My friend called me around lunchtime and wanted to know on a scale of 1 to 10 how "ticked off are you" that Virginia is now a red state.
"I'm not ticked off. I'm sad," I replied.
"Oh." Not the response she expected, apparently. "Why are you sad?"
"Because this means a backward toss to women's rights, for one."
"Because of abortion?"
"Because of a women's right to her own body, mind, and soul. Not only abortion. Eventually women will lose the right to hold property, to carry a credit card, to hold a job. That's the logical conclusion if you follow the path of the conservative effort to create a theological autocracy."
"Well, that's scary," she said.
Damn right it's scary. What is really scary is that I see Conservatives calling the left Fascists and the left calling Conservatives Fascist. And they're both Fascist, but the Conservatives are the ones careening toward a path of oligarchical theological authoritarianism. The Democrats are simply floundering around trying to figure out how to keep some semblance of democracy from running head on into a brick wall, and doing a poor job of salvaging whatever little bit of the Republic may still be intact.
A very long time ago, the movement toward democracy began in Virginia with something called the Fincastle Resolutions. We don't hear about them much, but in 1774, a group of 15 men (white, landholding men, of course), from Fincastle County, Virginia (which doesn't exist anymore), passed resolutions opposing the King of England and sent them on to the Virginia's Delegation to the First Continental Congress that same year. The First Continental Congress met after the Tea Party incident in Boston.
The Fincastle Resolutions basically said the men of this part of Virginia were willing to die if their rights were not obtained from the Crown of Great Britain. Had King George III acquiesced and set things right, they would have been happy to accept that, but under no circumstances were they going to do his unlawful bidding, especially when it came to free exercise of religion, their liberties, and their properties.
We all know the rest of the story. The shot heard 'round the world, the glorious George Washington (also a Virginian), the American Revolution, and then the beginning of a new political experiment, government of men by men, with rights granted by men, and a republic that pretended to be a democracy came into being.
Fitting, isn't it, that here it will also die. I harbor no illusions that this republic will remain standing or whole. In fact, I harbor no illusions that it still exists.
It doesn't.
We are in fact fairly well set upon a fascist road, regardless of party. When power is removed from the people, then fascism is what steps in, and the people are now powerless on both sides.
They just don't know it yet. Many an authoritarian country in this world holds elections and has votes, but it's still an authoritarian, fascist bastion of hate and spittle, and we are nearly there.
Hitler is the best example of a fascist regime, the one we all know something about. In 1933, he created a decree that gave him the power to take over state governments in order to keep Germany safe. This decree said:
"Thus, restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and the right of association, and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."
We're already there, are we not? And so busy worrying about weird crap like critical race theory that we can't see the scope of what has happened.
Here is how Mussolini explained fascism:
"The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature's plans, which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice the individual."
Basically, safety is what matters. We must be safe.
That is why the former guy was so scary. He touted this safety crap everywhere, and only he would make us safe. Mostly he would make us safe from scary immigrants and people of color. He was blindsided by a virus - a mote in his eye that he never saw coming. He did not make us safe from that.
Fascism happens differently in every instance and in every country. However, it all ends the same: authoritarianism and brutality. The former guy was brutal.
He also didn't simply show up out of nowhere. No, the American brand of fascism has been coming since the 1970s, a slow and slogging march, unrecognizable because of the creeping way it has writhed its way into the brains of the masses.
It actually started with the Moral Majority - also a Virginia invention, I'm afraid - and those loud and energetic nuts who wanted to bring their brand of morality into every facet of life.
They helped create division, and in turn that division has helped create an inability to accept or handle change. The Reagan years brought about the downsizing of important government functions, leading to the privatization and control of aspects of life that should never have left public hands.
Bush I brought us lies about Willie Horton and that creation of other. He legitimized that.
After that came the Clinton years, NAFTA, and the loss of local jobs. Suddenly we had a totally marginalized society, people who felt victimized who weren't used to feeling that way. And they were still scared of that other, whatever that other was.
Newt Gingrich stoked the fires then with hatred via political division and thus the great divisions of Republican Democrat began - and us versus then that lay not in anything tangible, but in a continual brainwashing via Fox News and other media. Lies, everywhere, finger-pointing to the point of gasping laughter, except none of it was funny. So much of our democracy, we didn't know, had been based upon the statesman's unwritten agreement that gentlemen would indeed be gentlemen, not crass boors who would turn, like bulls in glass shops, into something that would break everything it ran up against. And all of it legal, or at least appearing to be so.
Because we lost our statesmen and replaced them with boors, agents of hate and deceit, we have lost the republic.
And the solutions offered now? Republicans smash more government power over everyone's head until those who are paying attention feel as if they've been beaten by the belts of their fathers. Government power such as killing rights for women, stealing the votes by changing the voting laws, creating so many "others" that no one knows who is on what side, creating chaos in the maelstrom of laws and tweets and vindictiveness. The progressives find these abhorrent.
The other side, meanwhile, cracks down with laws for everyone's safety, too, - take the vaccine, abide by this law on climate change, listen to Uncle Joe. The conservatives find this abhorrent.
So no one agrees on anything. We are a people awash in ideas and no action, or actions without thought of consequences, and no one following through to the logical conclusions of the farces of the day.
Fascism is not simply here because today Virginia is red.
It has been here for years. Virginia bleeds red today because the United States of America is inherently fascist.
