and his acolytes getting things done.
Donald Trump is a relatively successful real estate developer, he is a successful reality TV star, he's a serial entrepreneur and an occasional political schemer.  He was born rich and stayed rich.  He's done pretty much zilch for anyone else.  Donald Trump is an entertainer who is playing a political rabble-rouser.

The profound difference between the two is that one did shit and the other just talks shit.  Talking up Trump as a Jacksonian only obscures the fact that our political system and American society in general is in serious crisis. 
His success doesn't require outlandish political and historical analogies to explain his victories.  The horrendous mess that our politics are explains it just fine.  Donald Trump is major news and a serious contender because he is competing against political midgets.  Every single Republican candidate would have been chased off in our past political ages early and often.  And the Democrats have a very similar problem. 

The other things to consider is that for all the racism and prejudices in our older society, it was a nation that was hacking out civilization on the frontier.  Venturing west of Appalachia in the 1800s was the undertaking of bold and foolhardy people.  To what degree does that boldness continue in the creation of apps and the consumption of luxury goods?  Does our society still have the material from which to produce great politicians for the people?

Trump/Jackson comparisons bury the lead in all cases.  The desire for a Jackson is greater than the capacity of any current candidate to produce.