How Far The Many Have Travelled
America’s Republican voters used to believe, with near unanimity, that nothing was more dangerous to their country than the threat of an executive branch that sought to circumvent the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers by legislating through executive fiat, i.e., without deference to Congress, and disregarding court rulings, such as by concocting phony emergencies to justify the expansion of presidential authority beyond the ordinary confines of the rule of law. Today, they embrace, with near unanimity, the most extreme and indubitable instantiation of this threat that their country has ever witnessed.
These same voters used to believe, with near unanimity, that the bane of republican government was the rampant exploitation of elected position for the sake of personal material gain through graft which established vested interests counter to the proper governmental aims of maintaining civil institutions and protecting national security. Today, they embrace, with near unanimity, the most obvious, and certainly the most extreme, instantiations of their own leaders profiteering from power, courting and accepting bribes, and turning domestic and foreign policy into straightforward tools of personal material gain, to the tune of billions of dollars brazenly waved in front of their faces as the spoils of an imaginary war.
They used to believe, with near unanimity, that political leaders using the levers of power to stalk, threaten, and penalize personal or political opponents simply for daring to oppose them, was a blatant violation of the principles of honor and civil government without which a constitutional republic would quickly devolve into a banana republic. Today, they cheer and shout gleefully, with near unanimity, at every instance of their own executive branch employing such tactics to the hitherto unthinkable (in the U.S.A.) point of disrupting large segments of society as has never been attempted before, simply to rain fear and suffering upon all who disagree with them in general, and all who have ever dared to oppose their dear leader in particular.
They used to believe, with near unanimity, that America had to stand towards the world at large as a shining city on a hill, always on the moral side of sovereignty and liberty against tyrannical oppression and usurpation. Today, they embrace, with near unanimity, a party leader who openly lends moral and rhetorical support to the most aggressive tyrants, through the most irrational moral equivalency arguments, along with repeated assaults on the integrity and worth of those seeking to defend themselves against those tyrants.
They used to stand, with near unanimity, against all notions of economic central planning, or any governmental intrusion in the economy that would amount to “choosing winners and losers,” which would rationalize its hyper-regulation and its special favors for certain billionaires or “sectors” as “creating jobs” or “sacrificing free market principles in order to save the free market.” Today, they embrace, with near unanimity and absolute faith, a president who believes he, and he alone, has both the economic omniscience and the righteous authority to take the entire world’s economy by the steering wheel and drive it this way and that at his complete discretion, executing screeching, arbitrary twists and turns on a daily basis, all according to his own personal whims, vendettas, or panics of any given moment.
These voters, who used to embrace, with near unanimity, so much of the good sense upon which the entire civilized world has depended for generations, have, under the sway of the most embarrassing personality cult of all time (another evil they used to oppose with near unanimity), turned all those reasonable instincts on their heads, and are now serving as the critical mass for an out-of-control vehicle of vulgar lunacy which is quickly dragging the world toward a precipitous decline into lawlessness and brutality, a suicidal combat between thuggish grifters and totalitarian schemers which can only end in civilizational collapse. What they are embracing with near unanimity, they will also richly deserve with near unanimity. They will reap what they have sown, with absolute unanimity, as, unfortunately, will all the rest of us.
