A landslide \u2014 against Trump and against his Republican Party enablers \u2014 might have put this worst-case scenario to rest. Instead, with Trump refusing to concede the election and the Republican Party celebrating its congressional and state house victories, the country is now inching ever closer to the Bushwick <\/i>plotline.<\/p>\n
Accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to bring down the existing system through a violent race war, are chomping at the bit. A raging pandemic has separated Americans into the cautiously masked and the defiantly maskless, further undermining what remains of the country\u2019s cohesion.<\/p>\n
As for zombies, they have rampaged across American popular culture<\/a> at least since Night of the Living Dead<\/i> hit movie theaters in 1968. They have now lurched off the page and out of the multiplex into real life. For how else would you describe the millions of Americans who deny the effects of a disease that has killed nearly 250,000 people and the results of a free-and-fair election that repudiated Donald Trump?<\/p>\n Jeez, something<\/i> must have eaten their brains.<\/p>\n The Disease Spreads<\/b><\/p>\n In 2016, the virtual equivalent of zombies \u2014 bots operating through social media and the comment sections of websites \u2014 intervened in the presidential election. In 2020, those bots were less influential<\/a>. But who needs virtual zombies when Americans themselves have become so willing to spread disinformation?<\/p>\n The Russian intention back in 2016 wasn\u2019t so much to get Trump elected. No one, including Trump himself<\/a>, thought there was much chance of that. Rather, the disinformation campaign sowed doubt about the political system more generally.<\/p>\n What started out as marginal hobbyhorses became widespread delusions. Don\u2019t trust the candidates, the media, the NGOs. A conspiracy lurks behind the fa\u00e7ade of normalcy. The Democrats are actually pedophiles (the Pizzagate conspiracy<\/a>), the financiers are actually Nazis (the Soros conspiracy<\/a>), and government officials are part of a deep-state resistance to Trump\u2019s agenda (the Fauci conspiracy<\/a>, among others).<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the One Conspiracy that Rules Them All.<\/p>\n The QAnon notion that all the world\u2019s a Satanic child-trafficking ring \u2014 Pizzagate raised to the nth degree \u2014 is so absurd on the face of it that no reasonable person could possibly entertain it. But plenty of people have embraced equally wacky theories. L. Ron Hubbard\u2019s Dianetics<\/i> has been a bestseller for decades, and all too many Americans were willing to believe that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s a lot easier to deny the existence of something if it remains far away in time or space. Those who live far from the ocean can blithely refute the evidence of the rising waters. That\u2019s not so easy when those waters have reclaimed your land and your house tumbles into the sea.<\/p>\n Misinformation about COVID-19 \u2014 that masks are not necessary, vaccines should be avoided, or herd immunity is a viable strategy \u2014 has been lethal. That denialism should have disappeared as COVID-19 At the very least, fear should have kept people at home instead of venturing out to the potential super-spreader events that President Trump was sponsoring as campaign rallies before the election.<\/p>\n But no. Thousands still showed up to what Democrats should have called Trump\u2019s \u201cdeath rallies.\u201d Even more unbelievably, Trump went on to defeat Biden in those parts of the country hardest hit by the virus. According to the Associated Press<\/a>, \u201cin 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority \u2014 93 percent of those counties \u2014 went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas.\u201d Even in hard-hit areas that ultimately voted for Biden, Trump often improved his showing from 2016, NPR reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n Well, zombies don\u2019t know that they\u2019re zombies. One day they\u2019re ordering BLTs and the next they\u2019re eating their next-door neighbor. They\u2019re completely unaware of how the abnormal has become normal.<\/p>\n The \u201cStolen\u201d Election<\/b><\/p>\n A coup requires at least some public support. The Thai military could count on the Yellow Shirts. The Egyptian military relied on those fearful of the religious leanings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Pinochet courted the rich and middle class.<\/p>\n Where public support is lacking, coups often wither. That\u2019s what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991. This week in Peru, the would-be president who forced the resignation of anti-corruption campaigner Mart\u00edn Vizcarra stepped down<\/a> after only a week in office, as protests continued to roil the country and the police killed two demonstrators.<\/p>\n Trump has the backing of millions of Americans who have bought into his allegations of a \u201cstolen\u201d election. As importantly, only a minority of Republican Party grandees has bowed to the inevitable by acknowledging Biden\u2019s victory. That includes a mere four Republican Senators (Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney, and Susan Collins).<\/p>\n A number of Republican candidates in this month\u2019s election, including those who were beaten by large margins, are also refusing to concede. Errol Webber, who lost his bid to unseat Karen Bass in a California congressional seat by an astounding 72 percent, now claims election fraud and won\u2019t back down. He\u2019s not alone<\/a> in his delusions.<\/p>\n The question is: how far will Trump and the Republican leadership go?<\/p>\n It\u2019s not likely that the Pentagon would support a coup, even after the removal of Mark Esper. The militia movement is armed and dangerous, but it\u2019s not even close to being as organized as in the Bushwick<\/i>scenario. The \u201cMillion MAGA March\u201d fell short of its goal by 980,000 people or so.<\/p>\n Trump just doesn\u2019t have the numbers \u2014 not the votes to reverse the election results in a recount, not the judges to overturn the decision through a legal strategy, not the support in state legislatures<\/a> to replace the Electoral College delegates, and not the people on the street for a popular uprising.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean he can\u2019t still do damage. Just this week, he announced that the administration would sell new leases<\/a> to oil and gas companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. He fired<\/a> the Homeland Security official who declared the election secure, and narrowly failed<\/a> to install wacko Judy Shelton on the Federal Reserve board. And he came close to starting a war with Iran just to destroy any last chance of salvaging the Obama-era nuclear deal. His advisors reportedly persuaded<\/a>him that it would be unwise to bomb the country\u2019s nuclear facilities.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, as I explain in a new article<\/a> at TomDispatch, not only is Trump throwing sand in the wheels of transition, the Republicans are gearing up to block just about everything the Biden administration will try to do from January on. The Republicans have transformed themselves into a zombie party that relies on a narrow base of zombie support. The party effectively died as a viable political force \u2014 absent gerrymandering and voter suppression \u2014 before Trump brought it back from the dead.<\/p>\n In films, zombification is a one-way street. Once you start twitching and slavering, there\u2019s no going back. Let\u2019s hope that the analogy doesn\u2019t hold in American politics.<\/p>\n De-Trumpification<\/b><\/p>\n In 1956, three years after Stalin\u2019s death, Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress entitled \u201cOn the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.\u201d Today, the speech seems rather boring<\/a>, full of jargon and acrobatic attempts to separate Stalin\u2019s crimes from the Soviet system. But at the time, it shocked the Communist Party zombies who\u2019d hitherto been unaware (or pretended not to know) of Stalin\u2019s crimes.<\/p>\n Most of those who were well acquainted with Stalin\u2019s crimes were already dead of famine, war, or murderous purges. That\u2019s the thing about plagues: by the time you\u2019re finally convinced of their lethality, you\u2019re on your deathbed. For some, even death is not enough. Compare the Stalinists who proclaimed love for their leader<\/a> as they were being executed with the COVID-19 patients who continued to deny the disease with their dying breaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Party speech was the first major step in the de-Stalinization campaign that Khrushchev waged into the 1960s. The campaign produced some liberalization of Soviet society, but the Thaw came to an end in a Brezhnev backlash that lasted effectively until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 (and finally published<\/a> Khrushchev\u2019s 1956 speech for all to read).<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the de-Stalinization that Khrushchev started in 1956 didn\u2019t completely discredit the Soviet dictator. Indeed, according to recent polls<\/a>, an astounding 70 percent of Russians approve of Stalin\u2019s role in Soviet history.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s personality cult exerts a similar effect. His adherents are incapable of seeing that the man\u2019s evil<\/a> extends far beyond his intemperate tweets. No speech by Joe Biden is going to make any difference. Not even denunciations by former Trumpers \u2014 Michael Cohen, John Bolton, John Kelly \u2014 have done much of anything. Trump\u2019s support only grew from 2016 to 2020.<\/p>\n So, what will it take to avoid the Stalin scenario? In an article about three historical parallels \u2014\u00a0 Reconstruction, de-Nazification, and de-Baathification \u2014 I conclude<\/a> that a mere speech won\u2019t do the trick.<\/p>\n Because Trumpism is a cancer on the body politic, the treatment will require radical interventions, including the transformation of the Republican Party, a purge of Trumpists from government, and the indictment of the president and his top cronies as a criminal enterprise. To avoid a second Civil War, however, a second American Revolution would need to address the root causes of Trumpism, especially political corruption, deep-seated racism, and extreme economic inequality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In this way, the leader can be properly stigmatized while the followers can be progressively de-zombified.<\/p>\n One thing is for certain: If the Biden administration doesn\u2019t take firm and decisive action against the illegalities of the Trump team, if Biden doesn\u2019t address the root causes of the zombification of half the electorate, the new president will be eaten alive.<\/p>\n The post Who Needs Zombies When We Have Republicans?<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/images\/managed\/pandemic_pivot_feffer.jpg\")
<\/a>infection rates began to spread to every corner of the United States before the election. The increasing proximity of the threat should have motivated Americans to come together as one to fight the virus.<\/p>\n\n