Mitch McConnell And The Inflection Point

William Rivers Pitt has written a really interesting piece on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Pitt believes McConnell is a valuable teacher:

He teaches us in graphic fashion how not to be. In his own words, McConnell shines a light down that road to ruin — his road, his way — and compels us for our own sake to choose the other route. He serves to make the decision binary: zero vs. one, nothing vs. something, altogether elegant in its simplicity.

It is all of a piece, the centuries-old notion of this country as a paycheck for the few at the expense of the many. British colonialists sought to peel the land using kidnapped Africans and impoverished Britons, slaughtering and displacing Native peoples wherever and whenever they were encountered. Wealth must be compounded with wealth, power must be held by the few to wield against the many. The fiction of democracy provides an illusion of freedom to obscure the looting that was the whole point of the endeavor to begin with.

Mitch McConnell is a highly visible champion of that ideological deception, a deft practitioner of that stagecraft. The “essence of America” he spoke of certainly exists, but cunning politicians of his ilk are too canny to mention it in public. That essence — the belief that the nation and its population are a gilded platter to be gorged upon, a fertile field to be plundered and despoiled for profit with the people serving as replaceable tools for the aristocracy — is McConnell’s poisoned birthright, and he defends it with all the powers at his disposal, just as his colonial predecessors did.

McConnell represents something the American Revolution sought to relegate to the dustbin of history. But the ideology of the British Overlords  is alive and well. It survived the Revoluion and today rules the roost. But we are, Pitt writes, at an inflection point:

Look no further than the tumult of the moment to witness how far the few will go to confuse and control the many. See their white nationalist puppets on the march and immigrants on the run; see the Black people cut down by the police officer’s gun; see women using a social media hashtag to explain how it has always been so it may someday cease to be; see the people deprived of options by the economics of enforced inequality fed into the maw of a profitable war machine; see LGBTQ+ people stripped of rights by a heteronormalized society that uses splinter Christianity to rationalize fear and hate; see the rage-flecked faces at one of Donald Trump’s rallies as they howl at enemies conveniently created to incur their distracted wrath; and see the oceans rising and the fires burning because the nature of plunder is damage. This is the place we have been, and the place we are going, if we choose poorly at this crossroads.

The Authoritarian Imperative survives in the Electoral College. And McConnell has devoted his career to seeing that it survives in the United States Senate. If he succeeds, all will be lost.

Image: cnbc.com