Trump’s MAGA GOP solely wants to seize absolute political and economic power.
THOM HARTMANN in ThomHartmann.Com
They rant about brown people pouring over the southern
border but refuse to even discuss what could be done about it. In fact, when
the Senate came up with a workable solution, Republicans in the House killed it
at the insistence of former U.S. President Donald Trump. No policies, no
solutions other than a Nazi-like roundup of 11 million people and a series of
concentration camps.
They complain about the state of the economy, but have no
arguments about what can be done to enhance the economy other than more tax
cuts for billionaires, who are already paying a pathetic average 3.4% income tax.
They whine that our students aren’t doing well but refuse
to engage in any serious discussion about how to take us back to the era when
America had the newest and most successful public education system in the
world.
They’ll yell about prescription drug prices and the high
cost of insurance, but their only policy suggestion is to end Obamacare and
Medicaid.
They love to slander Back Lives Matter and big cities with large Black
populations but refuse to even entertain a conversation about healing the
racial divide in this country; instead, their efforts are directed toward
outlawing or decertifying Black History classes, as just happened in
South Carolina.
All of this is because the GOP is now a post-politics
party.
The reason why is simple and straightforward: The people
who’ve captured the Republican Party envision a day when they won’t have to
even pretend that they’re engaging in good-faith political discussions or
negotiations because they will have outlawed, sidelined, or intimidated their
opposition into impotence and silence.
They’re using our political system this election year, in
other words, so they can seize enough power to destroy our political system.
And they have a model they’re using for what they want to
replace it with: the Confederacy.
In the first decade of the 19th century, the invention of the cotton gin transformed the South, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The machine could do the work of 50 enslaved people, so the wealthiest plantation owners could wipe out thousands of small farmers and other competitors.
Now that one machine could clean as much cotton as 50
people, every cotton plantation faced the possibility that it could produce 50
times as much cotton (and profit), if only it had 50 times as much land to grow
the cotton on and 50 times as many people to pick it.
The wealthiest among the Southern oligarchs colluded on
price-fixing to bankrupt and then buy out small farms and plantations for
pennies on the dollar. Within a few decades, by the early 1840s, a handful of
fabulously wealthy families had seized complete control of the economic and
political systems of each state in the Old South.
And they brooked no opposition: White men who dared run
or vote against them in elections were often assassinated or lynched;
newspapers were seized and handed over to oligarchs friendly to the plantation
owners; elections became a mere charade. They even monitored the mail: If you
wrote a letter to a friend complaining about the end of democracy, you’d find
yourself in prison or hanged from a tree.
Democracy in the South, by the 1850s, was completely
dead. The Confederacy had become a police state. And then they reached out to
try to end that pesky remnant of democracy in the North, as well.
It’s nearly exactly what the MAGA GOP is trying to do
today.
As historian Dr. Forrest A. Nabors wrote in his brilliant
book From Oligarchy to Republicanism:
The Great Task of Reconstruction, the richest families in
the South had replaced democracy with a violent oligarchy, what today I’d call
fascism:
A new generation of rulers reshaped the South around
their new ruling principle… The development of Southern oligarchy portended the
rupture of the union, regardless of the ties that bound them together, because
no ties, physical, legal, or otherwise, can overcome the difference between
fundamentally opposed types of political regimes.
Illinois’ Representative John Farnsworth noted that
history in his 1864 speech on
the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:
[With t]he invention of the cotton-gin,… the greed for
power took possession of the slaveholders, and the avarice of these men
overleaped itself…
Then it was, Mr. Speaker, that the slave power got the control of the
government, of the executive, legislative, and judicial departments.
Then it was that they got possession of the high places of society. They took
possession of the churches. They took possession of the lands. Then it became
criminal for a man to open his lips in denunciation of [them].
Then followed… the throttling of the right to petition; suppressing the freedom
of the press; the suppression of the freedom of the mails; all these things
followed the taking possession of the government and lands by the slave power,
until we were the slaves of slaves, being chained to the car of this slave
juggernaut…
This is the model that today’s GOP, the reinvented
Confederacy, is using to replace modern American democracy.
And they’re not even bashful about it: It’s why 10
Republican-controlled states officially commemorate the Confederacy with state
holidays every year and six refuse to recognize Juneteenth: Florida,
Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
Former President Ronald Reagan’s massive tax cuts (and
Bush’s and Trump’s) had the same oligarch-producing impact as the cotton gin;
before Reagan, billionaires were virtually unknown and few wealthy people were
politically active. Today, they own Congress, our social and news media, and
the Supreme Court.
The billionaire-funded Project 2025 is
this generation’s version of John C. Calhoun’s nullification speech and South
Carolina’s secession proclamation.
In this brave new world run by Citizen Trump and the MAGA
GOP:
Slave labor is replaced by the
perpetual poverty and servitude of a $7.25 minimum wage and Red state laws
hostile to unions. Children are encouraged to leave school and enter the
workplace in dangerous jobs like slaughterhouses.
Quality education becomes exclusively the province of the
rich and white as public schools are gutted by voucher programs while college
tuition explodes.
Healthcare is a luxury only available to the wealthy as
insurance becomes unaffordable, Republican governors refuse to expand Medicaid,
and medical practices are acquired by hedge funds and converted to concierge
practices with $3,000/year annual fees.
Media that speaks truth to power are bankrupted by new
libel laws, taken over, and turned into Republican propaganda machines.
Women, people of color, and religious minorities are made
culturally and legally subordinate to white “Christian” men.
In any Republican-controlled part of the country where
there’s a chance a Democrat could win an election, the voter rolls are purged
of Democrats and those voters who survive the purges find increasingly complex
barriers to casting a ballot.
And, of course, they want to preserve the Confederate
names and monuments still extant and bring back the monuments that have been
removed. As we saw on January 6, the Confederate battle flag is one of their
favorite totems.
The new GOP motto might as well be, “We don’t need no
stinkin’ issues; we just want power and revenge for the heroes of the Old South
and the New Insurrection.”
It’s why they lie so easily on the Sunday talk shows and
in political campaigns: They don’t give a damn about issues. All they care
about is power.
And their base is with them. As Oliver Markus Malloy
wrote in the headline for his Bad Choices Substack
newsletter yesterday, “MAGA dumbfucks are so fucking dumb, they have no idea
that the pro-slavery Confederates were the bad guys!”
In fact, they know what the sides were in the Civil War,
and they are intentionally choosing—embracing—the Confederacy.
Democrats—and Americans more generally—must finally
realize that Trump’s MAGA GOP is no longer interested in policy or politics but
solely wants to seize absolute political and economic power to end our
democracy and reinvent the Confederacy.
Only then we can begin a discussion
about how to deal with this Second Great Insurrection that they hope will
reboot the Civil War only—now outfitted with deadly bump-stocks—this time with
a different outcome.
Until then, as we try to debate “issues,” we’re merely engaging in meaningless political theater. Instead, we must identify, ostracize, and politically and legally crush this growing and violent insurrection against America and her traditional ideals.
© 2023 Thom Hartmann
THOM HARTMANN is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
