The Modern American Caricature
It’s not okay for the supporters of the one-term former president to engage in violent rallies, one intending to overtake the Capitol building. For many, the objective was to stop a Constitutional process. The chaos enabled the disruption of a string of peaceful transfers of power in the American executive branch since the Civil War era. That has now been broken.
The embrace of gun ownership within right-wing politics this campaign cycle has been as disturbing as it is crass.
On top of that, there is an ongoing gaslighting effort in the land to trivialize and alter the truth behind what happened on January 6th, 2021. From the unpatriotic obstructionism practiced by elected officials within the organ of the Republican Party to the ongoing effort of right-wing demagogues in a weakened press atmosphere to stylize content claiming a false flag conspiracy theory around the insurrection’s origins and flashpoints. All of this scheming and dereliction add up to a concentrated effort to mislead the American public and normalize the use of political violence, particularly by right-wing interests.
More audio came out revealing Donald Trump’s mindset the days after the insurrection. He wasn’t remorseful about the way Mike Pence was pressured to step out of his role, cast allegedly disputed electors aside, and then move the process to state legislatures (26 of which are under Republican control.) Calls from a hostile gathered crowd outside chanting “hang Mike Pence.” In the courts, there was no evidence in arguments presented the months following the election and argued that there was massive fraud capable of overturning the results where Joe Biden won by a strong margin. In some recounts, Joe Biden won more votes.
The real crux of the issue is that Trump continues to inject irrational rage into his political movement that already infantilizes weapons of mass death and disturbing displays of fascistic posturing when it comes to the free exchange of ideas and the recognition of facts.
As much as some Republicans want to separate themselves from this malicious chicanery, it is utterly unstatesmanlike to choose not to work or choose grotesquely trolling. This behavior stems from the core Republican denial that enabling an utterly unqualified person to have access to awesome constitutional powers and potent government resources without establishing any guardrails (no matter what that does to the number of judges one receives) was objectively irresponsible, hypocritical, and unpatriotic.
As Mark Twain noted the gilded nature of the years closing out the nineteenth century in America, today we often can find people discussing the grifted nature of contemporary times. Our political parties have become caricatures of their former selves. The Democrats are America’s labor party and unable to move past party members beholden to big industries and wealthy donors to update America’s social safety net and meet the standards of nations we once outcompeted. The Republicans hypocritically present an out-of-character and ahistorical plea for a superficial populism that is really an appeal to mean-spirited nihilism fueled by a coarsened culture, inequality, and a politically segregated population. We find social movements trivialized by celebrity demagoguery and scandals revealing deep hypocrisy within movement leaders. There are once serious intellectuals touting freedom while also tacitly signaling to racially and religiously-motivated authoritarianism as a way of, ironically, restoring liberty. We just had a judge, a servant of the courts, make a comment about Asian cuisine and the supply chain crunch in the Pacific Ocean during a trial where a young person brought an AR-15 to a Black Lives Matter protest with a misguided sense of vigilante justice. The defense is claiming self-defense despite willfully carrying a weapon engineered for rapid mass murder into a hot zone.
America can’t live in a world of little to no consequences while also projecting power on others in a questionable manner. The outcome is a destructive paradox that divides people and makes the population disinterested in their own civic environment. It makes it harder for us to appreciate the collaboration of different perspectives while testing our ideas in the honorable arena of debate and prose. But at a macro level, we have become a caricature of our former glory, and that further influences the dissemination of dark and parasitic energy eating away at world democracies.
