The Cold Pre-Dawn

I’m finding it hard to express how I feel after last night’s events.

I mean, I’ve often wondered what it must have been like, for the educated Jewish populations of Paris, Warsaw and such places, to watch the unfolding spectre of nazism in Germany. To know that your co-religionists, your people, were living in a country where the majority of the population were slowly and inexorably turning against them. The NSDAP may have eventually seized power by force of arms and aggression, but the path to that was paved with rampant electoral successes. What was it like to read of how the mainstream forces of right-wing politics, the Centre Party and the Democrats, were gobbled into the maw of nazism by simple appeals to the basest instincts of the mob. To watch as, little by little, the water got a little hotter, until the storm of Kristallnacht ended all pretence at civil society.

I just never thought I’d discover what that felt like in my lifetime, and certainly never in the United States of America.

We all knew this was happening. We’ve watched from afar as the US was changed utterly, piece by piece by piece. First by the Gingrich revolution, where the Republican Party decided that ideology and creed trumped even the most rational approaches to complex policy issues. Gingrich’s approach enthused the GOP base by removing all differences between the candidates, all united behind a common cause and platform, the Contract with America. The contract didn’t set out much of how it would be implemented, but it did provide a touchstone, a template that all Republican candidates had to declare their support of. By doing that Gingrich divorced the Party from its traditional roots in small business and civic administration, replacing that with the Creed of the Contract.

That Contract, with its mantra of Deficit & Tax Reduction, has become the guiding light of the Republican Party. The result has been a steady erosion of civic society ever since, everything that can be is privatised, everything that can’t is cut to the bone. Actions by the state in attacking dissent are, contrarily, increased, with increased spending on the military, the police, and the militarisation of the same police. Through it all, moreover, the Democratic party either plays along, as Bill Clinton did with PRWORA, or actively encourages it, as they did in supporting and extending the PATRIOT Act. In that they’ve really been no different to the Weimar Parties in the late 20s and early 30s, blowhards with butterfly nets trying to catch a dragon.

As the Democratic Party moved (even more) to the right in order to stay in the ‘center’, in the pursuit of some Overton Window bollocksology, so the Republican Party has moved even further to the Right. First noted after McCain’s VP pick in 2008, then with the mouth-frothing Tea Party nonsense in the 2010 mid-terms, the GOP has become a slave to their own base, tied to a fantasyland economic and social program and deliberately catering to the basest instincts. They almost collapsed the US Federal Government, time after time, demanding the Deficit be cut while ever expanding the power and the spend of the military. They demanded the military ever expand, while cutting services for veterans medical needs beyond the point of embarassment.

All nodded through by the Democrats, in a pale imitation of the pathetic attempts by Bruning to rein in the nazis.

When Obama was elected this madness accelerated beyond comprehension. From denying the legitimacy of the President through to the rise of intolerance, the Republican Party tacked ever harder and harder to the right. As they did so, the rage against the Other increased proportionately. Mexicans, Blacks, Muslims, Gays, Trans, each group was marginalised further and further, resulting in an epidemic of violence, both rogue and systemic, much of it tied into the American veneration and fetishization of weapons of mass destruction.

Many people outside the US thought that the massacre of twenty tiny children and their teachers in Sandy Hook would be a turning point, instead America variously shrugged its shoulders or attacked the victims. As Obama’s administration went on, the targets shifted, to gays, to muslims, to sikhs, or buddhists or Democrats; on and on and on they came, time after time, and nothing happened except the attackers grew bolder and the tally of the dead, wounded and ruined lives grew longer.

American society now exists in a parallel universe where teachers are urged to come to school carrying guns, where white men stand can stand outside polling places openly carrying assault rifles, while black children are murdered by police for daring to play with toy guns. Three people were shot, one fatally, by a man with an assault rifle at a polling place in California, and it barely made the news, so inured has America become to its endless procession of gun deaths and intimidation.

We, the people who don’t live in the US, have watched all this. We’ve been bewildered, browbeaten, incredulous. We remember events like Dunblane or Port Arthur and the response to those horrific events, and we are perplexed that a people can rate their own lives, their children’s lives, their neighbours and loved ones, so cheaply and so dispensable.

That was the second step, the vonPapen response. To accept that life itself had become so cheapened as to barely merit a response. Certainly, there were attempts by some to force a response, noble people like John Lewis who led a Congressional Sit-In in a doomed attempt to force the issue of gun control, but these were few and far between. The stage had been set.

With last night’s election, the USA has moved past vonPapen. There’s now no one who attempts to control the Mob, and their representative in the figure of the President-Elect. The baying forces of antisemitism aren’t yet a paramilitary force on the streets, but that is hardly for the want of trying. Given a voice by technology companies who’s leaders are as in thrall to the First Amendment as the Base is to the Second, given the means to create platforms where seemingly no amount of abuse is too much, where fake news isn’t challenged but celebrated and amplified the new SA revel in their hatred and bile, and use the veneration of the gun to spread their terror from the virtual world to the real.

In the cold pre-dawn of an Irish winter morning it was heart-rending to watch as some Americans, some white, but mostly other, some christian, but mostly other, some male, but mostly other, realised that the water really had gotten quite hot, and maybe this wasn’t actually the way things were meant to be. It was those heartfelt, bewildered responses that were, for me, the final straw, the moment I realised, finally, what it must have been like to walk on those Parisian streets or Polish eruvs, little over a century ago.

(This is the first of a series of essays on this topic I hope to write. I hope you find value in it, please let me know if you do)