UPDATED: #ColdWar2, in Ukraine and in Arizona

[bctt tweet=”America, and the liberal international order we lead, have been engaged in a new #ColdWar2 with an autocratic alliance led by Russia and China for years now, but many of us have only recently become starkly aware of this fact.” username=”BlogForArizona”]

Given that we haven’t widely realized this fact as a society, it’s really no wonder we’ve been losing the conflict. Russia and China have been insidiously spreading their model of authoritarian social control throughout the world while entangling the free world in a web of economic dependencies that have cozened us into a false sense of security.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russian strongman Putin puts the free world on notice in an unmistakable manner that Cold War 2.0 might not always stay cold.

There is much speculation about why Putin has decided on this high-risk escalation, violating the central norms of the current world order, frequently attributing his decision to the lies and excuses that he has put forward as justification for his aggression.

But the truth is this: Putin needs to destroy Ukraine because it represents the hope of freedom, democracy, and self-determination for the Russian people.

If Ukraine -the birthplace of the Russian nation – can choose democracy and alignment with the free world in the form of the European Union and NATO, then so might Russia itself. And that is an existential threat to the corrupt, murderous, authoritarian order Putin has imposed on Russia.

Unfortunately for the world, the United States is on the back foot in this new more openly-aggressive and antagonistic phase of Cold War 2.0, because the autocratic enemy is already behind our lines: a radicalized and openly authoritarian GOP.

The authoritarian faction that is now firmly in control of the GOP is attacking our democracy in fealty to wanna-be autocrat Trump. Many GOP officeholders and politicians, led by former President Trump, are openly supporting and admiring the murderous criminal thug Putin, even to the point of condoning and excusing Putin’s naked aggression. Their betrayal of American interests and values makes it plain that they no longer support American democracy and our traditional leadership of the free world – they side with the autocratic order represented by dictator Putin and despise the democratic liberal order led by President Biden.

Many in the Democratic Party – including myself – see the Trump Presidency as a long-term high-risk / high-reward Russian influence operation that succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Putin financially supported and personally cultivated Trump as a useful asset with which to undermine the American political system for many years prior to his unexpected and shocking victory in capturing the GOP nomination and the Presidency.

The damage Trump has subsequently wrought to the fabric of American society is almost impossible to overstate: a hyper-polarized national politics; a shredding and discrediting of our norms, traditions, and institutions; a policy and governmental paralysis that leaves us unable to effectively govern ourselves – let alone the free world; one of our major governing-capable parties openly advocating autocratic rule and anti-majoritarian governance; and brewing and growing populist movement toward violence and unrest to the point of reasonable people seriously discussing the possibility of a new American civil war.

Indeed, Putin’s long-odds gamble in propping up and promoting the political fortunes of a man in whom he saw the potential for chaos and a cult of personality in America has paid off handsomely, indeed.

The GOP’s fifth column of useful idiots – consisting of White Nationalists, Christian dominionists and zealots, paranoid conspiracy theorists, and outright fascists – have seized control of the GOP and its coalition of casual racists, a predominantly White slice of working- and middle-class Americans hypnotized by status anxiety and made desperate by economic distress, and a strain of evangelical Christians who despise and fear cultural change, through a combination of violence and the threat of violence, intimidation, and ostracizing anyone who is not on board for the revolution. These zealots have led the GOP into rejecting pluralism, civil rights, open society, and even democracy itself if the results of democracy are not to their liking.

Because the internet and social media are still fairly new and revolutionary technologies in historical terms, we have been left without the norms and regulations that formed the social immune system we developed in the era of broadcast media to control the spread of terrible ideas historically detrimental to social peace. The perenially pernicious ideas of fascism (fear and hatred of the ‘other’ however defined, racist and anti-semitic conspiracies and rhetoric, encouragement and valorization of violence, praise of authoritarian leadership, and mythologizing a heroic national history in defiance of historical reality) have spread like wildfire through this unregulated media. Fascism isn’t a static ideology, it’s a tactical toolbox used to turn open democratic societies against themselves and to take power using those worst atavistic impulses and flaws in human nature and psyches. And the GOP has opened Pandora’s toolbox.

We can see some of those ideas and impulses at work right here in Arizona.

It is no coincidence that the AZGOP is spending extraordinary amounts of time and energy in demonizing and attacking our public schools, undermining and disenfranchising Arizona voters, campaigning on cultural and religious grievances, and spreading conspiracy theories and lies – fealty to which they judge the loyalty of their aspiring leaders. Unfortunately, here in Arizona, the GOP currently controls almost all the levers of governance, and they are employing all of them in undermining and denouncing any opposition to furthering their control.

Public schools are increasingly under attack in Arizona.

Despite having the worst schools in the nation according to an authoritative national comparative survey and almost every objective measure, the AZGOP continues its multi-decade crusade to defund, disempower, undermine, attack, and dismantle our public school system, including our institutions of higher learning.

This year the biggest assaults have come in the form of a massive expansion of vouchers at the expense of our public schools, a phony-boloney, divisive, dishonest, and racist attack (Critical Race Theory) on our public school’s systems of democratic governance by local school boards, undermining supporting institutions and enabling legal harassment of our school teachers and administrators, dictating and censoring the ideas, history, and books that can be used in our schools, and empowering a radical and insistent minority to undermine the health and safety our public schools.

The GOP’s antipathy and hatred of the public schools – which have over the past century lifted up our middle class, enabled our rise as a leading industrial nation, and created the cultural melting pot of American mainstream culture – has exploded into view in new and vitriolic ways. Their hostility is manifest in everything they do in regards to public education, but their rhetoric has reached new heights. State Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita called teachers and parents who are fighting to protect our public schools “educational terrorists” on the floor of our Senate. Candidate for Governor and formerly somewhat rational Congressman Matt Salmon called the teachers union “a scourge on our society.”

Why the vitriol? Because they understand that democratic control of public education is a threat to their fascist project to divide and radicalize our society. And they are dead right: democratic public control of our educational system, evolved over a century of experience and local practice by parents and stakeholders prevents such radicalization of our youth. Only under the inherent unaccountability of private market control can they succeed in poisoning young minds with fringe ideas and unreason. If you want to own the future, indoctrinate the children. They hate the fact that our children are reared and educated in a system under the direct democratic control of local communities, answerable to broadly-shared community standards and priorities. They hate the fact that those citizens taken in and radicalized by their inflammatory rhetoric, lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are unable to unilaterally dictate school policies. They know that these radical partisans are a small minority and that unless the GOP breaks democratic control of public schools, they will never make in-roads on radicalizing the next generation.

The GOP is assaulting Arizona’s democracy in this AZLeg session.

First, the AZGOP schemed over several years to corrupt and stack the Independent Redistricting Commission in order to gerrymander our legislative and Congressional districts in their own favor. Then, after their losses in 2020, the AZGOP has spread the #BigLie that the Arizona election was, in some vague and mysterious way, rigged and stolen – a theory they have been unable to explain or justify despite dozens of baseless lawsuits, spending millions on a disinformation campaign by partisans and grifters like the Cyber Ninjas, browbeating their fellow Republicans into repeating their lies, and humiliating, repudiating, attacking and even threatening those who refused to repeat said lies.

The AZGOP is now using those same lies as the justification for an avalanche of bills that seek to dismantle and/or extend partisan control of our electoral systems: disposing entirely of our popular, secure, and widely used (70-90%!) mail-in early ballot system (UPDATE: even asking the AZ Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional the Early Mail-in Ballot system THEY built) and Permanent Early Voter List (PEVL); banning the use of all machines to count our millions of ballots in favor of subjective and corruptable hand counts; trying to create an electoral Gestapo police force under the Governor empowered to seize elections materials; eliminating the secrecy of the ballot with individually identifiable and trackable ballots; blatantly restricting access to voter registration, polling places, and the right to vote and have one’s vote counted in a myriad of racially and partisan motivated schemes; and even empowering the state legislature to outright reject electoral outcomes they don’t like!

The assault on our democratic electoral processes and rights has seldom been so intense and blatant, leading many to call this nationwide campaign against democratic participation “Jim Crow 2.0”. It’s an apt description, but in my opinion, it tends to belittle by comparison the violent racial terrorism and naked corruption of the Jim Crow era that destroyed reconstruction in the South. This is a more civilized, more legalistic attack on our democracy, so I prefer the appellation “#JimCrowEsquire”.

As a result of these trends, we have a crop of existing and new political figures in Arizona politics that are using the cultural grievances underlying the attack on our schools, and the lies and conspiracies about our elections, to fuel their bid for political power. Almost every AZGOP candidate must – and has – toed the line that the 2020 election was stolen, including everyone from all the candidates for Governor, Mark Finchem for Secretary of State, Senate candidates like criminal fraudster Jim Lamon, and pretty much every candidate for Congress and Arizona legislature, including incumbents such as Biggs, Gosar, Lesko, and even Schweikert. A whole crop of new and existing candidates have openly embraced the conspiracy theories of QAnon, including Congressional candidates like fringe celebrity Ron Watkins, candidate for AZ Sec State Mark Finchem, and (UPDATE: now censured) State Senator Wendy Rogers. And some, like Biggs and Gosar, are openly covering for and cozying up to violent insurrectionists by attacking the Jan6th Commission and courting white nationalists by speaking at their events.

We are in a political crisis, one that presents a far more grave and serious threat to our society than most will even credit. Everyone outside the increasingly radical GOP, including true conservatives Independents, and everyone who reveres and believes in the American democratic tradition must reject any and every applicant for office who rejects the results of the 2020 election, which even election officials of Trump’s own Administration called the “most secure in American history.”

This is the election that will determine whether the American experiment will fall to a fascist movement of unreason and authoritarian impulses, or be preserved for future generations. It matters how you vote from the top of the ballot to the very bottom.  If this fever is not forcefully broken by the American electorate by plunging the GOP into an ice bath of total electoral humiliation, we could find our nation ideologically and militarily aligned with the dictators and killers of Russia and China, and abandoning the liberal world order we built – however imperfectly – that has protected relative peace and prosperity in the world for over 70 years.