A Fitting End to a Slow-Motion Coup d’états

I have avoided the media coverage of the ongoing debacle that is the Kavanaugh confirmation process this week. I am not one of those who are drawn to train wrecks, unable to avert my eyes as its horror unfolds. But the implications of the actions in Washington go well beyond my personal anguish and the only ways I have ever known to work out my grief are to garden and to write.

A Coronation, Not an Investigation

What has become clear this week is that any hopes still held out for an independent, impartial judiciary at a time when a divided nation most desperately needs it are going to be dashed. The supposed investigation ordered last week in the wake of the Ford testimony before the Senate judiciary committee has proven to be a sham. Dr. Ford was not interviewed nor was the third alleged victim of sexual impropriety along with the bulk of the witnesses offered as corroboration.

This was not an investigation. It was a coronation at the end of a foregone conclusion. It was a means for cowardly senators to rationalize conduct for which they know better. It was a means to rationalize advancing party interests over those of the country, bearing in mind that a perceived need to rationalize one’s thoughts, words and behaviors carries with it an implicit recognition that the same are not reasonable.

All of this occurs in the face of an unprecedented firestorm of opposition from the legal community itself, The ABA withdrew its earlier endorsement demanding a full investigation and a letter signed by 2400 law professors (including at least seven of Kavanaugh’s own Yale Law School) urged his rejection. It was also the rare occasion when a former SCOTUS justice weighs in on a confirmation process, also urging the Senate not confirm the nominee.

All of this ignored.

Sadly, in the process, the last remaining branch of the national government that our citizens report actually trusting has now gone the way of a Congress dominated by ideologues and a White House in which resides a classic demagogue. Less than a majority of those polled report being able to trust either one.

It is also the final conclusion to a long running subversion of what was at one time a nation promising to live into its own highest ideals. Robert Reich describes this entire process as a slow motion coup d’états. The drive to dominate every branch and every level of government was the ultimate goal of the Powell Memorandum of the mid 1970s and the resulting Reagan Devolution beginning in 1980. After nearly four decades, the coup d’etat is now bearing fruit.

The window for reversing this domination is fleeting. If this November’s election does not at least put a roadblock in this juggernaut's path, there will be little more to talk about thereafter.

A Sense of Urgency

At a very fundamental level, the gutting of the Constitution and the corruption of its prescribed processes that we have seen up close the past two weeks are the product of a will to power that has come to take on a sense of urgency. That urgency is driven by three factors.

The most immediate is the demographics change. In a truly democratic republic, a population that is no longer WASP dominant (as is already the case in several states and by 2040 nationally) can elect people who look like the electorate and reflect their interests. Not only is the power to dominate lost in that shift but the loss of the expectable entitlement of those who have historically dominated without challenge creates a sense of urgency.

The median range factor is the ongoing decline of American empire both economically and militarily. Increasingly the US ' ability to control and exploit the natural resources of the planet at will is in question. The cost for a global military to insure corporate plundering has become prohibitive and is likely to become more so. 

The insanity of fighting two losing and interminable foreign wars halfway round the globe has depleted both our national morale and our finances. Hence you will see increasing plundering of the public realm (social security, EPA, national parks, spending on public education and health, et al) to both pay for the cost of what is increasingly a mercenary fighting force (think Blackwater) and to enrich the oligarchs fleeing the sinking ship.

The long-range factor is the coming ravages of climate change. The potential ill effects of this factor, which will begin to be felt with a vengeance by mid-century if not before, include disruption of food supplies and resulting waves of climate refugees (already a major factor in the Syrian/Iraq conflicts); the displacement of nearly 2 of 3 of the world's inhabitants from coastal urban centers affected by sea level rise; the badlands created by chemical and nuclear sites abandoned to rising seas; the extinctions of larger and larger swaths of the planetary flora and fauna and the migration of those that survive to cooler climes bringing with them diseases and pests not previously known.

While I don't give the WASP oligarchs much credit for insight, I do think they at least intuitively recognize that the world which brought them to dominance is threatened. Hence the desperate measures we see.

In the Spokes of a Turning Wheel

That said, their vision is incredibly myopic. Such is hardly surprising. A sense of entitlement tends to orient one to self-interest and to the immediate, to what can be taken without much concern for what impact those behaviors have on others. There is little sense of big picture notions like legitimacy of institutions or integrity of its actors in such views. But the fact the context is ignored does not simply make it go away.

John Kennedy brilliantly observed over 50 years ago that those who do make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolutions inevitable. The changes that our nation and our world are being called to make will come. The only questions is how that process will occur and what the result will be on the other end of it.

Resisting the turning of the wheel only tends to result in being pounded by its spokes. Brett Kavanaugh warned us during his testimony that we would “reap the whirlwind” of this conflict. Of all the things the man said, I would point to that observation as not only unquestionably true but potentially prescient.

And Yet I Continue to Hope

Finally, I know this sounds bleak and I do not offer it to depress people. Despite appearances here, I am not a doom and gloom prophet, it's simply the big picture that I currently see.

I do continue to hold out hope for a New America rising from the ashes of Trumpland. And I do continue to hold out hope for a planet whose peoples come to consciousness, recognize the existential threat they face and work together to meet those challenges. But much will need to change from where I sit this day before either of those things can happen.

There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm. - John Heyl Vincent

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.comhcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston 2018

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