Memories of the Pseudo-Americans
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, defended the right to bear arms, against all critics, arguing that the real reason for the Second Amendment had nothing to do with hunting or recreational shooting, but was all about the God-given right of a free people to arm themselves against a potentially tyrannical government?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, would have been apoplectic, many of them likely calling for civil war, had any member of a Democratic presidential administration dared to say in public that citizens who wear a legally-owned firearm to a public protest have only themselves to blame if they are shot dead by federal officers?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, speculated with anxious “Don’t tread on me” bravado about the prospect of the federal government sending thousands of heavily armed, masked officers into American cities, where they would outnumber the local police department, break into private homes without a warrant, and apply maximum physical abuse on local citizens with impunity, violently assaulting women, spraying tear gas and mace at anyone and everyone who dares to protest against their actions, all the while supported by an administration that refuses even to allow their actions to be investigated by local or state law enforcement officials, and declares these masked, unidentified thugs to enjoy “absolute immunity”?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, shouted in horror at a federal government white paper that identified as “domestic terrorists” people who had committed no crimes but merely happened to oppose the ideology of the administration of that time, or to speak out with distrust against what they considered excessive and un-American government actions?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, would have been sick with anger at an American president who flat-out told reporters, in reference to an innocent man who was shot dead by federal agents without just cause, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that”? And when those millions would have used that occasion to warn, in every forum available to them, that the first major act of any tyranny in history was to disarm the citizenry so that only the government would have weapons?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, would have said that the greatest threat to the American republic was a socialistic administration that believed it had the authority to demand part ownership of corporations, to impose massive tax increases without congressional legislation by means of phony “emergency powers” fiats more radical than the tariffs that caused the Great Depression, and to micro-manage the world economy on personal whim?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, fell over themselves with anti-establishment rage against the “uniparty” and its billionaire owners, when a Republican president said that the government needed to violate the principles of the free market in order to “save” the free market?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, would have hollered from the rooftops about an administration undertaking to obliterate all pretenses of personal privacy on Chinese Communist Party levels, with a universal surveillance web the likes of which George Orwell would have thought too far-fetched to imagine for a dystopian novel?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, saw the danger of a president who was too entranced by his power to kill individuals at will in foreign territory?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, decried the profiteering grift of Democratic presidents, would have screamed bloody murder at a president who unilaterally ordered the destruction of a large section of the White House for the sake of his personal pet building project, as though the White House were his private property, and would have been appalled at voters who could continue to support a president with a long and well-known personal history with notorious child sex traffickers?
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, spoke out vehemently against Vladimir Putin’s tyranny and were aghast at the mainstream media’s refusal to make anything out of the infamous hot-mic moment when an American president seemed to beg for Putin’s patience and promised to satisfy his wishes after the upcoming U.S. election?
Well, I remember those days. More specifically, I remember when those tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, pretended to be a “Tea Party movement,” called themselves “constitutional conservatives,” despised Vladimir Putin’s Russia, wanted government out of the economy, thought federalized law enforcement was the real domestic terrorism, and claimed to be defending “the vision of the Founding Fathers.” I not only remember those days, but I supported those people. I supported them because I thought those tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, actually were all the things they were pretending to be, and actually believed all the principled words they were saying. Thousands of them were my readers. A few of them became personal friends, or so I imagined, because I thought I knew who they were and that they meant what they said. As it turns out, all, or if I am to be generous I should say almost all, of them were fakers, liars; self-deluded at best, cynical nihilists at worst. But one way or the other, fake.
Or rather, that’s not quite true. What I can now say about them, with benefit of hindsight and more evidence than I could ever need, is that there was one truth in them, one reality they shared, as is evidenced by the fact that it is the only thing to which they have remained true and faithful through all the intervening years. Those tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, who associated themselves with all the positions, concerns, and warnings noted above, were indeed, when push came to shove, willing to drop all those pretenses when circumstances required it of them — all but one, that is: They were, and remain to this day, Republican Party voters.
For years, as I now see, these millions, including the ones I once believed were friends, were merely telling themselves face-saving lies to rationalize their continual, repetitive, and predictable surrender to the Republican Party’s ruling establishment, hoping to appear for one another, and perhaps even to feel in their own hearts, less cowardly and tribal, less sheepish and unprincipled, than they really were — less pathetic and weak than those other Republican voters, the “establishment types,” whom these millions dubbed “Republicans In Name Only.” In truth, however, these millions, the so-called grassroots Republicans, the pretend Tea Party, the fake constitutionalists, were no better than the RINOs they ridiculed. Or rather they were worse, in that they lacked even the minimal courage to admit to themselves or to one another that they too were merely the critical mass of their betters, the ineffectual “tribe” serving as the slavishly dependent collective at the mercy of a cadre of billionaire profiteers, market-riggers, and anti-American global manipulators who see a constitutional republic as nothing but a hindrance to their agenda and a practical nuisance. These millions, for all their civil war bluster, all their communists-under-the-bed paranoia, and all their latter-day MAGA chanting, were never anything more in the end but reliable, hopelessly devoted Republican Party voters — my party right or wrong, my party constitutialist or authoritarian, my party free market or socialist — right to their country’s last breath.
Republican Party voters, and nothing more. Thanks in large part to these millions, that last breath seems closer every day.
