The Portland Oregonian should win a Pulitzer Prize just for this headline and picture yesterday:
Unlike what's going on in the untethered heads of the Malignant Fascist/ Stephen Miller/ Kristy Noem, this is what reality is in Portland, OR.
Just finished reading preeminent Civil War historian James McPherson's 2015 book, "The War That Forged A Nation: Why The Civil War Still Matters" (Oxford University Press). In the decades leading up to the Civil War, McPherson reminds us of the bloody, violent disagreements over slavery that erupted after the Mexican-American War all over the American West, then in "Bloody Kansas," then in John Brown's raid, and eventually spilling over in the halls of Congress before the Southern slave state traitors left the Union. We have yet to see anything near the chaos and violence of those decades that preceded the Civil War, and it was actually reassuring in an odd way to be reminded that, yes, this country has been through even more horrific times than what we're seeing today. We also heard a Democratic leader assure us on Monday that change will come. And yet here we are.
The "here we are" part also has antecedents in the Civil War and the failed Reconstruction that followed. It involves the "Two Concepts of Liberty" that have played out in our politics from our founding. Here's McPherson (pp. 12-14):
"...The two concepts are negative liberty and positive liberty. The idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar, It can be defined as the absence of restraint, freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior. Laws requiring automobile passengers to wear seat belts or motorcyclists to wear helmets would be, under this definition, to prevent them from enjoying the liberty to choose not to wear seat belts or helmets. Negative liberty, therefore, can be described as freedom from.
Positive liberty, by contrast, can best be understood as freedom to. It is not necessarily incompatible with negative liberty but has a different focus or emphasis. Freedom of the press is generally viewed as negative liberty -- freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads. But an illiterate person suffers from a denial of positive liberty; he is unable to enjoy the freedom to write or read whatever he pleases not because some authority prevents him from doing so but because he cannot read or write anything. He suffers not the absence of a negative liberty (freedom from) but of a positive liberty (freedom to read and write). The remedy lies not in removal of restraint but in achievement of the capacity to read and write."
McPherson notes that, with the end of the Civil War, there was an "historic shift in American values in the direction of positive liberty," citing the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. He continues:
"Positive liberty is an open-ended concept. It has the capacity to expand toward notions of equity, justice, social welfare, equality of opportunity. For how much liberty does a starving person enjoy, except the liberty to starve? How much freedom of the press can exist in a society of illiterate people? How free is a motorcyclist who is paralyzed for life by a head injury that might have been prevented if he had worn a helmet? [snip]
"The tension between negative and positive liberty did not come to an end with the Civil War, of course. That tension has remained a constant in American political and social philosophy. In recent years, with the rise of small-government or anti-government movements in our politics, there has been a revival of negative liberty. The presidential election of 2012 [i.e., Obama v. Romney] pitted the concepts of positive and negative liberty against each other more clearly than any other recent election..."
It should be hard, reading those passages, to miss the point that the current fascistic manifestation of the negative liberty side of the equation is the Malignant Fascist's MAGA cult, as it is fighting positive liberty's "expansion of equity, justice, social welfare, equality of opportunity" (basically, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion!). Just as telling, McPherson quotes then- Missouri Sen. Carl Schurz speaking of racist Southern resistance to Reconstruction laws:
"As they once asserted that true liberty implied the right of one man to hold another man as his slave, they will tell you now that they are no longer true freemen in their States because... they can no longer deprive other men of their rights."
That's not far off from "Wilhoit's law" of conservatism ("There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect") and the Malignant Fascist's and the entire Republican Party's -- executive, legislative, and judicial branches -- operating philosophy.
So, again, "here we are" 160 years after the epic struggle was fought, with the trappings of 20th Century fascism gilding the Trump/ Republican "negative liberty" turd. It's vitally important that we adopt the non- defeatist posture that our philosophical "positive liberty" antecedents did entering into the Civil War, which sustained them through the darkest times until victory. As a modern Illinois politician said this week, "This country has survived darker periods than the one
that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will
swing back" (see below). Our history didn't start with our 20th / 21st generations, but now it's on those generations to make sure it won't end with us either, as long as we help that pendulum move toward justice again.
(Image: "This 1868 drawing shows a man representing the Freedman's Bureau standing between armed groups of Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans" / artist, Alfred R. Waud)
Back on March 12, in posting about European and Asian allies of the U.S. going it alone in addressing Russia's continuing aggression in Ukraine, we pointed to some obvious connections:
The strategic disaster of a Russian asset as President of the United States is a world historical coup for the Russian dictator, who has cultivated and likely blackmailed the Malignant Fascist into serving the interests of Russia. What else could explain the inexplicable confrontations with our friends and allies in Canada, Mexico, and western Europe? What else could explain the incredible self- sabotage of the U.S. economy by ruinous tariffs placed on those friends and allies, and on the American people? What else could explain the dismantling of institutions and the rule of law that made America a functioning democracy, rather than an oligarchic autocracy like Russia? Who benefits from all of this chaos and destruction and who gains?
The fast- accelerating fascist klepto- kakistocracy being imposed on America -- with easily traceable roots in Russia, Hungary, and other autocratic dictatorships -- is catching many off guard. Some see, but don't grasp, what's happening around us to our values, our institutions, our sense of ourselves as a generally "good" nation among others. Others grasp what's happening, but don't know what they can or should do to fight it. But, we think we're fast approaching a tipping point, when opportunities to fight back are severely limited or gone.
Today, Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo asks the essential, unasked question concerning our country's decline toward increasing lawlessness:
"Faced with a lawless White House, the question many of us are asking ourselves this morning is what are we prepared to do arrest that decline.
"It’s the question Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posed on Sunday. If we continue to observe norms and act like the U.S. is business as usual — if we won’t step outside our comfort zones — our democracy could be gone in under a year. We are 'at immediate risk.'” (our emphasis)
Murphy: "If we continue to observe norms, if we continue to engage in business as usual, this democracy could be gone. I don't think we have a year to save American democracy. I think the way the president is acting ... puts out democracy at immediate risk."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 16, 2025 at 10:37 AM
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As we've said before, people have to decide for themselves if, when, and how to fight back against the dystopian fascism of Trump and his MAGA cult. We can only say, if you value freedom, democracy, and prosperity in your future and in that of your loved ones, the time is now to make your plan, even if it's outside of your comfort zone.
On St. Patrick's Day, it's especially appropriate to quote the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who said, "Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking."
