Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Babylon Palm Beach

Behind every popular uprising is an old guard or would be old guard eager to perpetuate its own power. Autocracy produces strange bedfellows. When you look at the MAGA crowds composed of the same dispossessed lumpenproletariat (unemployed and untrained workers and former ex-military) you wonder why they don’t realize they're being used. The fact that Trump’s tax cuts benefited the rich and that he never made good on his promise of a healthcare plan (at one press conference Kayleigh McInerny handed out a thick loose-leaf binder as proof of a health plan that was essentially the Emperor’s New Clothes). If you watched Babylon Berlin, the Netflicks series about Weimar Germany and the years leading up to the rise of Hitler, you noted a demographic tantamount to what is occurring in America today. Old-line conservative oligarchs, vestiges of the Prussian military find themselves in a fatal alliance with mobs of proto-fascists. It’s a dance of death much like that which exists between Trump’s base and the Republican party. Many Republicans have made a Faustian bargain with a nest of angry vipers. The sole purpose of these G.O.P. stalwarts lies in the perpetuation of their power—which they inadvertently relinquish each time they dilute the very values which they stood for in the first place. Actually, the conservative Republicans who would tolerate a Trump monarchy if it could satisfy their ends and their ragtag band of insurrectionists are like oil and water. It’s a delusional alliance that would be sad, were the results not so disconcertingly deadly. Don’t they realize their leader has nothing but contempt for his hordes of followers and that the gates of Mar-a-Lago itself will not open to MAGA?

Read "MAGA and the Coronavirus by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star


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