What They Fear

Ebola, terrorism, immigration, PC-police are all proxies. Republicans are scared to death and they are acting like it's the end of the world. They are right. White racist patriarchal extractive-industialism cannot survive a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing society. They feel cornered. They think the final battle is upon them. They experience progressive change as an existential threat. It is because they have already lost that they can mobilize the imaginative and organizational resources to do their last bit of mischief. White racist patriarchal Republicanism isn't just, Godwin do forgive me, Hitler but Hitler in the bunker now. They cannot win but do not underestimate the damage they can do in losing: victory in a smoking planetary ruin traumatized beyond healing.