Forget Orban’s Hungary. We’d be worse.
Paul Krugman writes about the dystopia the U.S. could become under one-party Republican rule. He thinks a GOP autocracy would be far worse than Orban’s Hungary.
Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. [...] But what strikes me, reading about Orban’s rule, is that while his regime is deeply repressive....it is... “soft fascism,” which makes dissidents powerless via its control of the economy and the news media without beating them up or putting them in jail.
Do you think a MAGA regime, with or without Donald Trump, would be equally subtle? Listen to the speeches at any Trump rally. They’re full of vindictiveness, of promises to imprison and punish anyone — including technocrats like Anthony Fauci — the movement dislikes.
How the remnants of the Confederacy morphed over time to (ironically) take over the Party of Lincoln
Krugman’s article is well worth reading. But I reblogged it to give a context for one of the reader’s comments, which provides a succinct history lesson about how the spirit of the Confederacy (kept alive in part through the Southern Baptists) has finally found a home in today’s GOP.
Interesting how the term 'Culture War' has been missed here, when it is actually central to the problem.
The Right, (the Neo-Confederacy within the Republican party) is fighting the Culture War, and has been since the end of the Civil War, in 1865.
This dovetailed with the formation of the Southern Baptists in a schism with the Baptist Convention in 1845, 20 years earlier, over the Southern demand that slavery should be protected from the abolitionists in the North, and the parallel demand that they should help spread slavery to the new states of the American West.
When they lost the war, the Confederacy concealed it's political beliefs within the Evangelical Fundamentalists Alternative Facts of Creationism vs Evolution, the Lost Cause versus the Yankee victory.
It was easy for Trump to gather the faithful Neo-Confederates with the Obama Birther Myth, and easier still to believe in QAnon and the stolen election.
Evangelicals are not Christians.
They are a political party representing the Confederacy, pretending to be a religion. The religion they want is a Confederate Theocracy, even if it destroys the United States, as they failed to do in the Civil War. They may have succeeded this time.
--UTBG, Denver
