Après tu le déluge
While I was recovering yesterday from whatever I came down with, news was breaking that Republican senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler dumped stock or bought stocks after receiving classified briefings from regime officials.
This was so execrable that even Tucker Carlson was calling for Burr's and Loeffler's heads. While the country stood unprepared for a pandemic, these two "public servants" were profiting off of insider information, in contravention of a law signed by former president Barack Obama.
Michelle Obama famously said in 2016 that the presidency doesn't make you; it reveals you. That could be extended to how one behaves in a time of national crisis.
The GOP is a cesspit of malfeasance. But the Donald Trump Show has obfuscated the fact that the problem lies not solely with him. The entire party is corrupt, root and branch. But as long as the focus was on him, people perceived that fact only dimly.
In come Burr and Loeffler.
The most reviled people in any society are profiteers. They prey on a society at a low ebb for the vilest of reasons: filthy, fleeting lucre. And when profiteers are in fact at the apex of the political establishment? Revolutions have begun for less.
Don't for a minute assume that Burr and Loeffler were the only profiteers. Donald Trump's public performances are often a nudge and wink to his friends to short the market. But what Burr and Loeffler did was even more egregious. They knew what was coming. And instead of using that information to prepare the public, they remained mum and profited off of it.
We are at an inflection point, as I've been saying this week. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the rot and weakness at the core of our global civilization. That the world's empire has been revealed to have been brought low by a kleptocratic kakistocracy has focused the minds of citizens. As bad news stacked upon bad news, Democratic voters decided that a steady hand was needed, and thus flocked to Joe Biden. But beyond Biden, our self-conceptions have been shattered. We've been shown to be ruled by a party no different in its corruption and malfeasance than the ancien régimes in place in 1789 and 1917. However, whereas those old elites were overthrown and replaced by something far worse, because we have a centuries-long tradition of democracy and peaceful changes of power, we have a chance this November to wipe clean the entire sclerotic edifice of a corrupt party and return to being a true democracy.
As the tweet which headlines this piece says, everything that the GOP could do to destroy itself it is doing. So sure in the immortality of their power, they thought nothing would touch them. Instead, a microbe has exposed their necrosis.
Jared Diamond wrote that guns, germs, and steel have shaped modern civilization. We're about to see what new world is reborn after this germ finishes with its work. If I were someone who had lorded it over others as masters of creation, I would be very worried about my future.