The American Union is dead. It died sometime in the last 2 weeks or so, smothered by a demented, raging President and his battery of MAGA golems. When he invades Greenland and imposes the Insurrection Act, the funeral service will have ended.
There is no going back to normalcy, to moderation, to acceptance. The Republican Party is only a conduit for the transfer of wealth from the State to the wealthy, a collection of cowards and true believer white nationalists. We can no longer be governed by these people. Ever.
This collapse has been facilitated by Democratic fecklessness and MAGA resentment. Trump has been the perfect vessel for their hatreds – a monster who makes monsters, a beacon for incels and neo-Nazis and Proud Boy cosplayers and those decimated by neo-liberal economics. Trump is a contemporary, malignant PT Barnum fleecing the rubes while trying on the robes of an American Caligula.
We are hurtling toward a Biblical reckoning for all of our sins – slavery, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the murder of Lincoln, the triumph of unrestrained wealth, the worship of money and the celebrity crushes on those who have it, our historical amnesia, our putrid, blinding innocence, our bully-boy ruthlessness overseas, our arrogant belief in being the Chosen nation — the People of the Coin, of White Power, of rancid masculine supremacy.
The Union as we have known it since 1865 is dead. It will stagger along, zombie-like, for a while, but the life it once held is gone. Nothing is there but something howling, mad, ravening, sclerotic.
Whatever comes next must be reinvented. It must separate the Blue States (if they even survive as we know them) from the governance of the Red, severely diminish the power of the Presidency and the Federal Government, smash the power of the oligarchs, drastically reduce the power of the Supreme Court.
This is not a call to despair. Any fight is a good fight. Taking the House and Senate in’26 is of vital importance. However, we should not be blind to what has happened, is happening and what will be necessary in response. We should not be fighting for the past, but for what might arise from the ruins.
