Blood and Soil

Steve Bannon emerged from the shadows yesterday to descant on his vision for our future for CPAC.If you're not scared by the phrase "deconstruction of the administrative state," then how about "new political order"? I'm terrified by both.“We're a nation with an economy, not an economy just in a global marketplace with open borders, but we're a nation with a culture and a reason for being and I think that's what unites us." The syntax is a little tangled, but the drift is clear. That culture and reason for being is white and "Judeo-Christian," as I believe they still put it, at least when Jared is within earshot. We're talking about blood and soil here.What scares me the most is the prospect of this administration settling down into some semblance of normalcy and driving legislation through Congress, which it will in the next few months. If you take the temperature of left wing social media, you'd think that Trump and Trumpism are on the brink of collapse. But if you look at Republican America, they are 100 percent behind it and its right wing agenda, even when that agenda hurts them, even when it's diametrically opposed to what it was, say, a year ago, and everything that their fourth grade civics teachers taught them about American values and the American way. You need to go back to the 1930s (or the 1790s or the mid-19th century) to see how this kind of collective madness plays out. And yes, we were spared the worst of it back then. We might have had a president Huey Long or Lindbergh but we didn't. We elected Lincoln just when things reached their tipping point in the 1800s. Trump is no Lindbergh or Long, but Bannon is very much a Himmler.