To laud our veterans today, I want to focus on what they fought to preserve, freedom. From day one, this republic has stood against autocracy, freedom for the people to determine what’s right and better for their own lives, not in behalf some autocrat and his edicts, from the oppressive edicts of the English King George to murdering Nazi leaders and beyond. But today, among all days, it’s appropriate to ask if all that they fought for has been in vain.
How is an autocracy created? You take a group of people who think they have to save the country from those who disagree with them or look differently from them, the perceived enemies and scapegoats for all of these knuckleheads. You find a charismatic leader for them who eggs them on and enables them. Those same people then decide they’re willing to resort to violence to achieve their ends.
Am I writing about King George or Germany in the 1930s? Or early twentieth century Russia, or later in that century in China? No, I’m writing about Christian evangelicals and right-wing Catholics in twenty-first century America! White, angry, far-right voters that a recent study showed are willing to resort to violence to get what they want, i.e. save their way of life they think they’re in danger of losing.
If wanting to live in the past were their only sins (emulating 1930 Nazis is still morally reprehensible–the German people felt cheated after World War I), we might be inclined to write them off as only fascist fruitcakes. But this horde of rabid Trump acolytes are modern fascists through and through, as much as Hitler’s followers were. And it’s not just Trump pulling their puppet strings like Hitler did. Lurking above Trump and Hitler were plutocracies more worried that citizens would get smart and realize that their real enemies are the super-rich plutocrats who don’t give a damn about religion, morality, or anything else ordinary, struggling citizens care about; these plutocrats only want to get richer and have more power, and in America they’re doing just that.
Trump is a “f&^%ing moron,” as SecState Tillerson so famously said, but evangelicals and Catholics who believe an autocracy would be better are as stupid as pond scum—maybe worse. First of all, the world waits for no one; as Dylan said, “The times are a-changin.” America is more diverse now, and the afore-mentioned “marching morons” (they’re a lot more dangerous than those in C. M. Kornbluth’s famous novella) who, like lemmings, follow Trump (read Cohen’s book to see how “evangelical” Trump really is—he held that Bible upside done, after all!), and they cannot turn back the clock. Second, resorting to violence is against any religion’s moral precepts, so, by their “faith,” there’s no way to justify the attitudes they have about doing violence to others.
Plutocracy is just another form of autocracy, and it’s the plutocrats these people are implicitly supporting, even if they’re too stupid to realize it. These people aren’t preserving American values or their way of life. They’re throwing out everything our veterans prized, and they’re hastening America’s rush into the cesspool of autocracy by doing that.