Excerpts from an essay by AR Moxon: https://www.the-reframe.com/youve-persuaded-us-already/
You've Persuaded Us Already
When it comes to the idea that conservatism has embraced fascism and supremacy, nobody is more persuasive than conservatives themselves. An essay on bullies and the margins of permission in the USA.
"The people who persuaded me that Republicans are fascist are Republicans.
The people who persuaded me that the dominant spirit of my country is both conservative & supremacist are conservatives."
"Republican office-holders/aspirants, have been burning & shooting effigies for years, indicating the things & people they want to see eliminated.
People are alarmed by this: burning & shooting things is always the precursor to [supremacists] burning & shooting the signified people."
"Another interesting thing about the Republican Party is that it is entirely driven by its country’s dominant founding spirit of supremacy. Supremacy, in case you didn’t know, is the belief that some people matter and others don’t, and that those who don’t matter should be forced to conform to the comfort of those who do matter, and if they won’t conform then they should be punished and terrorized and eliminated, and if they do conform then they should be maintained at minimum possible expense and used for profit for as long as they are profitable, and then abandoned when they are not."
"I didn’t used to believe that the conservative spirit was irreducible from supremacy, or that supremacy was the dominant spirit of my country. I would have considered that ridiculous. I believed very firmly in the popular modern supremacist myth that supremacy had been defeated forever, mostly by white people who fixed a handful of significant flaws to the otherwise perfect system they had inherited, and that we were now as a result the Greatest Country In the World."
Republicans "have fully committed to the notion that crimes aren’t crimes if they are the ones doing them, that elections they lose aren’t valid, & that parties other than theirs aren’t fit to serve."
Republicans "have harassed and bulled and harmed and menaced and demonized queer communities, casting them as pedophiles, a pretext to stripping their medical care, seizing their children, excluding them from public life. There are refugees now from Texas, from Florida, from other fascist states where white supremacists have captured the governments.
Speaking of government capture, they’ve spent decades utilizing the most shameless hypocrisies and dirtiest possible ratfuckery to gerrymander and disenfranchise Black people, up to and including defying court orders ordering them to stop.
They’re removing books from libraries, prosecuting librarians, defunding and closing libraries, outlawing curriculum that delve into racial and sexual awareness and enforcing curricula that teach false narratives of supremacy, like the old popular lie that slavery benefitted the enslaved."
"They’ve stripped women of their bodily autonomy, driven up natal and maternal mortality rates, passed laws to control movement of pregnant women between states, proposed laws to track the menstrual cycles of teenagers, forced raped children to give birth, and have now set their sights on birth control, IVF, and no-fault divorce.
"They’ve broken our government in order to create a pretext for further breakage, sabotaging programs that make up our increasingly frayed social safety net to ensure that they fail, and then use the failure as an excuse for further sabotage. There’s been a deliberate sustained effort to increase immiseration and decline in the areas of health care, education, and infrastructure, in ways that cause the greatest harm to fall upon disabled people and minority communities."
"They’ve utterly broken our constitution with support of their almost infinitely corrupt Supreme Court justices , in order to walk back any notion that our government is of, by, & for, the people, & to restore it to its originalist glory as a nation of, for, & by slaveholding billionaires."
"So yes, Republicans have persuaded me that Republicans are fascists. I have to say, they are very persuasive—so persuasive I don’t think anybody could persuade me otherwise. People who are fans of persuasion should study it."
"Every “sane Republican” who finds some rationale to continue to support their fascist party persuades fascist bullies that there is no act so shocking that sane conservatives won’t rationalize it."
"It’s getting worse, and it’s getting worse fast.
I can see that your type of persuasion isn’t working at stopping it.
In fact, I think your type of persuasion is making it inevitable, by making the margins of permission as elastic as the most fascist bully wants to make it.
If you want to prevent inevitable violence, and stave off the beating that our national gang of fascist bullies—by which I meant the Republican Party—is intent on delivering to our friends and neighbors, our siblings and cousins and parents, you’re going to have to find the fascists on Monday and grin at them in morning class—or whatever it takes to communicate by posture and position something new, that persuades in more effective ways, that the permission they’ve been enjoying has changed."
