Bipedal Death Wish and the Feckless “Resistance”

Two historical periods—one recent, one from the history books—come to mind when contemplating the Great Pandemic and its aftermath.

Both demonstrate that when faced with moments of extreme uncertainty, bloody-mindedness, and insouciant incompetence at the top, the first reaction of our bipedal species is . . . abject surrender.

I say the “first” reaction because I do not believe this coronavirus story will be over any time soon but that the seeds are being sown for a long, disruptive slog towards who-knows-what set of outcomes. But in each case of historical parallels, I see that our immediate impulse as Americans is to cling desperately to the habits and comforting illusions of the past while they systematically dissolve, fracture, unwind, dissipate, and collapse before our eyes.

Many are convinced that our current plight originates and is fully embodied in the person of Donald J. Trump and will be swept away once we dispose of him. Large portions of the appalled citizenry, loosely identifying with the Democrat camp, insist that Trump is the cause of inner rot in the body politic rather than merely a suppurating boil that has erupted on its surface. They continue to bleat that said personage’s removal from office is the moment in which we can all sigh with relief. In this happy fantasy, once Sleepy Joe Biden stumbles or is wheeled into office, all will be well with the republic, and we can get back to ignoring “politics” and all that shouting on the cable news shows.

This viewpoint clashes with the evidence of one’s battered senses. The so-called “Resistance” to Trump’s actions consists of Nancy Pelosi stamping her foot and then signing off on pretty much everything Trump demands he get. Their reaction to Trump’s appalling failure to protect American lives is a whiny series of complaints soft-pedaled in some sort of bizarre spirit of national unity, which Trump promptly mocks with insults and slander. (See Biden’s ridiculous backtracking on his very mild criticism of Trump during his Mar. 23 MSNBC interview, one of his few recent sorties from his cave under the Delaware River.)

September 11

The immediate parallel is the Democrat reaction to 9/11 when George Bush’s minority regime (and, not incidentally, the entire intelligence apparatus) blithely ignored evidence of a dangerous Saudi plot, leading to the deaths of several thousand New Yorkers. Instead of holding him to task for it, Democrats promptly fell into line behind his “leadership,” upon which he then led us into the worst debacle of recent times, the criminal conquest of Iraq. Sleepy Joe was 100% behind this abandonment of principle and good sense, which he continues to lie about today. But the country was behind him, and the invasion was popular—for a while. Let us not forget that Bush was re-elected in 2004 in the midst of this disaster, and buyer’s remorse only set in well into his second term.

Some may argue that the country was ferociously united behind Bush and the war-making apparatus and that no one could have stood up to the wave of patriotic fervor that 9/11 unleashed. That’s self-fulfilling prophecy, and of course the fact that no one did stand up to it means that it now looks impossible in retrospect. Here’s a thought experiment: had the Republicans been out of power at the time of that incident, how long would it have taken them to blast President Gore for being asleep at the wheel and exposing Americans to the worst terrorist act in our history? How many episodes of Rush Limbaugh would have been dedicated to reaming him as an incompetent traitor? And how many Democrats would have reluctantly agreed?

Of course, for Democrats to resist the war-promoters, the weapons contractors, and the horny generals who were gearing up to take advantage of the sudden national desire for revenge would have entailed actually being opposed to new military adventures and the accompanying crackdown on civil liberties, which the Democrats were and are not. This, of course, is the real meaning of their supine non-resistance, which will be seen as a permanent fixture of each historical episode treated here, including the one we are now living through.

The ante-bellum 1850s

Another striking parallel with our troubled times can be found in the run-up to the Civil War, which we, deploying our 2020 rearview vision, now see as an inevitable outcome of the clash of competing social and economic systems. But reviewing the events of the years before Fort Sumter, one cannot help but be struck by the consistent habit of the Northern industrial states of ceding ground to Southern demands via the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, right up to the last, failed attempts to placate the slaveowners. The Whigs and later the (Lincoln-era) Republicans looked everywhere to avoid digging in their heels against Southern intransigence on the issue of owning people as property. As historian Carole Emberton wrote, “From the founding of the Republic through 1860, Northerners and Southerners went to great lengths to find a way to make slavery work.”

Northerners wanted desperately to avoid a conflagration that would be bad for business, and (notwithstanding the exception of the minoritarian abolitionist movement) they had no profound objections to chattel slavery itself. They gave in little by little all through the 1850s and ended up having to fight the war anyway. Similarly, today’s Democrat grandees don’t mind giving away the store to billionaire financiers—after all, those guys are their main backers as well as Mitch McConnell’s. Above all, they want to keep things rolling smoothly along as the plutocrat class and the slice of professionals and managers that comprise their support base are doing fine under Trump. Meanwhile, the Joe Bidens and the Nancy Ps don’t have to take responsibility for the system’s massive failings for everyone else. Their troops chant, “Vote Blue, no matter who,” and their loyal followers rush headlong toward the voting booths like pilgrims to Lourdes thirsting for a cure from the holy waters.

Thus, no one beyond a few lonely voices on the dissident websites and online magazines emits a peep of objection when the Democrat-controlled House fails to even raise a bar of non-negotiable demands before signing off on the multi-trillion-dollar corporate giveaway handed to supposedly dangerous and recently impeached Trump. The same guy who should have been removed from office, according to Democrat officialdom, for mishandling $400 million in aid to the Ukraine, now gets a slush fund of 120 times larger, oversight of which he has promised in advance to roundly ignore. Trump now has a huge pot of ready cash with which to do favors for the industries, individual companies, and localities key to his re-election. This Democrat giveaway would look contradictory if the Nancy Ps and the Joe Bs really cared—they don’t.

What we are witnessing is the complete transfer of our polity to the financier class that has stripped the country bare over the last 40 years and reduced us to defenselessness and decay. We will now see just how ruthlessly these New Feudalists will jerk away the remaining remnants of our safety net, criminalize dissent, and gleefully flaunt the totality of their rule. Trump’s clemency of convicted crooks like Illinois Rod Blagojevich and war criminals like Navy Seal Eddie “Kill-Anything-That-Moves” Gallagher are signals to one and all that the guys in charge will take everything, that no rules apply, and that anyone standing in their way is dead meat.

Real resistance will need to reach far beyond voting “blue, no matter who.”

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