Watching the spectacle of the Republican primaries evokes the unavoidable truth that now, in the wake of Citizens United, it has become totally legal for rich people to run politicians the same way they might run horses, or greyhounds.
As with Robert Heinlein‘s novels, Margaret Atwood’s marvelous sci-fi novel The Handmaid’s Tale is chillingly prophetic. In her dystopia, environmental catastrophe has rendered the elites infertile, and pushed them to withdraw into gated communities where food shortages are common, and people are regularly hung in the public square to keep everyone fearful and docile.
The narrator remembers how just before her world fell apart, there were signs of repression: books being banned and burned, identity cards being issued and required, mobility restricted, media censored. All of a sudden, one fine morning, it was no longer possible for her and her family to get in their car and drive away to seek safety in Canada. All of a sudden, they were trapped in a nightmare that went quickly from bad to worse.
As in Germany before the Kristallnacht, none of us here in the U.S. wants to believe that anything could happen to destroy our cherished freedoms, our vaunted “American way of life.” We don’t want to admit, even to ourselves, the extent to which our freedoms are already being encroached upon, day by day.
We have met the enemy, and it is us. We are Fascist. We are Nazi. Get used to it.
