While reading a Pro-Publica article on Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, this bit put me in mind of the activities of the Soviets and their notorious relation-of-convenience with the truth:
Parscale and his fees have attracted an unusual amount of attention, but they’re only part of the story. He has also spearheaded what appears to be the Trump campaign’s takeover of the RNC to the benefit of the president — and the seeming detriment of other Republican candidates. Other presidents have consolidated control over their party; similar criticisms were made of Barack Obama. But the extent of Trump’s takeover is unprecedented, according to experts. They say it inflicted damage on Republican congressional candidates in the 2018 elections, and could do so again in 2020.
One previously unreported example: Since Trump’s election in 2016, critical “voter scores” — sophisticated polling-based analytics that the RNC provides to party committees and candidates — have conspicuously omitted an essential detail for any down-ballot race: how voters in specific states and congressional districts feel about Trump. Republican insiders believe these analytics are being withheld to try and prevent GOP candidates from publicly distancing themselves from the president or leaking unfavorable results that embarrass Trump.
Indeed, after V. Lenin, truth became merely another item to be manipulated, Pravda being both Russian for truth and the newspaper organ of the Soviet’s Communist Party, the one and only political party of the Soviet Union. It’s only competition – and it turned out to be deadly – was reality, which gave the lie to Soviet claims of crop harvests, when Soviet science and management failed.
Similarly, Trump’s campaign organization is carefully ensuring Trump remains top dog in all possible ways, because that’s his basic ego-requirement and how he discourages challengers to his supremacy. He cannot simply order their deaths, as did Leader Stalin, but he can leave them in the dark.
Or so he wishes. The crucial difference between Trump and the Soviet Union is that he cannot control the free press. He can denigrate it, he can accuse it of lying, but the fact of the matter is that he does not control the information for the entire American population. He endeavours to keep his base in their little cocoon of Fox News, but, like the Soviet Union, reality has begun intruding in the form of poor farm exports and former Republican members blaring out their displeasure for Trump.
Thus, we’re seeing the very long slide of the Republican Party continue. We can trace it back to when it was the Party of Lincoln, the home of slavery abolitionists, and the home of the victorious President in the Civil War that resulted in the abolition of slavery. As the decades passed since then, though, the South had its revenge on the Republicans via Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which brought in former and current KKK members and the like, debasing the party until the Democrats, once home to the pro-slavery Fire-Eaters, became the leading Civil Rights major political party.
The Republicans, who long touted themselves as the redoubtable anti-Soviet party of the American political system, now find their leadership now imitating Soviet practices: information control, equality of falsehoods to truth, and the naked pursuit of power over justice. I don’t think we’re about to see them spouting rhetoric espousing the nationalization of various industries; I believe the tactics of political dominance are neutral as to the political system using them, even as they are diagnostic of the pathological, or evil, nature.
I think and hope it’ll end just as badly for them. The deceptions are stomach-turning, even as they deceive each other. And I can’t imagine how they can degrade themselves next, unless we catch Jerry Falwell, Jr. actually frenching Satan. Gak.
