Tomorrow Is GOP Caucus Day In Iowa-- Utterly Meaningless, But The Conservatives Spent $300 Million

All Losers, No Winners

My grandfather’s rural village, in what is now Ukraine, had been decimated by Cossacks. He was a teenager— and a socialist— when he arrived in the U.S. over a century ago. My parents had no interest in politics whatsoever; I learned my politics from my grandfather. To me, the Republicans have always been:

1- the capitalists

2- the Cossacks

They still are. I wish the Democrats were as clearly defined. But conservatives have always infuriated me— including conservatives who call themselves Democrats. Yesterday Lisa Lerer wrote that this weekend, Iowa Republicans are casually talking “of the prospect of World War III, civil unrest and a nation coming apart at the seams.” She didn’t mention that are dumbass imbeciles who are unworthy of American citizenship. “Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primary race,” she wrote, “bounces from courtroom to campaign trail, lacing his rhetoric with ominous threats of retribution and suggestions of dictatorial tendencies.”

Former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, who campaigned in Iowa for president, told Lerer that the race for president today is unlike that or any other presidential race he had ever experienced. “The difference,” he said, “is just so stark in terms of American values and in terms of what is the future going to be.” You know, the kind of values I hold are very different from the kind of conservative values espoused by someone like Nikki Haley, let alone Ron DeSantis. But I recognize the conservatism being espoused by Haley and DeSantis to be wrapped up in values. Trump and Ramswamy— not at all. These two are grifters, 100% so, who have nothing to do with values at all.

Democrats worry that a second Trump administration could plunge the country into chaos, trample constitutional rights and destroy the legitimacy of elections. Trump and his supporters make false claims that the previous election was stolen, that the riot on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection and that the Biden administration has been using the legal system to prosecute its political opponents. In the years since the attack at the Capitol, Trump and both mainstream and fringe elements of the conservative media have pushed a steady drumbeat of those lies, an effort to turn upside down the narrative of Jan. 6 and undercut the legitimacy of the Biden administration.

The result is a disorienting frenzy of facts and falsehoods swirling around issues once considered sacrosanct in public life. Recent polling shows Americans have a gloomier view of the future and express a new openness to political violence.

…As politicians, commentators and voters grasp for historical analogies, one of the darkest chapters of American history keeps being evoked: the period leading to the Civil War. Some see a parallel in the clash of two Americas— not North and South now, but Red and Blue.

Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, mentioned the Civil War during his speech as he dropped out of the presidential race on Wednesday and questioned whether Americans would support democratic values. He recounted the story of Benjamin Franklin being asked by a woman in Philadelphia what kind of government the founding fathers had given the country.

“He said to the woman, ‘A republic, if you can keep it,’” Christie told voters in New Hampshire. “Benjamin Franklin’s words were never more relevant in America than they are right now.”

David Blight, a historian at Yale University, has been surprised at how his once-obscure academic specialty in the Civil War has become a matter of current debate: In recent months, he has been repeatedly asked to speak and write about whether that period of strife has lessons for today.

Blight does see the comparisons. “It’s not the 1850s but there are many similarities,” he said. “When are the times when the divisions are so terrible that we feel on the brink of losing the whole? When are the parts tearing us asunder in ways that we fear for the whole enterprise of this ideal? And we’re in one of those, there’s no question.”

So… tomorrow is caucus day in Iowa. What do you hope for? An unset victory for Haley or DeSantis? Ramaswamy? That would be funny. How about that everyone who goes out to vote winds up with a nose that freezes off from frostbite. I’ll go with that. Yeah-- I'm a jerk; I'd love that. A lot.