Authoritarianism Rising

The former "moral majority party" doesn’t give a rat’s back end about the people, just power.

When a political party incessantly fear-mongers “communism” and “socialism” to the masses, while breaking from all democratic norms of a Republic – by suppressing the vote, truth, decency and reality – then authoritarianism already has one clumsy foot in the door.

If no one ever said that before, someone should have.

Five years ago, I concluded an opinion that appeared in the local weekly newspaper, The Herald, with these words:

“Rock bottom line: Obsessive greed and the relentless pursuit of absolute power, is the mad scientist that inadvertently electrified and enlivened this amalgamation of our lesser selves, (Donald) Trump, to run amok, deceive, disparage and ultimately destroy with impunity.”

At this unsettling point five years hence – after so much deception-generated upheaval, degradation and tragic death in these un-United States – what more really is there to say?

In 2016, amid the ugly, unprecedented precipitous rise of an unrepentant demagogue to power, many of us Americans sensed gratingly and forebodingly in our spirit the absurdity and imminent danger of handing the Oval office keys to a man demonstrably bereft of any sense of decency and devoid of any hint of compassion, for even one month, let alone four years.

The writing in bold-faced, capital letters was on the wall.

But the long disenfranchised were blinded by their desperation for a savior. Many of my fellow white Christian evangelicals who have worshipped the Republican Party as an idol for decades, since the days of the alleged the “Morale Majority Party” led by political opportunist Jerry Falwell, were hoodwinked again.

“Donald Trump is what happens, he’s the result, the divine justice administered, in the wake of so much criminal negligence and inexcusable abandonment of the people in their most desperate times of need,” I wrote in that same Herald opinion five years ago.

Decades of tireless hypocritical policy and lies masking our society’s engrained economic disparities and racial inequities which oppressed the “least of these” for so long, finally manifest into the glaringly obvious – Donald Trump.

And now, the destroyer has destroyed. And continues to destroy. And he’ll keep on destroying as long as his sycophantic abetters, in high office and across the American lowlands, give him license.

For the sake of salvaging the Republic, let's drop this “bothsidesing" talk, as if each of the two present day political parties had an equally legitimate argument or agenda. They don’t.

One party is eviscerating truth daily, working feverishly to suppress the minority vote, muddling our nation’s racist history, opposing desperately needed jobs/infrastructure stimulus and obstructing a probe into the machinations behind the Jan. 6, deadly Capitol coup attempt that shook this nation to its core.

The other party is defending the truth, trying to protect the vote, coming to terms with the nation’s systemic racism, striving to pass legislation that fires up the economy and rebuilds America and urgently is seeking answers to how our Republic was nearly overthrown by a bunch of Trump-loving insurrectionists six month ago.

Through all the chaos and pain that Donald Trump exacerbated -- the Covid-19 pandemic that killed nearly 600,000 Americans, the racial unrest sparked by George Floyd's murder, escalation in hate crimes and mass shootings -- it's as if an almighty Creator has been shining a giant LED spotlight on this nation's vast inequities so that we might finally start acting right.

But, still, way too few of us are picking up what God's been putting down.