How America Fell Into The Darkest Timeline of 2020

(Update 10/24: Thank you Tengrain for linking this to Crooks & Liars on the daily Mike's Blog Round-Up page! Welcome to mah award-winning blog, people! Browse around, don't cost nuthin'...)

In some of my insomnia-driven nights of anxiety and stress, I wonder often just how the hell this all happened. In these moments I know I'm not the only one who thinks this, I know far too many people at work and online and in my circle of family and friends who are just as stressed as I am.

Part of me knows this Darkest Timeline didn't just crop up out of nowhere: This is the end result of decades of plans and schemes by a Far Right element of our political discourse that despised how things were turning in the 1960s and 1970s and had decided to play The Game more ruthlessly and recklessly than ever before.

But this all still seemed like it creeped up on us, doesn't it? Perhaps too much hope and too much faith in the Long Arc of Justice, I suppose. I can only speak for myself on that.

The groundwork of this destruction had been there ever since the fearmongering of the 20th Century against Communism and its first cousin Socialism, added to the racism that had ruined the United States since the days of Slavery and even worse through Jim Crow, the backlash against the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, and to today with the struggle against police brutality against poor (read: Black) communities. (There's an item to discuss later on, that there's proof of how racism directly hurts the U.S. especially in the area of finance and Capitalism we're supposed to be so good at)

All that fearmongering comes into play as the partisan divide between the two major parties grew: Where there had been moderate factions in both Republican and Democratic ranks, the Republicans pursued a Southern Strategy that sought to merge all conservative thought - economic, ethnic, religious, cultural - into one Far Right Conservatism without room for Moderate bipartisanship and no love for accountability.

We've been at the point for more than a decade where John Cole's observation - I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties (re: the Republicans) is insane - has been proven again and again... and yet everyone else in a position to make note of it and react against that madness - the Beltway punditry - sit there and pretend these problems only cropped up yesterday. And worse, the media is already pretending that if trump is forced out of office this problem of being in the Darkest Timeline goes away.

trump alone is not the source of the cruelty, greed, and racism dominating current Republican ideology. It's been there before he rolled down that escalator in 2015, and there's every sign it will get worse once trump goes away. Look at Ed Kilgore's evaluation of past and future GOP malevolence documented in Steve Benen's work The Imposters, reviewed here in Washington Monthly:

...The Imposters is a skillful illustration of how rank cynicism allowed Donald Trump to easily take control of the Republican Party. Republicans, Benen shows, already had subordinated their traditions and alleged values to unprincipled hypocrisy, indifference to facts and empirical data, and self-serving partisanship long before Trump arrived. The GOP created a vacuum in its own soul that the 45th president was easily able to fill with his inflated self-regard and his uninhibited politics of lies and polarization...

Over the last several decades, the Republican Party has been conquered by the Christian right and the overwhelmingly white Tea Party movement. The former has a theocratic vision for America. The latter militantly opposes economic redistribution. These movements converged with a realization that demographic trends were unfriendly to their party’s older base, generating a white identity politics that found its natural expression in the intensely divisive and intermittently racist stylings of Trump.

Consider, for example, Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again.” It is effectively a pledge to return to the days when white men walked tall in America, Christianity was a quasi-official creed, and foreign influences were on the margins of national life—precisely the world that most Republicans yearn for. Trump’s steady appointment of conservative judges gives evangelicals, many of whom believe that abortion is literal murder, exactly what they want. His heavy (if erratic) investment in restrictionist immigration policies has always been central to his appeal, and the sudden lurch of the GOP in that direction after George W. Bush and John McCain championed a more diverse future was far from being just another area of Republican electoral opportunism...

The modern Republican cannot reform because they dare not. Even in the face of demographic shifts away from their power base - away from the religious extremists, the racists, and the defenders of the uber-rich - they had put in so much effort to create this power base they have no way to redirect that base onto different paths. They can't change their tune about immigrants being monsters, they can't take back their "Birth Control Is Murder" chants, they can't reject the massive and unpopular tax cuts they've granted to their deep-pocket overlords. 

Republicans have staked out positions of ideological value so extreme that any attempt to move away from them would cause permanent schisms in the factions they've merged together, and would push the party out of any national role - which it currently clings to only due to Minority Rule status thanks to gerrymandering and geographic factionalism - for multiple future generations. And given the purge of Moderates (the RINOs hunted into obscurity) since the early 1990s, there are no leaders among those factions willing or able to moderate themselves or find the power within the party's structure to force such decisions for the long-term good of their own organization.

One of the hopes of various pundits is that once trump is gone, some form of sanity will return to the Republican Party and they'll take steps to rehabilitate themselves and their image. But it's too late. And it wasn't even trump's fault they're like this. All trump did was show how to exploit the rage and fear to create a devoted cultish voting base. There is no coming back from this. The Republicans had their chance to reject Trumpism (tm) but ignored it when they refused to rally to the likes of Jeb, Rubio, Christie, or Kasich. It's all trump now, and when trump is gone his replacement will play the same strategy. 

This is now the foundation of the modern Republican Party: Racism, Sexism, Political Obstruction, Tax Cuts Forever, Own the Libs, Make America Lose Again. There is no savior coming to save the Republicans. It's trumps all the way down.

And if the Republicans succeed in rigging the game against Democracy and the needs of the nation, they're dragging the rest of us down with them.

The only way out of this pit of doom is to stop voting Republican across the board. Just stop. You don't have to vote Democratic, although that helps the most. Just stop putting Republicans in political power, because they honest-to-God cannot be trusted with that power, not now not for another ten generations, not until all this extremist madness is drained out of their descendants.

We can climb out of the Darkest Timeline, America. But we're going to have to leave the Republicans in that dark deep pit that they made for themselves.