We don't need no stinking kings!

This morning, Heather Cox Richardson lays out what the forces of equity and human decency in this country are confronting in the present moment:

Putin, Orbán, Lukashenko, and others like them are advancing a very old version of society. They believe that a few men—white, Christian—should run the world and amass both wealth and power while the rest of us support them. While they attract voters with their cultural stands—attacking immigration and gay rights, for example—they have rigged elections, turned their economies over to cronies, and stifled the press. They have turned their nations from democracy to an authoritarianism that has been called “kleptocracy” or “soft fascism.”

In short, they want to abandon democracy for autocracy—government by a dictator.

Astonishingly, radicals of the American right have embraced this vision. Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson has been open about his support for both Orbán and Russia, and in 2022, the Conservative Political Action Conference will meet in Budapest, where, apparently, they think they will feel at home. Leaders on the American right hammer constantly on cultural issues, deliberately inflaming voters against immigration, Black rights, and transgender students on school sports teams, for example, as signs that American society is collapsing and that we must turn to Christianity and traditional values to restore our stability. 

... [ that they are] are taking their lead from minor authoritarian countries—the economy of Russia is comparable to that of Texas, while Hungary’s population is comparable to Michigan’s—shows the extraordinary poverty, or perhaps the extraordinary greed, of their vision.

Our domestic authoritarians are tapping into widespread disillusionment -- a significant number of us are frustrated, pained, and anxious. Too many of us are ready to see hope in a king. 

And a slight majority of us, know -- however bad the present -- we couldn't survive in the authoritarians' world.

This is ironic in a moment when debate over the impetus for the American Revolution is raising rancor among historians. But whether or not at its core the American founding uprising was predominantly about preserving slavery and despoiling native peoples, it certainly was about ending colonial rule by a distant king.

Democracy is hard. Multi-cultural, multi-ethnic democracy is harder. We've only had a glimpse of such a thing since the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s. 

And democracy rooted in women's equal humanity is something new under the sun.

Professor Peter Beinart helps us to understand the centrality of revulsion against female empowerment among our homegrown fascists. They like having a Kimberley Guilfoyle around to front for them, but, he quotes Texas A&M political scientist Valerie Hudson on how, at a deep level, they experience women's equality as emasculation and desecration of what they hold holy.

Hudson argues that in many societies throughout history, government has rested upon a social contract between men: “Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women.” In those societies, male political dominance appeared legitimate—like adults ruling children—because it mirrored the hierarchy of the home. Women’s rule, by contrast, was considered unnatural. In the words of the Prophet Isaiah, “Youths oppress My people, and women rule over them. My people, your leaders mislead you.”

Beinart continues:

... Trump’s message was clear: As president, he would put women in their place. He promised a new political order in which all women—no matter how elevated their status—would be graphically reminded that their worth is determined by men. In so doing, Trump tapped into an anxiety among his supporters, more than two-thirds of whom said in an April 2016 poll that American society “is becoming too soft and feminine.” When he led crowds in chants of “lock her up”—something Republican crowds never chanted about John Kerry, Barack Obama or Joe Biden—he incited a fantasy of revenge. In a de-feminized America, women who threatened male power would be not merely defeated but punished.   

In other nations, Trump’s ideological cousins have done something similar. To undermine fragile liberal democracies, they have associated them with emasculation. And to signal their restoration of male dominance, they have humiliated powerful women. When Brazil’s current president, Jair Bolsonaro, voted to impeach his predecessor, Brazil’s first woman president, Dilma Rousseff—who had been tortured by Brazil’s military rulers in the early 1970s—he dedicated the vote to one of that regime’s most infamous torturers. In 2015, he told a Brazilian congresswoman, “I would not rape you, because you are not worthy of it.” When Bolsonaro ran for president, crowds at his rallies chanted that they would feed dog food to feminists. ...

The leadership of the Republican party has sold its soul for this stew of feces. The rest of us are challenged: will we allow them return their king?