Month: October 2022

First of all, I’m furious that Nancy Pelosi’s house was broken into and her 82 year old husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer, fracturing his skull. She and her family did not deserve this. But I’m even more pissed off at the motive. The perpetrator was marinating his brain with lies generated by the right, and it caused him to believe what he was doing something was in some way warranted.

…a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” contains an array of angry and paranoid postings. The blog’s domain was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and a resident of that town said that Mr. [David] DePape lived at that address. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured a flurry of antisemitic sentiments and concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.

One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.

In one post, written on Oct. 19, the author urged former President Donald J. Trump to choose Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as his vice-presidential candidate in 2024.

It may be true, as Fox News host Jesse Watters says, that “People are being hit with hammers every day.” But there’s no denying that Paul Pelosi was hit by a hammer because a bunch of extremely horrible people made up a bunch of lies.

And now it has resulted in a vicious attempted murder of the Speaker of the House, who thankfully was not home, and her elderly husband.

There are any number of ways to fight back against this. What’s certain is that it cannot be allowed to stand.

And I know political figures on the right have been attacked, most famously at a Congressional baseball game in 2017. I know someone traveled to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with the intention of killing him before changing their mind and turning themselves in. These acts are deplorable no matter who is involved.

But look at the things that David DePape was led to believe. It’s a combination of age-old fascist anti-Semitism and white nationalism and brand new manufactured right-wing bullshit. It’s no accident that these two genres of hate meld so seemlessly together in the mind of a man who’s strategizing Donald Trump’s next presidential campaign.

And watch how the right makes excuses, engages in whataboutism, and refuses to even express an ounce of concern of sympathy for the Pelosi family. That’s now how the left reacted to the shooting at the baseball game or the news that Justice Kavanaugh had been at risk.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who just purchased Twitter, is using the social media platform to amplify the very pedophilia conspiracies that motivated the attack. Both he and Tulsi Gabbard, who was Mr. DePape’s preferred replacement for “Hang” Mike Pence on Trump’s 2024 ticket, have been working overtime to help Vladimir Putin divide the West and defeat Ukraine. These are not coincidences.

So, yeah, I’m fucking furious.

 

Hello again painting fans.

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This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Subtle changes for this week’s cycle. I have added more details for this week’s cycle. Note the added details especially to the rear towers. More next week.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.
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I have little negative to say about David Von Drehle’s brief opinion piece in Friday’s Washington Post. His point isn’t overly ambitious but it’s solid. When it comes to the art of persuasion, we would do well to follow the advice of Abraham Lincoln.

He was of the people; he knew what it was to be looked down upon, underestimated, deplorable…Righteous lecturing is no way to win people to a cause. “To be hectored and condemned; to be told that they were wholly wrong” was for Lincoln “a path not to reform but to intransigence,” [biographer Jon] Meacham writes. “If you would win a man to your cause,” he quotes Lincoln, “first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”

“On the contrary,” the young frontier politician continued, “assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself.” The “head and heart” of the person one wishes to change become as impenetrable as “the hard shell of a tortoise.”

More to the point, we should not prejudicially assume everyone with a contrary opinion is completely intransigent and unmovable. That way lies self-defeat and hopelessness.

But I do have one problem with Von Drehle’s argument, and it comes in his conclusion.

To the last sentence of his last monumental speech, Lincoln acted with malice toward none, with charity for all. If this made him less than a perfect scourge of human prejudice and cowardice, it made him a more effective politician. Lincoln got results.

Let’s stipulate that the purpose of this piece is to use the past as a guide for how we should proceed in the present. In this example, we are to look at the example of Lincoln who “wanted to be an effective force” for ending slavery which “was evil and made a mockery of America’s founding rhetoric.” But he knew it was not enough “to be morally correct.” It would require a monumental political and persuasive effort, “pursued deliberately, cunningly and tirelessly.”

In fact, however, it required winning a Civil War that resulted in over 1.2 million casualties and 600,000 dead. There is plenty of deliberate and tireless action in war, and hopefully some cunning as well, but this is clearly not what Von Drehle is referring to in his piece.

All of Lincoln’s soothing and strategic words did not prevent the South from rebelling before he could even take the oath of office. In this respect, Joe Biden can relate, as he watched his political opponents storm the Capitol in a desperate effort to keep him from being formally declared the winner of his own election.

When we ask how to proceed in the present, we need to understand its true to parallels to the past, and Von Drehle seems far too sanguine about the power of mere persuasion to win the day.

In Wednesday’s Washington Post, Miriam Berger reported on the protests “rocking” Iran. The focus of her article is on the way the Islamic government is and is not responding. So far, “the clerics who lead Iran have yet to fully unleash the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a parallel military force created to defend the state at any cost.” And I’ll get to that because it’s very important.

But first I want to highlight something she mentions but does not do enough to emphasize. As you hopefully know, the current unrest in Iran began about six weeks ago, on September 16, when a young Kurdish-Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini was killed by the Guidance Patrol (“morality police”), apparently for (“improper hijab”) not sufficiently covering her hair. Wednesday marked the fortieth day since her death, which is precisely why the protests were bigger and more emphatic than other days.

Thousands of people poured into the streets of Mahsa Amini’s hometown Wednesday and marched to her grave. Iranian security forces responded — as they have throughout the course of the nationwide protests inspired by her death — with violence and arrests.

The gathering in Saqez, in Iran’s western Kurdistan region, marked the 40th day since Amini’s death in the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” a traditional moment of remembrance in Islam. As the night wore on, demonstrators came out in other cities, as they have every day since mid-September.

To understand the potential significance of this, I want you to read the following retelling of how the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran unfolded in 40 day stages. It really got started on January 8, 1978 when the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published an article accusing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then in exile in Najaf, Iraq, of being a tool of colonialism and a British spy. There scurrilous lies outraged pious Shiites who were already feeling put-upon by the Shah’s aggressive secularism. On January 9, roughly 4,000 religious students in the holy city of Qom (or Qum) took to the streets in protest, and the Shah responded with gunfire, killing as many as seventy of them.

In an American context, this was like Kent State on steroids, and the religious and secular alike were completely outraged.

Forty days later, more people were killed while observing the remembrance of the Qom students. And forty days after that, more died while remembering those lost in second protest. This pattern continued until the Shah was finally forced into exile.

In this way, what had originated as elite resistance to the Shah took on a more clerical flavor. Yet, at the same time, those who might have disdained the clerics in the beginning, increasingly saw them as allies and leaders in the just cause of ending the Shah’s reign of terror.

We know how the revolution turned out, and it wasn’t the way “the intellectuals, writers, lawyers and businessmen” has envisaged at the outset. But that’s not the part we should focus on here.

On Wednesday, the clerics repeated the mistake the Shah made in February 1979. On the fortieth day anniversary of the original sin, they created more martyrs who will be mourned 40 days hence.

In all likelihood, they’ll respond with force and create another batch of martyrs. And, so, every 40 days the protests can grow and gather strength, with the government losing more allies and creditability each time, until they are washed away.

Except, the clerics aren’t completely unaware of how they came to power. They took precautions from the outset to make sure their regime was more secure, and that’s where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps comes into the picture.

The IRGC was founded as a counterweight to Iran’s other security forces — a way to prevent a revolution like the one that first brought the Islamic republic to power in 1979…

…After the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah in 1979, the Shiite revolutionaries who won out purged the existing military, called the Artesh, and the shah’s fearsome intelligence agency. In their place, they created their own security state undergirded by the IRGC.

Then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini constitutionally tasked the Revolutionary Guard with protecting the Islamic Republic and its ideals inside and outside the country…

…The IRGC’s profile rose during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, as the guard took charge of training young soldiers to send to the front. As a reward for its service — and to prevent massive unemployment among decommissioned fighters — the guard was given control of Khatam al-Anbiya, the first of Iran’s many military-run economic enterprises.

The engineering firm was tasked with rebuilding the war-battered country…But the Revolutionary Guard profited mightily, diverting large amounts of money to its own banks and institutions.

Seven different times in the New Testament, Hell is described as a place where sinners cry and grind their teeth. I don’t know why the authors found this imagery so terrifying but maybe it’s because Jesus allegedly used it himself. In the Gospel According to Matthew, the Nazarene explains, “This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Seems harsh, but who am I to argue? Truth be told, however, our modern picture of eternal damnation owes more to Dante Alighieri’s 14th-Century epic poem The Inferno than anything detailed in scriptures. That’s the section of The Divine Comedy where the ancient Roman poet Virgil gives Dante a guided tour of the nine circles of Hell.

I don’t put any stock in the medieval way of looking at the cosmos or possible afterlife, but I still find Dante’s organization of Hell very instructive because it demonstrates a really keen intelligence about all the different ways that human beings can do very shitty things. For Dante, it was important to rank these transgressions and imagine appropriate punishments.

We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Dante encountered Judas Iscariot in the ninth (or worst) circle of Hell, but it’s amusing to see where others landed. The people he sees in Hell are a mix of ancients and contemporaries, including some Florentines who has personally wronged him. It gives new meaning and power to “poetic license.”

As we go through the circles, it’s hard not to identify our own contemporaries or even ourselves. At the highest level are people who engaged in illicit affairs or other weaknesses of the flesh. Below that are the gluttonous and addicted. Still further, we encounter the hoarders and wasters, then the vindictive and petty. In the seventh circle, we get to those who commit violence. But it’s the eight circle where we get to the real problem cases: seducers, flatterers, panderers, fraudsters and counsellors of fraud, hypocrites, thieves, and corrupt clergy and politicians.

When it comes to our present day politicians, it’s obvious that many belong here in the eight circle of Hell. Donald Trump seems to satisfy placement in every circle, but others give him some stiff competition. And, oh what a fate awaits them!

Sowers of Discord: In the Ninth Bolgia, the Sowers of Discord are hacked and mutilated for all eternity by a large demon wielding a bloody sword; their bodies are divided as, in life, their sin was to tear apart what God had intended to be united; these are the sinners who are “ready to rip up the whole fabric of society to gratify a sectional egotism”. The souls must drag their ruined bodies around the ditch, their wounds healing in the course of the circuit, only to have the demon tear them apart anew.

I suppose it’s nice to fantasize about divine justice, at least once in a while. Lord knows, it can be trying waiting on the earthly variety. And I know that Dante’s poem is not scripture, but his vision is now pretty well bound up with how many Christians view God’s wrath. If you believe that these types of sins warrant and ensure these kind of punishments, then you probably should be praying for Trump’s soul rather than acting like he’s a defender of Western Civilization.

Just sayin.

As a postmortem on this piece, I’d also like to note that near the end of World War Two, there was a plan to dig up Dante’s bones and bring them to the last Italian fascist redoubt in the Alps.

The Valtellina Redoubt or, officially, in Italian: Ridotto Alpino Repubblicano (transl.  Republican Alpine Redoubt) or RAR, was the intended final stronghold or redoubt of the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini at the end of World War II in Europe. It was to be based in the Valtellina, a valley in the Italian Alps, which had the natural protection afforded by the surrounding mountains as well as the possibility of re-using fortifications built in the area for World War I. The idea was initially proposed in September 1944 by Alessandro Pavolini, one of the fascist leaders, who saw it as the place for the regime to make a “heroic” last stand which would inspire a future fascist revolution…

…The final German-Italian meeting on the project was held on 14 April. At the meeting, Mussolini introduced the project as the Ridotto Alpino Repubblicano (meaning Republican Alpine Redoubt) and used the acronym of “RAR”. He then asked Pavolini to provide the meeting with details of the plan. Pavolini declared that the Valtellina Redoubt would be “Fascism’s Thermopylae”, a final stand that would inspire future generations. He spoke of setting up a radio station in the valley to broadcast the final days of the stronghold to the outside world and printing a newspaper in the redoubt which would be air dropped on Italian cities. He also proposed having the bones of the medieval Italian poet, Dante brought to the Valtellina from Ravenna so that “the greatest symbol of Italianness” could be present at fascism’s last stand.

The lack of self-awareness is astounding. After committing so many sins, he still thought Dante would want to have anything to do with him. Pavolini and Mussolini were captured, executed, and hung upside down at a Milan gas station. Sometimes there is earthly justice, and what’s tiresome is waiting on the divine.

It’s midweek somewhere. Need to take a break from all the insanity? Here’s your space.

Sandoz was just a pseudonym for ex-Cabaret Voltaire founder Richard H. Kirk. He was pretty prolific both with the Cabs and afterward.

Cheers!

I was going to write that Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) is completely dead to me, but perhaps she really was screwed by members on her staff. If so, then Paul Campos is correct and “some people obviously need to be fired, and replaced by higher quality personnel.” The error is so egregious and untimely, however, that Jayapal should still face consequences. Any consideration she may have had for a larger role in leadership should be off the table, and the Progressives ought to seriously consider finding someone else to be the face of their caucus in the House of Representatives.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has withdrawn a letter, signed by 30 House liberals and sent to the White House on Monday, that urged President Biden to negotiate directly with Russia to bring an end to the war in Ukraine.

You won’t believe this, but this letter was created over the summer and circulated for co-sponsorship in early August. Somehow, thirty members attached their names to it, including some of the larger lights in the Progressive firmament like Reps. Jamie Raskin (Md.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Cori Bush (Mo.), Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.). But the letter was not released in August. Instead, it was dated October 24, 2022, and sent out on Monday.

Of course, between early August and this Monday, the Ukrainians turned the tide of the war, forcing Vladimir Putin to attempt a massive conscription of hundreds of thousands of troops which has proven both massively unpopular and almost comically bungled. At this point, Putin’s best hope appears to be if Elon Musk can convince the West that nuclear war is inevitable if Ukraine doesn’t stop reclaiming its territory.

In light of these developments, several of the original signatories of the letter no longer support it, and they were blindsided when it was released. What’s worse is that House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who is likely come January to be the Speaker of the House, recently suggested that U.S. aid to Ukraine may cease next year. It’s a position that rightly badly divides the Republican Party, and one that might have been effectively exploited by the Democrats in the last days of the midterm campaign. Instead, Jayapal effectively joined hands with McCarthy in raising doubts about the present course.

The Biden administration’s position is that only the Ukrainians can agree to cede any of their territory to Russia in exchange for peace, and that Putin is both losing and in no mood to make acceptable concessions. While the threat of escalation to a nuclear conflict is real and gravely concerning, succumbing to nuclear blackmail in these circumstances is not going to be their policy.

Even Jayapal recognizes that the timing here is bad.

“As Chair of the Caucus, I accept responsibility for this,” Jayapal said in a statement. “The proximity of these statements created the unfortunate appearance that Democrats, who have strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance to the Ukrainian people, are somehow aligned with Republicans who seek to pull the plug on American support for President Zelensky and the Ukrainian forces.”

Let’s be clear that Putin is responsible for all of this. Someone in Russia with the power and wherewithal to remove him from office should do so and then negotiations can begin. In any case, there’s nothing to do put keep the pressure on him, since rewarding him any way would be utter foolishness, and also morally wrong in every way. If the Republicans win the midterms and come to his rescue, we need a completely united front in opposition, and the Progressives have fucked up here to a staggering degree.

Here’s something I fundamentally disagree with:

Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican campaign strategist who wrote a withering indictment of the party’s trajectory, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it.”

One of the keys to understanding the trajectory of American politics is to understand how normalizing something makes it much more widely acceptable. If there are strange ideas out there held by just a few weird people, then most ordinary folks won’t see the appeal. In fact, not wanting to be considered weird themselves, most won’t even entertain them.

It’s easy to see, for example, why it’s so important to the Church of Scientology to have high visibility adherents like John Travolta and Tom Cruise. It makes the nonsense of L. Ron Hubbard seem vastly more plausible, and perhaps even tied to fame and success.

Also important is to focus on how people will adopt strange ideas without respect to their intrinsic value if it allows them to be part of a larger group that enjoys wide acceptance in their community. Someone from the North who has relocated to Alabama might join the Southern Baptist church, not through a rigorous comparison of available religions, but simply because it will aid them in making friends and advancing their career.

Something similar can happen with people who feel marginalized. They will join up with groups that are expressing defiance and resistance, and take it as a point of pride that their strange beliefs are scorned by more respectable folks.

All of these factors held explain how the MAGA cult of Trump, QAnon, and associated conspiracy theories (e.g., about voting, Jews, Black Lives Matter, immigrants, the LGBT community) have attracted so many adherents and taken over the Republican Party.

One key factor is that the Democrats went from being a forty percent party in much of the country to closer to a 25 percent party. Suddenly, the social costs of being a Democrat became so great that it just isn’t worth it for most casual observers of politics. Along with this, being a defiant conservative became part of many communities’  self-image and identity. I warned of this going back all the way to 2013, calling it the Southifaction of the North. The idea was that the conservatives who control the GOP would react to the presidential losses of John McCain and Mitt Romney by seeking to attract more minority votes but instead by winning a much higher percentage of white votes in exurbs and rural areas in the Midwest and North.

Donald Trump, whether by accident or design, chose this exact path and it has been wildly successful. At this point, believing crazy shit about pedophiles and voting machines isn’t about anything but expressing social pride and civil cohesiveness. You believe it because it makes you fit in better with your peers. Not believing it is suspicious, suggesting you don’t love your own town and your own people.

So, this isn’t really about latent racism or antisemitism being unleashed as much as it about creating brand new racists and antisemites. People are embracing these ideas who never would have embraced them when they were still considered weird and had social costs. Now that they’re normal, they bring rewards.

So, it’s the people who helped make these ideas normal that are most at fault. Donald Trump is the number one culprit, but every Republican who goes along with this and amplifies it is also part of the problem.

Another concept I’ve harped on over the last decade is that lower classes of the majority ethnicity/religion group will always be attracted to populist ideas, but right-wing populist ideas are always fascist in character. The danger for Democrats of writing these folks off as “deplorables” is that it will leave them with no labor/socialist alternative for their defiance.

What we’re doing now is harvesting to result of a suicidal response to the rise of Trumpism. Trump gave this folks permission to embrace their worst impulses and instead of giving them alternative outlets for their frustration, the left tried to take the permission away. That only increased the appeal of these hateful ideas and made them totems of identity, pride, and community. Left-wing populism has it’s own problems, but it’s a necessary counterbalance, and without it the glue that holds our democracy together becomes unstuck. Now we’re trying to govern the country without any prospect of consent from the governed.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have added to the castle for this week’s cycle. Note the various details including windows/arrow slits. Obviously the color has changed as well.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. He’s a Christian Nationalist and a fascist. I wonder, though, if he’d feel quite so confident in his convictions if he spent some time studying the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and the resulting regime that ruled Spain until 1975.

To begin, Davidson’s provocative essay argues that the “conservative” project is over.

…you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead. Perhaps you can retain a memory of it or knowledge of it. But that is not what conservatism was purportedly about. It was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing.

Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.

With nothing worthwhile remaining to conserve, the right should move on with the aim of creating something new. Of course, Davidson’s aim is still to go back to the way things were in some important respects, but he’s ready to jettison the first two-thirds of the conservatives’ traditional three-legged stool of small government, strong national defense and traditional social values.

The fusionism of past decades, in which conservatives made common cause with market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neocons, is finished. So too is Conservatism Inc. and the establishment GOP it enabled, whose first priority was always tax cuts for big business at the expense of everything else. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 heralded a populist wave and the end of Republican politics as we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters.

I agree that the election of Trump heralded a new era for the Republican Party, but so far it seems less like a clear move to populism and more like an outbreak of multiple personality disorder. Davidson wants more clarity, and that means traditional social values are the sole focus. He thinks the party can be electorally successful without support from national defense hawks and big business by “claim[ing] ownership of a pro-worker, even pro-union political agenda.” If this were possible it might take a small measure of sting out of the fascist brew he’s cooking up.

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it…

…To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children…

…wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime…

…if they want to stay in office, [Republicans] had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder…

…parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse…doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked…teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

Aside from the concern about what universities are teaching, everything else on that list is an effort to restore Victorian Era sexual ethics and put men back in the driver’s seat. He wants to make it very difficult to get a divorce and impossible to get a safe abortion. He wants traditional gender roles restored and rigorously enforced. To accomplish this, he’s ready to use a lot of government resources and coercion.

His motivation is his belief that by “maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing,” conservatives can prevent the left from “transform[ing] America into a woke dystopia.”

Davidson is self-aware enough to realize that he’s making radical proposals that fly in the face of traditional conservative concern about slippery slopes and too move governmental power, but he has an answer for that.

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.

I don’t see the the same crises in American society and culture that Davidson sees, but I do understand that there’s a lot of discomfort about how the politics of human sexuality have changed, and about how the racial and religious composition of the country has become more diverse and less centered on white Christian values.

It’s a lot clearer to me why the right revolted against the Spanish Republic in 1936. After the right won elections in 1933, the left attempted to invalidate the results. Soon there was widespread disorder, including massive worker strikes, attacks on police, murder of clerics, destruction of churches and convents. The country became so split between right and left that it was ungovernable. Then, in 1936, the left won the elections and went on a bit of a rampage.

Because, unusually, the first round produced an outright majority of deputies elected on a single list of campaign pledges, the results were treated as granting an unprecedented mandate to the winning coalition: some socialists took to the streets to free political prisoners…In the thirty-six hours following the election, sixteen people were killed (mostly by police officers attempting to maintain order or intervene in violent clashes) and thirty-nine were seriously injured, while fifty churches and seventy conservative political centres were attacked or set ablaze.

This was the context in which a substantial part of the military concluded that a coup was necessary to protect the right and restore order.

To be clear, the left in 1930’s Spain bears little resemblance to the left in present day America. The Democrats are not overrun with Communists and anarchists, for example, and President Biden recently resolved what could have been a crippling national railroad strike. While American conservatives may feel besieged in a cultural (and sometimes legal) sense, the left is not trying to invalidate elections or killing religious leaders and destroying churches and right-wing political centers. But if Davidson’s call for fascism has less justification, that doesn’t mean it would not suffer from some of the same consequences.

Under the leadership of Generalísimo Francisco Franco, the left in Spain was crushed by 1939, and democracy was not restored for more than three and a half decades. People were rounded up into concentration camps and tens if not hundreds of thousands were put to death. In other words, the right did not “relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus.”

I’ll be the first to admit that there were serious problems with the Spanish left in the 1930’s and that the right, from business and land owners to religious Catholics, had plenty of legitimate fears and grievances. Far more, in fact, than anything that gay wedding cakes, drag queen reading time, and Black Lives Matters protestors can conjure up in the American right’s imagination. But, even if the situations were equivalent, the solution pursued by Spanish fascists is not one that America should emulate.

I wish that American conservatives had learned this lesson from the experience of fighting German and Italian fascism, but it’s not a lesson they’ve typically understood.

The American conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr was an admirer of Franco, and praised him effusively in his magazine, National Review, where the staff were also ardent admirers of the dictator. In 1957, Buckley called him “an authentic national hero”, who “above others”, had the qualities needed to wrest Spain from “the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists.”

Again, even if I were generous enough to grant Buckley’s point, in no way does the left present the same kind of threat today that it did in Spain in the 1930’s. Pretending otherwise, is mainly a racket that gets attention, pays well and has political advantages. If it’s a serious belief, backed by action, it’s fascist sedition.