Manufactured Chaos

The Republican party appears to be in turmoil.

Trump, his entire inner circle, and his fellow insurrectionists at FOX News are all caught up in criminal and civil court battles that aren’t going well for them. However, they have no intention of giving up their efforts to get Trump re-elected, in large part because an active campaign is continuing to shield them from those cases being permitted to advance properly.

Republicans in control of the House appear to be obstructing each other as much as they are their opposition.

At least twice this year, Speaker McCarthy has turned over the entire House to insurrection spokesperson Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as Speaker Pro Tempore.

Republicans in the Senate have mostly gone quiet in the halls of Congress.

None of them are giving any appearance of being willing to actually govern. None of them are making any effort to work with Democrats or the Biden administration on any meaningful legislation.

Their one cohesive policy stance seems to be a willingness to force the nation into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling to ensure the government continues to pay off the debt it has already accrued.

Meanwhile, all these Republican leaders have pretty much stopped appearing on any news networks other than FOX News and that network is choosing to give the majority of its air time to the most extremist Trump loyalists.

When they do speak publicly, on air or online, they’re rhetoric feeds the hatred of violent extremists embracing fascism through White Nationalism, patriarchal misogyny, and religious bigotry.

It is not only easy, but extremely tempting and extremely dangerous, to dismiss all this as disorganized and incohesive chaos. Don’t fall into that trap. It becomes far more terrifying when you allow pattern recognition to settle in.

Since the beginning of our country, regardless of the party name they chose, America’s political conservatives have had the same agenda that they currently have:

To establish a society of multinational corporate feudalism with most of the populace serving as serfs enriching the corporate ownership both as consumers and servants using racism, bigotry, lies, misinformation, and any other tools they can get their hands on in order to accomplish it, and insure that the populace does not have the resources or willpower to do anything about it.

If you accept that premise, then their ongoing efforts against health care, birth control and abortion, living wages, food and housing assistance, social services, social safety nets, and more all make sense. If you accept that premise, their constant efforts to divide us over race, religion, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexuality, age, and more make perfect sense as tools to keep us from uniting. If you accept that premise, then all their efforts to discredit and dismantle the federal government, especially its regulatory enforcement, make perfect sense. If you accept that premise, all their lies and misinformation make perfect sense.

If you accept that premise the appearance of constant infighting, incompetence, and outright stupidity make perfect sense as a tool to get us to dismiss the underlying patterns as well as from what the damage they are doing nationwide in the state level governments they’ve managed to gain control of.

If you can see beyond the smoke and mirrors and all the bluff and bluster, taking a look at where we are right now in relation to the 2024 election cycle makes far more sense.

Trump is currently the front runner for the Republican party’s presidential nomination, and will likely win it barring any unforeseen health issues or sudden movement in any of the several criminal cases pending against him. Despite CPAC attendees deciding that they want Kari Lake as their VP nominee, Trump is more likely to pick Marjorie Taylor Greene. She both idolizes him and looks enough like his daughter Ivanka to be too enticing for him to pass up. The news that she and her husband are finally divorcing after staying together through the last 8 years of very public disagreement about Trump does nothing but add to this possibility.

This is why McCarthy has given her control of the House twice already despite having many more experienced and slightly less crazy options available. They’re trying to get you used to seeing her at the podium.

Meanwhile, the “traditional republicans” — a term which merely means they prefer to be more subversive with their efforts toward obtaining their party’s long term goals than overt — are currently pushing for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to be their nominee. Ron is far more dangerous than Trump. He shares all the same petty, vindictive temperament, the same quirks, biases, and more, he’s just a more skilled politician who knows how to get his hatreds built into legislation proposals that he can get passed into law.

Honestly, all the Republicans would be perfectly fine with either of these candidates winning. Either continues them full speed ahead toward the goals they’ve been laying the ground work for across the nation with there recent slate of “state’s rights” bills that are nothing more than a rehashing of the original secession letters of the Articles of the Confederacy that led to the Civil War.

I think; however, that Republicans will find that if Trump gets too hard to elect, the Trump voter base won’t rally behind DeSantis after they’ve torn each other apart in a primary. So they’ll opt for a more “traditional” member of their party. They’ll rally behind someone more like Sens. Richard Burr or John Thune who have mostly kept themselves out of the national spotlight and present them as their “moderate and rational” candidate to lure back in the party’s disenfranchised conservative moderates.

But, know this, even if they were to choose someone more like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney, they’d still be putting forth a candidate that was 100% behind the modern Republican party’s long established policy platform and goals. The ones behind the smoke and mirrors and bluff and bluster.

Pay attention to what they are actually doing and what they are actually accomplishing by working so hard to make you believe they’re not successfully working together to achieve their goals on a nationwide scale.

Because they are.

And that is far more important than anything they say that they are or are not doing, or will or will not do.