GOP has devolved into an organized mob bent on revenge
THOM HARTMANN for Common Dreams
To punish them and teach women and other
young men Black men — who might think of being too troublesome in the
legislature — a lesson, the GOP ran a pathetic Kangaroo Court for the world to
see. And got their revenge.
Jim
Jordan and his buddies in the GOP are furious and out for
revenge. Donald Trump is being held to account by a Black district attorney in
New York City for falsifying business records to affect the outcome of an
election and to avoid paying taxes and Jordan is attempting to intimidate the
prosecutor’s office.
Ron
DeSantis is furious and out for revenge. After the CEO of
Disney publicly disagreed with the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation,
DeSantis thought he could hurt the company, but they outfoxed him. Now he’s
demanding an investigation to harass and bully the company.
Brett “Beerbong” Kavanaugh is furious and
out for revenge. Several women pointed out his drunken sexual assaults when he
was a teenager and he told the Senate:
“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades … and as we all know, in the political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.”
Donald Trump is furious and out for
revenge. For the first time in his 76 years on this Earth, he’s being held to
account for a small slice of his lifetime of criminal behavior, and being held
to account by a Black man. He’s apparently trying as hard as he can to trigger
another of his stochastic terrorist followers to threaten or assassinate the
DA, the judge, and their families.
The Republican Party has devolved into an organized mob bent on revenge, because the people of America are rejecting their version of leadership and their abandonment of the principles of democracy. Facing increasing rejection by voters, they have turned to gerrymandering, threats, blocking the right to vote, and inciting violence.
Having failed at holding power through the
democratic process, Republicans have turned instead to revenge tactics.
Revenge is violence.
Revenge as a political philosophy is rooted
in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument
of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth
and political power being used to destroy one’s enemies, or unjustified
violence inflicted by the state under color of law.
But at its core, revenge is rooted in
physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It’s war brought into politics and
governance.
Vengeance like this has its own power and
its own attraction. The media is drawn to it, making it attractive to
Republicans as a way of bringing together their followers.
Insecure, frightened men (and the
occasional woman) participating in revenge-fueled violence find a sense of
agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life
of ordinariness and political impotence.
And make no mistake: the GOP has become the
party of revenge and political violence.
Democrats watch revenge threats of violence
against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid;
against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who
Republican legislators declare — and try to put into law — are less than human
or “aberrations” that must not be tolerated in a “free society.”
“It’s the exception,” the media notes, and
moves on to the next story.
In fact, these displays of revenge-based
violence and the willingness to use violence are Republican declarations. They
are statements of purpose. They’re spoken and executed with pride.
They are assertions by Republicans and
their followers that they are perfectly willing to exercise violence and its
power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human lives, as they
did against three police officers (and tried to kill others) on January 6th.
Republicans and their media lionize Kyle
Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing
two protestors. They celebrate police revenge against Black people with “thin
blue line” flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the
willingness to kill one’s political opponents.
They show up at protests heavily armed and
wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, “Free helicopter
rides for liberals.” Their leader said there are “very good people on both
sides” after his followers — demanding revenge against Jews they say are trying
to “replace” them with Black people — murdered a young woman named Heather
Heyer.
Republicans running for office feature guns
and imply threats to kill people for political revenge in their television and
online advertising. Eric Greitens is
just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and
implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie’s Christmas Card, but he’s
just one of many members of Congress to pose their white children with deadly
assault weapons.
These are all expressions of a political
philosophy that is based in revenge.
When men like Rusty Bowers, Adam Kinsinger,
and Brad Raffensperger — Republicans who dared stop Trump’s criminal attempts
to steal the 2020 election — describe how they were and continue to be
threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.
Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured
violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay
dying: this kind of revenge-driven violence is devoid of compassion. It is
evil.
Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about
the embrace of revenge by the base of the Republican Party she leads, there was
not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow
conservatives like Liz Cheney now face, nor a word from Republican media other
than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications about why they must
seek revenge.
Because revenge is now their brand. They
revel in it.
They boast of it in ways they sometimes
claim are just hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of “Second
Amendment solutions” to Democratic successes at the polls, or when Donald Trump
sent his mob to hang Mike Pence in revenge for failing to flip the election to
him.
Their followers know what they mean: these
are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse revenge-based
violence, and carry explicit threats.
Revenge is the cardinal characteristic, the
logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has
lifted itself to power on the scaffold of revenge against an “other” they claim
have stolen from them or persecuted them.
Rightwing media revel in the language of
revenge. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like
“invaders” and “vermin” and “illegals” and demand revenge for the lost jobs,
integrated schools and neighborhoods, and other insults they imagine.
To justify the violence at the heart of
their movement, they also squeal a phony claim to victimhood: wealthy
Republicans claim Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear
gays are trying to groom their children. They pretend teachers are
indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Revenge, they say, is their only
option.
Over the past four decades, as this
revenge-fueled movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than
three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by
rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists who invariably claim they’re
rightfully seeking revenge.
Republicans justify their violence as
necessary to get revenge against those they say have assaulted their faith,
their families, and the “identity” of their homeland. They will tell you it’s
the unfortunate last-ditch “necessity” provoked by the Democrats and
dark-skinned or queer “others” who “threaten our way of life.”
In reality, revenge is not the fascist’s
final, last-gasp option: it’s their first.
— It’s their most powerful recruiting tool,
showing, as it does, their dominance and control of society and society’s
institutions.
— It’s how they cow dissent.
— It’s the weapon that provokes action, and
fascists are all about action.
— It creates chaos, and revenge needs chaos
to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to
replace.
The final cause to which fascist revenge is
directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia:
war of all against all. Every vengeful act is designed intentionally to bring
society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly and
vengefully kill their enemies — particularly people of color and “liberals” —
in the streets of the nation.
It’s why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma
Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680: he told
the world it was revenge for Waco and other “big government” violations of his
rightwing world. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who
killed 58 people and left over 550 wounded, and the Boston Bomber. Revenge
against Black people was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a
supermarket, and revenge against Hispanics motivated the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people.
Revenge against Jews enraged the Tree of Life synagogue shooter.
It’s the story line of the two best-selling
books within this part of the modern Republican movement, Camp of the
Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with
revenge-fueled mass slaughter leaving a nation of “pure” white Christian
survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of brown
and Jewish bodies.
Most Americans are not driven by revenge.
It’s not how they think politics should work.
They’d just like a country that works for
all of us, instead of just white people, the billionaire class, and giant,
monopolistic corporations. Most Americans are sick of Republicans saturating
our airwaves with their revenge fantasies, their revenge investigations, their
revenge against voters, their revenge programming on hate-driven TV and radio.
Revenge is a poison, and it’s deeply
embedded now in the political bloodstream of our nation because Republicans who
haven’t gotten their way have proclaimed the political and social equivalent of
revenge-fueled holy wars.
They showed up with revenge in their hearts
to make right Trump’s loss on January 6th; they sought revenge for
having to wear masks during the pandemic; they seek revenge on women, racial,
and gender minorities who merely want equal rights and freedoms as citizens of
the United States.
A 2003 study by University of Oklahoma
psychology researcher Ryan P. Brown found a strong association between revenge
and narcissism, a personality disorder that has become a defining
characteristic of many Republican politicians, from Donald Trump to,
apparently, Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Jim Jordan.
“As expected,” Brown noted, “people low in
dispositional forgiveness were more vengeful than were people high in
dispositional forgiveness, but particularly so among those high in narcissism;
among those low in narcissism, forgiveness was less strongly related to
vengeance. Thus, the most vengeful people were those who were both low in
forgiveness and high in narcissism, independent of gender differences and
healthy self-esteem.”
Republicans in Tennessee, preening for the
cameras and high on their own white privilege self-righteousness, got their
revenge yesterday. They bullied and humiliated their Democratic colleagues who
were acting on behalf of that state’s schoolchildren, and expelled two “uppity”
Black members.
Now, hopefully, America sees how disgusting
and pathetic revenge is when compared to governing on behalf of the people,
instead of just the gun industry and the morbidly rich.
THOM HARTMANN is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
