Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

The right-wing rebellion against American democracy is often subtle, expressing itself through tricky changes to election law without a full-throated acknowledgment of what lawmakers are actually doing. But sometimes, the mask slips — and someone in the conservative movement openly tells you what’s really going on.

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“The US Constitution no longer works,” Ellmers writes. “What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.”

Many traditional conservatives, in his mind, are blind to this fact. Trump’s victory represented the true people rising up against an establishment that was unwilling to openly state how precarious the country’s situation is:

The great majority of establishment conservatives who were alarmed and repelled by Trump’s rough manner and disregard for “norms” are almost totally clueless about a basic fact: Our norms are now hopelessly corrupt and need to be destroyed. It has been like this for a while—and the MAGA voters knew it, while most of the policy wonks and magazine scribblers did not… and still don’t. In almost every case, the political practices, institutions, and even rhetoric governing the United States have become hostile to both liberty and virtue. On top of that, the mainline churches, universities, popular culture, and the corporate world are rotten to the core. What exactly are we trying to conserve?

Trump’s main failing, on Ellmers’s telling, is not that he was destructive — but that he was too ignorant and poorly advised to attack the right targets.

“As if coming upon a man convulsing from an obvious poison, Trump at least attempted in his own inelegant way to expel the toxin,” Ellmers writes. “By contrast, the conservative establishment, or much of it, has been unwilling to recognize that our body politic is dying from these noxious ‘norms.’”

Ellmers is not all that interested in the mechanisms of how and why the country has become so broken. He doesn’t really explain in any detail the nature of the nefarious forces that have polluted most American minds; he rails against “the progressive, or woke, or ‘antiracist’ agenda that now corrupts our republic” and takes it as a given that his audience will agree that this threat is apocalyptic.

He is more interested, instead, in rallying the forces of Real America against enemies he describes in strikingly dehumanizing terms.

“If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman,” Ellmers writes. “Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/1/22356594/conservatives-right-wing-democracy-claremont-ellmers

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