America May Be Broken Beyond Repair

[maestrob]

May 27, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

In an ad released last year, Blake Masters, a leading candidate in Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, cradles a semiautomatic weapon. “This is a short-barreled rifle,” he said, ominous music playing in the background. “It wasn’t designed for hunting. This is designed to kill people.”

For Masters, this isn’t an argument against allowing such guns to proliferate. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment of why access to these weapons is, for the right, a matter of existential importance. “The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting,” said Masters. “It’s about protecting your family and your country. What’s the first thing the Taliban did when Joe Biden handed them Afghanistan? They took away people’s guns.” Guns, in this worldview, are a guarantor against government overreach. And government overreach includes attempts to regulate guns.

These days, it’s barely remarkable when Republicans issue what sound like threats against those who’d dare curtail their private arsenals. “I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,” Randy Fine, a state representative in Florida, tweeted on Wednesday.

It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.

Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy. Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.

Fine’s words echoed Donald Trump’s during the 2016 election, when he said that “Second Amendment people” might be able to stop a President Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court justices. What was once a barely concealed insinuation of violence has morphed, especially after Jan. 6, into an even more forthright menace. As ProPublica has reported, dozens of members of the Oath Keepers militia were arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, but that hasn’t stopped the organization from “evolving into a force within the Republican Party.”

In Shasta County, a conservative part of rural Northern California, a militia-aligned faction has secured a majority on the board of supervisors, in what members of the movement see as a blueprint that can be deployed nationally. Throughout the country, reported The New York Times, “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him” — meaning Trump — “from power.” Expecting those same Republicans to collaborate with Democrats on public safety is madness.

The horrifying irony, the hideous ratchet, is that the more America is besieged by senseless violence, the more the paramilitary wing of the American right is strengthened. Gun sales tend to rise after mass shootings. Republicans responded to the massacre in Uvalde by doubling down on calls to arm teachers and “harden” schools. An article in The Federalist argued that parents must home-school so that kids can learn “in a controlled environment where guns can be safely carried for self-defense or locked away when not in use.” It’s a vision of a society — if you can call it that — where every family is a fortress.

Guns are now the leading cause of death for American children. Many conservatives consider this a price worth paying for their version of freedom. Our institutions give these conservatives disproportionate power whether or not they win elections. The filibuster renders the Senate largely impotent. Trump, a president who lost the popular vote, was able to appoint Supreme Court justices who are poised to help overturn a New York state law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons. It’s increasingly hard to see a path to small-d democratic reform.

And so among liberals, there’s an overwhelming feeling of despair. Even as people learn the names of all those murdered children, the most common sentiment is not “never again,” but a bitter acknowledgment that nothing is going to change. America is too sick, too broken. It is perhaps beyond repair.

Two years ago, David French, an anti-Trump conservative, published a book, “Divided We Fall,” warning of the possible crackup of the United States. It included two chapters imagining scenarios for how the dissolution of the country might happen. One involved a mass shooting at a school in California, to which the state’s people reacted “with white-hot rage.” French envisioned furious state politicians defying the Second Amendment, leading to a nullification crisis and blue-state secession.

He meant it as a cautionary tale, but rereading the chapter after Uvalde, it feels less bleak than our reality. In French’s scenario, atrocity has the effect of energizing people rather than immobilizing them. They are determined to fight, not resigned to defeat. They have audacity and hope.

The real nightmare is not that the repetition of nihilist terrorism brings American politics to an inflection point, but that it doesn’t. The nightmare is that we simply stumble on, helpless as things keep getting worse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/opin ... oting.html

[Rach3]

Reason with ilk like these ? No thanks:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2022 ... -stations/

[barney]

I don't have any friends who support Trump, for the reason that my friends are basically decent people. But I don't think I could remain friends with anyone who did. (This is not pro-Democrats, because they worry me too, but it is definitely anti-Republican.) As the Trump fantasists feel the same way, and as facts no longer matter in these debates to such deplorables (pro-Trumpists never try to deny what's emerging; they just pretend it doesn't matter), I too think America is broken and may be beyond repair. To quote a large piece of pondslime, very bad, very sad.

Australia has never been so extreme in its oppositions, but I wonder whether we are simply 10 years behind.

[maestrob]

I don't have any friends who support Trump, for the reason that my friends are basically decent people. But I don't think I could remain friends with anyone who did. (This is not pro-Democrats, because they worry me too, but it is definitely anti-Republican.) As the Trump fantasists feel the same way, and as facts no longer matter in these debates to such deplorables (pro-Trumpists never try to deny what's emerging; they just pretend it doesn't matter), I too think America is broken and may be beyond repair. To quote a large piece of pondslime, very bad, very sad.

Australia has never been so extreme in its oppositions, but I wonder whether we are simply 10 years behind.

What gives me some small hope is that Trumpist candidates that won their Republican primaries are polling BEHIND the Democratic candidates they will face in the mid-terms this Fall.

At least so far.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

From WAPO today:

"Gun purchases rose to record levels in 2020 and 2021, according to a Washington Post analysis, and gun deaths reached a 25-year peak in 2021."

GOP sabotage. "No wonder faith in institutions has fallen so far." : https://wapo.st/3axaeWR

[Rach3]

Australia has never been so extreme in its oppositions, but I wonder whether we are simply 10 years behind.

I certainly hope not.As matters stand now, I have been considering Nova Scotia,Oz, and New Zealand as possible refuges. The wines are better in Oz and NZ, but I believe it rains less and without fires in NS.

[Belle]

I'd be soul-searching to find out why you got Trump in the first place. That would be a good place to start, but something tells me political pugilism is always more expedient.

Rach 3, it will prove to be an eternal quest finding the perfect climate.

[Belle]

From WAPO today:

"Gun purchases rose to record levels in 2020 and 2021, according to a Washington Post analysis, and gun deaths reached a 25-year peak in 2021."

GOP sabotage. "No wonder faith in institutions has fallen so far." : https://wapo.st/3axaeWR

Norway and Japan just had two significant gun crimes - the former horrifically in 2011 - when neither nation ranks on gun ownership. There are other forces at work, same as in the USA. Mental illness and the deinstitutionalization of patients - leaving THEM to decide about their medication - is but one of these and, in fact, has been one of the worst social experiments of the last decades.

Anyway, nobody is seriously interested in any complexities about gun crime.

[Belle]

I don't have any friends who support Trump, for the reason that my friends are basically decent people. But I don't think I could remain friends with anyone who did. (This is not pro-Democrats, because they worry me too, but it is definitely anti-Republican.) As the Trump fantasists feel the same way, and as facts no longer matter in these debates to such deplorables (pro-Trumpists never try to deny what's emerging; they just pretend it doesn't matter), I too think America is broken and may be beyond repair. To quote a large piece of pondslime, very bad, very sad.

Australia has never been so extreme in its oppositions, but I wonder whether we are simply 10 years behind.

By your own reckoning of 'decency' then, there are obviously circa 70 million indecent Americans. I won't have a bar of that. It's the sanctimony of your claim which is a hallmark of the modern left. These 'indecent' people would don a uniform in a heartbeat to save your bony hide, Barney.

I've dumped friends and relatives who are hard Left, believing them still to be inherently 'decent' but completely deluded, misguided and motivated by hatred and bitter resentment (when you drill right down into it - as I often do!).

But, if you tell the people they're 'deplorable' often enough they'll never let you down.

[Rach3]

By your own reckoning of 'decency' then, there are obviously circa 70 million indecent Americans...

But, if you tell the people they're 'deplorable' often enough they'll never let you down.

Actually, closer to 74 million, plus all those who voted for Trump whose votes allegedly were not counted in the "Steal" ( 70% of GOP voters claim today Biden was not elected). About 12 million more than voted for Trump in 2016 after observing his first 4 years in office !! 112 of the 221 GOP members of the US House voted to overturn the 2020 election results.Indeed, you can count on a " deplorable" to act deplorably, as they did in Nov.,2020, and Jan.6 ,2021 urged on by the wife of one of our Supreme Court Justices and , of course, urged on by the Deplorable in Chief Trump.

[Rach3]

The " deplorables " on the march:

The GOP flirtation with political violence could be a harbinger of democratic breakdown.

https://wapo.st/3c2qwrd

[barney]

I've dumped friends and relatives who are hard Left, believing them still to be inherently 'decent' but completely deluded, misguided and motivated by hatred and bitter resentment (when you drill right down into it - as I often do!).

Well, we're not likely to meet socially, Belle, are we? A profound relief to both of us.

[jserraglio]

i was so relieved that the MLB Cleveland Indians rejected Deplorables in favor of Guardians when Wokers forced the team to change its name this year.

The term does denote perennial also-rans, and the Tribe hasn’t won a WS in 3/4 of a century, but in my view that word should be reserved for losers that sport red baseball caps.