Soft-Focus Fascism
Kari Lake is running for governor of Arizona, a state that long ago became a safe haven for conspiracy theory-spewing gun nuts and other anti-government militia miscreants.
They live side by side with the sun birds, retirees and the new age crystal-loving crowd that have flocked to its cities and stunning desert beauty along with hardworking citizens that have been demonized by Trump and much of the GOP as somehow less than real Americans because of their Latino heritage and the Republican Party’s war on immigration.
The last time I was in Tucson, where my own father lives, it was for a benefit for gun safety in the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting involving Congresswoman Gaby Giffords. I was there as a road manager for Jackson Browne and It featured everyone from Alice Cooper to Sam Moore and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
The concert felt like it addressed some of the cultural issues and concessions that need to be recognized if this country is ever gonna have a sane policy regarding guns.
Just this week there was another school shooting in St. Louis, this one was made logistically possible by Missouri Governor Parson’s passing of the ‘Second Amendment Preservation Act’ which essentially blocks federal gun laws and makes ‘red flag’ laws impossible to enforce for local police.
Police had even been asked by the shooter’s own family to confiscate his AR15 before it was essentially returned to the killer - who used it to murder a beloved teacher and horrifically add yet more names to the ever growing list of American students dying by gun violence.
The concert itself almost feels naive now but the heroism and hard work of Congresswoman Giffords still inspires. Her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, has been serving as the state’s junior senator since 2020 and is a great example of the kind of politician I believe we need to embrace as Democrats.
I met Mark the night of the benefit and talked with him about a friend of mine, Garrett Reisman, who served alongside him in NASA on the Space Station. Mark seems to be the sort of pragmatic politician we need to embrace, along with John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Tim Ryan in Ohio. Men who communicate in an authentic way that seems to reflect the places and people they want to represent - not interlopers like J.D. Vance or Dr. Oz who are clearly trying to grasp for power to benefit outside interests.
In the case of Oz, his instincts may be to serve entirely foreign interests, much like the man who anointed him, Donald Trump; with his obvious obsequiousness to Vladimir Putin and the cadre of Russian oligarchs that kept his poorly run businesses afloat for decades.
Men like Ryan and Fetterman, seem to be quite comfortable bridging the cultural divide that has been forced on much of suburban and rural America by the slick, very profitable and extremely reactionary messaging of Fox News and its personality pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
Tucker is already priming his viewers not to accept the results of the mid-term elections should the Democrats prevail in certain key races.
A candidate like Kari Lake is the polar opposite of progress and bridging divides - if she doesn’t scare you, you might not be paying attention.
As a former local television news anchor, Lake speaks with a polish not found in the burnt-gristle-dripping-with-chicken-fat sounds that come out of the angry mouths of her MAGA peers like MTG, or the almost adolescent whine of a Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz, and she has already been embraced to some extent by national MSM cable news networks.
Lake will provide endless sound bites full of lies but spoken in a soft almost mellifluous way that will have a direct appeal to the same conservative, mostly white women that shop at Zara outlets and think Trump really cared about protecting their ‘way of life.’
Anyone who has spent time in the suburbs that were populated after a stream of middle and working class, mostly great-grandsons and daughters of immigrants - now 2nd and 3rd generation Americans -left the cities for a ranch house and a quarter acre on a cul-de-sac and ‘safer schools’, knows the appeal of a Kari Lake on this demographic.
I grew up among these types in a middle class, slightly rural town about and hour and change from NYC. I moved there on the last day of 1984 to live with my grandparents.
I left Prince Georges County, Maryland, where I lived in an apartment complex that was filled with diverse and multicultural families (and whose children were very much a target of Reagan-era socioeconomic and racial divisions, I saw free school breakfasts and lunches disappear overnight and my friends subsequently go hungry for the school day) to live with kids that had dirt bikes and went deer hunting.
The era of ‘ketchup is a vegetable’ had morphed into ‘greed is good’ - the signs of destruction as a result of many of Reagan’s policies were already quite visible in the cracks and fissures of American life.
This was met with a lack of empathy and hardening of the spirit in certain sectors of our society like the one I am writing about here. Snark as a political shorthand was just over the horizon and would hit is apex a decade or so later with the birth of Fox News and rise of Rush Limbaugh.
My classmates’ parents had voted for Reagan and cheered on his war on the poor, as it was the first not so subtle dog whistle that those who were not white Americans were freeloaders.
Their own futures of course were quietly being outsourced in favor of LBOs (leveraged buyouts) and corporate raids but it was all being done under the guise of ‘Morning in America’.
The fact that most of these folks had achieved their toehold in the suburbs due to decidedly Democratic policies put in place decades before - FDR’s ‘New Deal’ and the manufacturing boom of the post-WW2 era; the continued education for returning vets thanks to the G.I. Bill, was largely forgotten. Not to mention, the five day work week and job safety protections - also the result of Democratic policies and the hard work of labor unions.
Keep in mind that the House GOP voted against both the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, two landmark pieces of legislation aimed at an equitable recovery and lowering inflation - and GOP candidates are now taking credit for the largesse in their home districts and blaming Biden for a global inflation situation (which is much worse in Europe). We also have a strong dollar, as opposed to some of our closest allies. The federal deficit was cut in half last year thanks to Biden Administration policies.
But those facts won’t get in the way of the well-pruned minds salivating for key buzzwords concocted by the Federalist Society and almost genetically engineered to be repeated ad infinitum in the cerebral cortexes of red state voters across this land.
The ability to lie without shame is a hallmark of the modern conservative movement. Mendacity as political strategy, something they all watched Trump commit with no consequence.
These same principles and institutions that created the middle-class and made life relatively comfortable for the American worker (though equality and opportunity was not yet in reach for minorities, an issue the Biden Administration is tackling and baking into project funding as it goes out to the states) are now key buzz words in a libertarian influenced (and well-funded) conservative boom in think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation.
Who among us truly believes any member of the current GOP would vote for the New Deal in 1933?
There are new talking points, many developed at the behest and bankroll of folks like David Koch (and his little brother Charles who carries on the family’s legacy of one day building and enduring autocracy).
This talk was in may ways a reaction to the Carter Administration’s desire to inject environmental awareness, conservation and clean energy into the body politic, as it threatened the status quo and exploitation and polluting of public lands, that companies like Koch Industries had come to rely on and perform with impunity.
It worked very well as a means of injecting rancor and xenophobia into the kitchen table rants of Americans that felt like some foreign ‘other’ and immigration were the cause of their crumbling futures and rust belt dreams so slowly dying on the vine.
It was and is a lot easier to believe in a bogeyman and embrace invective and hate than to factor into the conversation the results of global trade and complex financial instruments like the aforementioned LBOs that were gutting US manufacturing and sending American jobs overseas.
He who controls the narrative on many of the cultural issues, like guns and abortion, controls the spigot that allows hate or progress to flow freely. Messaging alone now seems to decide whether we continue to stretch towards the highest ideals of our founding principals and build an inclusive nation with justice for all or devolve into a rancid kleptocracy peopled with the well-armed and ignorant, militantly voting against their own self-interests.
It always starts with dog whistles and turns into bullhorns.
And now here we are on the eve of midterms in the United States of America and GOP militants are showing up at polling center drop boxes, masked and armed with the intent of scaring voters. Intimidating them from participating in democracy and certainly one of the most consequential mid-term elections in modern times.
It’s worse in Florida where Ron DeSantis has used local police forces to arrest people who voted 100% legally to the best of their knowledge and were still being arrested as an act of voter suppression. (DeSantis knowing full-well the videos of the arrests would circulate online and keep others from exercising their rights). DeSantis himself turned in an awful debate performance (at the only one he agreed to participate in) and short-circuited like an animatronic doll at some sort of fascist theme park.
Which would be an apt way to describe Florida itself, or Arizona for that matter if the GOP has it’s way. Fascism is embraced as a brand, as a lifestyle choice now and they’re betting on it working.
Let’s stop them on November 8th by voting in numbers too large to deny. Democracy itself may hang in the balance but we can win.
Vote Blue.
“DeSantis himself turned in an awful debate performance at the only one he agreed to participate in and short-circuited like an animatronic doll at some sort of fascist theme park.“
Hilarious and so true. Thanks for inserting a laugh amid the darkness.
I’m sorry to hear this about your friend. I’m so rurally located I’m even isolated and up till this week was a florist which is an incredibly isolating business, I digress. I’m in northern Az near Sedona and our city is Flagstaff a very different place to be sure. Native influence but also the university of northern Az which has roots in agriculture. Also has music or had anyway. It’s a very normal community that gets along from what I can see. Little flag waving or posturing. The boarder trouble have been a story for several decades, a sort of third rail. I can’t say Az is progressive but there are people who want to defend the wilderness and their rural life style which includes an impressive building of trails for bicycles, walking , horses and also trails for ATV’s. Preservation is a big deal. Not just growth here.