The Civil War Never Ended: Understanding Deep Culture and Racism

We made nice with the slavers and their cruelty and inhumanity with the three-fifths compromise to create our union with the devil, and they repaid us with the Civil War. We made nice with them after we kicked their asses in the Civil War, and they repaid us with Jim Crow and lynching. We made nice with them after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and they repaid us with the Southern Strategy. We made nice with them during the Southern Strategy and elected our first Black president in spite of it, and they repaid us with Trump and the authoritarian power grab we’re now living through.

Our country has lived with this dilemma from its inception. To create our more perfect union, we had to make a deal with the devil. Did we think that it was going to turn out any other way than it is turning out right now? They are unreformed unrepentant white supremacists. Instead of coming to terms with the horrors of slavery and the wickedness in ourselves that produced it and allowed it to happen, we made nice and hoped that they would live quietly among us and not exert themselves too directly, too forcefully.

As the election results in the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races attest, the racists never really have gone away. They’ve never really made nice. They just hide under a thin veneer of lip-service to the American notion of All People Being Created Equal until the coast is clear and then they come marching out like some kind of rats to the GQP’s Pied Piper’s dog whistling song. And, now, our democracy is as good as dead and gone, and we’re just a zombified nation stumbling around not realizing that we’re actually dead, #ZombieNation.

If not for the inner racist of white people being nurtured and comforted by the GQP, how do we reconcile these “observations” about what the American people “want” with how they vote?

Survey Says!

Polling says that a majority of the American people support these Democratic policies and priorities, so why the fuck don’t they vote like it? The only poll that matters is the election, and soon, as in 2022, that won’t matter because the GQP will have rigged the elections in their favor having either suppressed the vote so they win or nullified the votes against them… or both, because who’s going to stop them? The 70% of Americans who tell pollsters that they support American democracy but can’t seem to bring themselves to vote for it when it really matters? #ZombieNation.

Here, let’s look at some polling numbers:

Look at that, with so many people supporting the provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better plan, you’d think it would be a shoe-in to pass and be the law o’ the land RIGHT FUCKING NOW, wouldn’t you? People will tell the pollster they “like” something, but they either won’t connect it to their vote. Seriously, if even a fraction of these folks picked up their phone and called their Members of Congress to express their support for the bill, no member of Congress would dare vote against it fearing for their re-election. You’d think, but you’d be wrong because #ZombieNation.

With abortion on the chopping block before the Supreme Court, you’d think it would be a number one voting issue in every election no matter what office it was for, so that we could codify Roe v. Wade because, you know, seventy-odd percent of Americans support legal abortion, but you’d be wrong. They’ll tell pollsters that, but they won’t vote for politicians that will support it. In fact, they’ll vote for politicians who are vehemently against it because #ZombieNation.

Even when we look at actual elections, we see how little the American people as a whole are moved to really support the policies that they tell the pollsters that they “like.”

Seriously, ya think that if America weren’t at least a teeny-tiny bit center-right that in 2020 we’da had a landslide blue wave election with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate?

Youngkin’s Election as Governor

Election 2020: What the Fuck is Wrong with White Voters?

So, what happened in Virginia which was supposed to be a blue state because of all the suburbs and exurbs outside of DC? What happened to the vaunted white suburban female vote that was going to propel Democrats to electoral Nirvana?

A funny thing happened on the way to the voting booth. Governor Youngkin started whistling himself up some Critical Race Theory and all those white voters lined up behind him, marched into the voting booth, and pulled the lever for him and his merry band of GQP authoritarian race-baiting hucksters.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of the results (emphasis mine):

First and foremost, this is a story about suburban voters, who, on average, moved to the right. That is, as we suggested, a departure from what we observed nationally in the 2020 presidential election.

Education issues that dominated much of the lead-up to Tuesday’s race were significant for understanding how voters felt about the candidates, but it’s actually really hard to isolate the role education played in the race.

Rather, disappointment in — or opposition to — Biden’s presidency may have been the main driver of this outcome, as is often the case in off-year Virginia elections.

From How Virginia’s Electorate Shifted Toward Republicans (all links are FiveThirtyEight’s)

Youngkin’s education policy amounted to spittle-inflected red-faced dangerous-neck-vein bulging invective about Critical Race Theory as our ace political media reporters over at CNN found out when they, like FiveThirtyEight, touted the importance of Youngkin’s education policy in winning the election, but then couldn’t really articulate a single education policy he would actually enact.

Yeah, the issue that moved these white suburban voters to vote GQP was concerns about eDuCaTiOn… *cough* CRT *cough* *cough* racism *cough* *cough*.

Democratic Failures

Call Your Senators about Talking to Manchin, Sinema, and Others about Modifying the Filibuster — McQonnell says no SCOTUS Justice for Biden, UPDATE

Sure, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are tag teaming the BBBB plan and their voting rights legislation in order to earn their corporate “donations” of actual real green money that doesn’t corrupt anyone in any way, does it John Roberts? But, that doesn’t stop any and all Democrats from getting out there and pulling a Reagan and asking for the American people to call their Members of Congress and beg them to pass these bills, right? It doesn’t stop Biden and Congressional leaders from barnstorming the country supporting these two key pieces of legislation. It doesn’t stop them from countering the incredibly damaging narrative that the GQP has put out there that liberals want to teach white kids to hate themselves and America because of racism.

Instead, the Dems are lost in the corner checking what’s in their pockets and wondering who moved the door on them… AGAIN! This response is consistent enough that you’d think they were in on the plan to actually turn America into a single-party pseudo-democratic minority-rule autocracy with the GQP at the helm and them as the trusty sidekick picking up the corporate donor political donations that the GQP drops on the floor.

The Enthusiasm Gap

The Blue Tsunami and the Disappointing Result from Election 2020

If you can’t get it up for preserving the democracy and pulling a half of our fellow Americans out of poverty and positioning us to be competitive with China and mitigate the on rushing disaster of climate change, what the fuck can you get enthusiastic for?

Jebus fucked with his own crudifix, what will get you out of bed and to the polls to vote for the only party that can preserve whatever tattered remains of our democracy that we have left and whatever meager hope that we can limit the climate disaster so that we might could just live through it without too much pain and misery?

If you can’t figure out how to message around those themes and issues, maybe we really should just give up and resign ourselves to being the United Fucking States of Fucking Stupid, put both of our collective thumbs up our collective asses and walk around with a silly grin on our face wondering what’s giving us that tingling sensation in our naughty bits because, sibling, if those issues can’t animate you, then nothing can.

The results of Virginia’s and New Jersey’s governors races really do show us that our democracy is dead, we just don’t know it yet. And it is the white voter who just refuses to actually confront their implicit bias enough to recognize the dog whistling GQP candidates cynically manipulative tactics who have lobotomized themselves and rendered us a true #ZombieNation.

Maybe it really is time to let it all go, move all the liberals and folks of color to the blue states and the conservative crazies to the red states and make two separate countries. Maybe we can no longer afford to make nice with people who refuse to give up their inner racist.

Maybe I’m wrong on all of this. If so, let me know in the comments!

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Image Attribution

“Zombie” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0