onegoldenraptor

Posted by David Brin

https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/07/if-you-wont-listen-to-paine-or-adam.html

 I've long urged friends and acquaintances who are on the more privileged side of life – specifically those who rationalize that today’s Republican Party still bears even a vestigial connection to patriotism, or market competition, or even sanity – to reconsider the wisdom of killing the goose that has laid all of their golden eggs: a mixed society that’s been vested – ever since the WWII generation – in science, infrastructure, rule-of-law, rising-tolerance, pragmatic negotiation, respect-for-facts and - above all - a thriving/dominant middle class. 

Is a return to 6000 years of feudalism, as pushed by heirs of Stalin -- plus a world cabal of inheritance brats – truly in their long term interest?

These fellows – who seem to think the American Revolution was inspired by Edmund Burke or Dr. Phil, instead of Thomas Paine – deem themselves to be smart guys. Yet my parents – and even laborers and cabbies of the 1940s – had more vocabulary and understanding of Adam Smith, or Karl Marx, or John Locke, or the U.S. Founders than any of the tech-bros or ‘investment economists’ I know. 

Having grown up in a Rooseveltean society that carefully dispelled the incantations of Marx, by use of science, infrastructure, rule-of-law, tolerance, and a thriving/dominant middle class, many rich fools now assume they can reverse all of those miracles – and the greatest wealth-generation the world ever saw -- yet somehow remain safe from Old Karl’s revived spectre.

They can’t. But it seems they must learn it the hard way...

... by waging all-out war vs. the one clade that stands in the way of their lordly ambitions – all of the fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. 

The very same professional castes who know bio, nano, cyber, nuclear and all the rest. And who will not take kindly to being oppressed and immiserated, along with a working class that is driven to proletarian wrath. Those are the millions who are targeted, beyond headlined travesties toward poor immigrants.

As if absolutely determined to hire a tumbrel ride, these 'elite' fools seem incapable – and too incurious – ever to study basic things that my parents’ generation discussed in detail, while working with the Greatest Generation’s hero – FDR – to cancel what then seemed an inevitable communist revolution. Veering society instead toward something more complex and successful and diverse and responsible and free. 

Alas, the hedge parasites, petro princes, monopolists, tech-bros, inheritance brats and kremlin "ex" commissars wallow in flatterers, rather than lifting their heads to study what worked.

And so, as nest-trashing greed sends wealth disparities skyrocketing past French Revolution levels, we must seek another voice who might be persuasive.

 Charles Dickens had the right of this:

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and
insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are
fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France,
with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a
peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain
than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape
once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same
tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression
over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
...

Shall I put it in simpler language? When flatterers persuade you to close off every civilized form of redress, then what do you expect to be the reaction? 

That we’ll go meekly to the concentration camps? Here’s a musical riff for you that pre-dates Les Miserables:

Allons enfants de la patrie… 

…do you hear across the land those 

who would engorge upon our children?

Watch that scene in Casablanca. 

Then look up the words behind the anger! 

Leading to the second stanza’s fulmination… 

It’s us who they’d dare to 
Return to ancient slavery!

Stanza, schmanza. 

If it ever truly comes to the refrain… Aux armes, citoyens!...

... it will be too late for you would-be lords to negotiate, or to win a deal. 

We know the location and schematics of every prepper bunker. 

And your Uber-Tumbrels driver is almost there.

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== An important lagniappe: Do the Re-Register Gambit! ==

 Following up on a perennial question.  Are there ANY high Rrepublicans who are clearly NOT blackmailed Kremlin agents, but have tried to stand up to the madness that has taken over the Party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan? 

Here is the comprehensive alphabetical list of all U.S. Senators and House Republicans since 2015 who either voted against Trump in key moments (impeachment, election certification, Jan 6 commission) or retired/resigned rather than face MAGA pressure—covering every state with at least one such member:

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 Senators

Bill Cassidy (LA) – Voted to convict Trump (2021)

Bob Corker (TN) – Retired post-Trump clashes

Ben Sasse (NE) – Resigned to academia

Lisa Murkowski (AK) – Survived, rank-choice  Still independent critic

Mitt Romney (UT) – Retiring, impeachment votes  Continues open criticism

Pat Toomey (PA) – Voted to convict (2021)

Richard Burr (NC) – Voted to convict (2021)

Susan Collins (ME) – Voted to convict, survived

Thom Tillis (NC) – Retired post-clashes

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 House of Representatives

Adam Kinzinger (IL) – Retired post-impeachment  Still fighting Trump publicly

Anthony Gonzalez (OH) – Voted to impeach (2021)

Brian Fitzpatrick (PA) – Remained, dissenting votes

Dave Trott (MI) – Retired, became Independent

Fred Upton (MI) – Retired post-impeachment  Occasional public critic

Jeff Flake (AZ) – Retired anti-Trump  Occasional public critic

John Katko (NY) – Retired post-impeachment

Justin Amash (MI) – Left GOP, retired, Independent run  Independent-minded

Ken Buck (CO) – Resigned early dissent  Continues criticism of Trump

Liz Cheney (WY) – Ousted, primary loss  Actively fighting Trump

Mike Gallagher (WI) – Resigned impeachment dissent

Paul Mitchell (MI) – Left GOP, retired 2021

Peter Meijer (MI) – Primaryed post-impeachment

Notice how how many have been driven out of office? And this doesn't include the THREE Republican Congressmen who declared or alluded that their party is rife with "orgies" - (think the film Eyes Wide Shut) - that lead inevitably to blackmail. (And blackmail is the ONLY theory that explains 20 years of Republican behavior.)

Will these folks join Romney and GOP former Crown Prince Paul Ryan in finally, finally gathering a True Republican Party? Or else (shudder) join Elon's latest whimsey?

Not likely.  

FAR better? If millions of Dems and Independents who live in gerrymandered GOP districts should re-register as Republicans!  Hold your nose and do it! It would:

- protect you from being accidentally purged from voter rolls before November 2026!

- utterly mess up their calculations!

- let you vote in the only election that matters in your district - the Republican primary. And thus give a chance to some moderate adult, reducing gerrymander-induced radicalization.

Hold your nose and do it!  And spread word.

https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/07/if-you-wont-listen-to-paine-or-adam.html