Pearl River No Kings Day, only short months after an earlier event in June, was scheduled in more than 2500 towns and cities across the United States. Reports indicate there may have been over 7-million participants.
As Jamelle Bouie writes in the Times, Republicans went crazy over people exercising their constitutional right to assemble,
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming said of a planned No Kings protest that it would be a “big ‘I hate America’ rally” of “far-left activist groups.” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana also called No Kings a “hate America rally.” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that he expected to see “Hamas supporters,” “antifa types” and “Marxists” on “full display.” People, he said without a touch of irony, “who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.” And all of this is of a piece with the recent declaration by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.”
Wow! Talk about demonizing your opponents. Hey, now tell us what you really think. All of this for a bunch of rallies and parades organized by coalitions including Indivisible, 50501 and MoveOn, that are just standard issue, liberal white bread with hardly an arrest record among them. For goodness sakes, most of them got permits!
Trump’s assault is unending, but with every day it’s hard not to believe that the center is not holding for his team. Take the shutdown, as one example. The AP in a current poll finds that a higher percentage of Americans blame Trump and Republicans in Congress, than they do Democrats. Other reports indicate that they are in disarray because the Democrats stumbled on an issue – continuing subsidies for working families on Obamacare – that is popular with the public and no amount of word bombs seem to be helping their case.
Furthermore, the canaries are cheeping away in the political coal mines.
David Brooks, moderate conservative Republican columnist for the New York Times, hardly a MAGA-man, but often a middle-of-the-road Trump policy apologist, writes in The Atlantic, that what we need now is a mass movement. He writes,
Trump’s actions across these various spheres may seem like separate policies, they are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent. If you think Trumpism will simply end in three years, you are naive. Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation. This could be the rest of our lives, and our children’s, too. So why are we doing so little? Are we just going to stand in passive witness to the degradation of our democracy?
David French, another conservative columnist for the Times, seems to also be issuing a call at this point in his horror at the recent report of racism and antisemitism by young Republican professionals, politicians, and Congressional staffers and other less than civil, often violent comments, including from the Vice-President, saying…
When you combine all the elements — yet another Republican racism scandal, death wishes from a Democratic politician, Vance’s decision to excuse the inexcusable — you can see the ways in which 10 years of Trumpism has twisted the American soul.
I’m not saying that we’re winning, anything but. We’re getting a butt-whipping on the daily, but rightwing extremism in rhetoric and actions emanating from the White House and infecting everything it touches is a lot worse than not being a good look. It’s driving people away from them, and pushing us to come up with a plan that works from the bottom up and the top down.