When I talk about “Radical Republicans,” I’m talking about the Radical Republicans of Reconstruction, not, like the modern Freedom Caucus. So, in a sense, I guess that’s something of a letdown to people who might hate-read this blog.
But anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is there is historical precedent for all my talk of Radical Resistance. It’s been done before and done well. Yet it happened after a war, so, shrug. I think Trump is going to survive and prosper, given the existing conditions.
Republicans are always talking about “new rules,” and maybe if the Resistance to Trump grew a bit more radical on an ideological level, we might come up with our on set of “new rules.”
For me, the concept of Radical Resistance is more of an ideological issue than an excuse to, like blow stuff up. I am very much more MLK than Lenin in that respect (not to sound too painfully self-aggrandizing.)
So, briefly, the issue is more what people could do collectively if we could somehow radicalize the proletariat, shall we say, on this issue. That’s why getting the #NeverTrumpers on board would be great — those guys are really smart and could articulate to a lot of more conservative people why they should, say, contribute support through advocacy and money.
As I have mentioned, there’s a fatal flaw to all my talk of Radical Resistance — time. What I propose would have to happen, like, now, for it to matter. If we don’t get Trump by August 2019, then we don’t get him until sometime after 2020, if ever.
In some respects, what a Radical Resistance could do is limited in the short term unless it catches on in a big way quickly. You could go to a protest, advocate online, that kind of things.
But what we need is something, I personally, can’t provide — an app. I can articulate the need, but building an app to connect a radical resistance movement together immediately is not something I have I have natively in my skillset.
Or, on an even more basic level, I guess the issue is I know how quixotic this is. Some external event would have to happen at this point for there to be the opportunity for Radical Resistance.
All this talk of Radical Resistance is more my personal frustration with House Democrats than anything else, I guess. So, in that sense, I guess this post is kind of pointless. Or I’m not smart enough.
I fancy myself something of an armchair historian and I’ve always thought Reconstructions Radical Republicans were badasses. They took their fight to the top and pretty much ran the country during much of an extremely turbulent period in American political history.
So, it seems to me, we need to tap into our race memory and gird our loins for a political war against the Trump Administration now, and not until the Mueller investigation wraps up at some magical mystery moment in the potentially far distance future.
Let’s put things in perspective — we have the president dead-to-rights on a massive coverup and violation of campaign finance laws. And what is Congress doing about it right now? Nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Not a damn thing. Meanwhile, there are 17 (!) open, active investigations of the Trump Administration and we’ve learned that the FBI believed that “obstruction was collusion” enough to open up a counter-intelligence operation against the President of the United States when he abruptly fired James Comey because of the FBI’s Russia probe.
But again, what is happening right now? Nothing. Not. A. Damn. Thing. As such, it seem pretty obvious something, anything political needs to be done. We need to get radical, we need a Radical Resistance.
We’re all supposed to sit back and let Trump politically destroy every democratic norm he can think of while we either eventually get the Mueller report or we’re given the option to fight it out with a bunch of circle jerking plutocrats who are actually quite pleased with the fetid, traitorous, felonious tyrannical racist, misogynistic Trump Administration.
I often vacillate between simply shrugging and saying Trump is president and there’s nothing I, as a lone citizen can do and being apoplectic and talking about starting a political movement such as this liberal fever dream I’m writing about right now.
No one listens to me. No one. And, really, all of this writing I’m doing about this idea is simply me decompressing from doing a huge amount of developing on my novel I’m attempting to write.
But enough of that aside — I guess what makes me so angry is this is not some sort of cryptic political observation that only tinfoil hat cranks without any credibility are noticing. This shit is right there in front of everyone’s face and yet Democrats in Congress are following this surreal political calculus whereby only until the shithead MAGA people see the light and decide to support impeachment will they then follow the will of the people who voted for them specifically because they expected them to at least, like, uh, do their job?
Invesitgate something actively, and immedately?
Another way of articulating all of this is maybe the Democratic base should take a few plays for the “New Rules” GOP and go for the political jugular as well. We need to get politically woke and radical in way not seen since the end of the Civil War.
We need to bring back the spirit of the Radical Republicans. Break something. Stir some shit up until the milquetoasts in Congress get their act together and AT LEAST impeach Trump. I honestly don’t care what happens in the Senate. Fuck them. I just want Trump to have the stain of impeachment on his record when he gets stroked by plutocrats in 2020.
Let me be absolutely clear about a few things — 1) no one listens to me. 2) I’m a man of peace, but I’m also a man of ideas.
As such, I hate violence and I hate conflict. But in extreme cases, such as what’s going on with the fetid rotting pond scum known as the Trump Administration, I willing to engage in, if nothing else, a little bit of ideological wargaming.
What I mean by that is, I don’t want anyone to get hurt, but fuck, man, we have to do something about the Trump Administration and telling me to “wait for Mueller” or “wait for 2020” just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Thus, from a strategic standpoint, if we want to radicalize (at least a little bit) the fortress of married “purple” soccer moms in the exburbs of Philadelphia, we could do a lot worse than getting #NeverTrump intellectuals such as George Will (and others) to become the Tom Paynes of the Radical Resistance. We need them to articulate the very specific, very simple –and yet right now extremely provocative — demands of the Radical Resistance in a calm, cogent manner that won’t freak otherwise pretty placid centrist-liberals out.
It’s going to take everything the Radical Resistance has (which of this writing is just me, like, talking to myself on a blog no one reads) to simply get the basic demand of impeachment hearings begun in the House. I honestly don’t see simply being a wee bit more urgent when it comes to scheduling House hearings of the Trump Administrations high crimes and general fuckery too be too much to ask.
Why is it that Republicans when they controlled the House got to conspicuously stroke the base when it came to impeaching Obama for bullshit, but when we have massive amounts of un-Constitutional bullshit going on under the Trump Adminstration…nothing. Crickets. We have to wait until Feb. 7th until Michael Cohen testifies and even then the way things are going, Trump may get his wish and scare Cohen off from testifying in the first place.
So, it seems extremely urgent to get people such as George Will to wade into the rhetorical waters of Radical Resistance. Yes, I know Trump long ago lost most of the American intelligentsia, but I’m not really seeing the Howard Beal moments I’ve long been hoping for. The blue check podcasters of Twitter talk a good talk, but they aren’t, like, on TV demanding impeachment proceedings every time they are on TV or on a podcast. If we could get that to happen — why I’m saying “we” when it’s just “me,” I don’t know. I guess it makes me feel better.
I really respect the intellect of the #NeverTrumpers and if they could throw a few rhetorical bombs now and again maybe, just maybe, this Trump nightmare might end sooner rather than later with impeachment…and conviction.
This should not be this difficult to get through people’s thick skulls. The American Republic is in a crisis not seen since the end of the Civil War in 1865.
The Trump Administration — by its mere existence — is an existential threat to the American Republic, the American experiment in self-governing that happened when the brave Revolutionaries decided to take a stand in 1776. What bothers me is how self-evident the need for Radical Resistance is.
Radical Resistance, as I define it, is the ideological belief that Congress should not wait until Mueller provides cover for impeachment. Congress should not wait until the sun turns into a blackhole and the MAGA red hat deadenders finally see the light. If you are a Radical Resistor, you vow to use whatever political power you have as an individual to help move the nation towards the immediate impeachment of Donald John Trump, 45 president of the United States.
If enough of the 60% of the electorate that is aghast by the Trump Administration shenanigans took to the streets long enough, someone in Congress might take notice and actually do their job. The South Koreans proved it is, in fact, possible to have something akin to a People’s Impeachment, and I don’t mean just sitting on own hands and waiting until a bunch of fucktwit plutocrats have a circle jerk in 2020 to see if Trump gets another four years.
I mean we strive to take serious political steps on a grassroots level to effect the immediate commencement of impeachment proceedings against Trump. Now. Today. Tonight. This whole business of waiting until Mueller issues a report so we at least have that fig leaf is bullshit. That’s a massive cop-out that leaves open the possibility that we’ll be mentally masturbating about this until Trump leaves office on Jan. 20, 2025.
Let’s do it NOW. Let’s put whatever political pressure in needed to get — at a minimum — Congressional hearings into Trump’s pay off of Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. I mean, of a dozen things we could impeach — and convict — Trump of, that’s the easiest of the easy pickings.
And…yet…nothing. Nada. Not a peep from Congressional Democrats who I supported whole-heartedly believing they would at least look into the Stormy Daniels issue within days of the House flipping. This “phony war” going on between Trump and Congress is bullshit.
Someone in the Democratic Party needs to strike politically, and if we, the people have to be dicks to get them to do it via a Radical Resistant movement, let’s rock.
But as I have said elsewhere — no one listens to me. If we could get George Will to write about being a Radical Resistor, then, well, that’s a different matter altogether.
I guess I’m just frustrated at how slow things are going. If Congress would just do its job, then Trump would be out of office. He really is that bad.
My fear is if we don’t do something immediately, the abscess on the American Republic known as the Trump Administration will go septic and we’ll be in even more of dystopian nightmare than we already are. There’s a real chance that if not Trump, but one of his successors will lurch the country into full tyranny if we don’t stop the MAGA infection now.
No one listens to me. I feel like I’m simply screaming into the void, which, I guess, I am. It seems pretty self-evident to me that we need a Radical Resistance movement in the United States. I use the term “Radical Resistance” for no other reason than I feel the threat to the Republic is equal to what was experience during Reconstruction when the Radical Republicans faced off against President Andrew Johnson.
It’s self-evident that something radical on an ideological level has to be done to address the abscess on the Republic’s social contract known as the Trump Administration before it inevitably goes septic. What I mean by this is, Trump is pretty much setting into motion the sequence of events that will ultimately lead to the end of the Republic and the establishment of something much more akin to an Americanized version of the Roman Empire.
Let me give you some context — the Roman Republic never really ended, or in a sense it didn’t end for much, much longer than we traditionally think. It gradually ended as the First Citizen of the Republic gradually over the years began to style himself as Emperor. So, in a sense, what I’m saying is it may not be Trump, but Trump is definitely going to be the primordial goo from whence an American Caesar will rise.
Unless, that is, we take a stand and impeach and convict him, removing him from office immediately. (Or as quickly as is politically convenient.) I guess what I’m saying is maybe we need to do it now, when it’s not particularly politically convenient. Or maybe there should be Radical Resistors who vow to primary any Democrat in 2020 (if, unfortunately, Trump lasts that long) who doesn’t say their main objective is to impeach and convict Trump.
You see, it seems self-evident to me that if we don’t impeach and convict Trump by, say, August 2019, he ain’t going nowhere. If we don’t impeach and convict Trump by August 2019, then the 2020 political silly season will have begun and the political conventional wisdom will be we should “let the people decide” Trump’s fate in 2020.
This, to me, is not an acceptable political statement.
I say this because it’s a huge fucking co-out. It means that we will suffer the tyranny of the minority. That cult-like 37% of the electorate that is completely content with Trump’s traitorous, felonious maleficence is telling the rest of us — the actual fucking majority — the suck it. We already have Trump dead-to-rights on any number of impeachable crimes and…nothing. Crickets. It’s beginning to make me very unhappy on a political level.
I’m a man of peace. But I’m also a man of ideas. As such, it seems to me that there is a ideological case to be made for peaceful Radical Resistance. As such, I don’t advocate violence of any sort, but I do believe we should the utmost political pressure on the Democrat Party to, like, do it’s fucking job. I voted Democratic in 2018 specifically because I wanted a Democratic House to immediately impeach Trump. So fucking what if he doesn’t get convicted in the Senate. So fucking what if it only makes his shit-for-brains moronic MAGA supporters double and triple down on their support for him.
I honestly don’t fucking care.
What I do care about, however, is hearing Trump’s numerous crimes against the Constitution of the Republic articulate in the Well of the Senate. I want it to be established what a horrible president Trump is on an existential level so at least going forward I can point to that in an political debate and say at least we know he’s a criminal and what, exactly, he did.
Of course, the issue is, the Mueller Report.
That Congress would be so lilly-livered that it feels it needs to political cover associated with a third party such as Mueller to do, like, it’s job and stuff makes me very, very unhappy.
Alas, that definitely seems like what’s going to happen. And, as such, the talk of impeachment will turn into talk of how we can prevent Trump from protecting his “legacy’ in 2024. I, for one, say fuck that — impeach and convict NOW.
When, in the course of human events a democratic nation finds its ideals corrupted from within and without by the election of an illegitimate, treasonous, felonious regime it is the responsibility of each patriotic citizen to think in radical political terms.
Though violence is never the answer in domestic affairs of a constitutional democratic republic such as The United States of America, in times of crisis a more radical — though non-violent — course of action is necessary. One must only look at the early years of Reconstruction to see how the Radical Republicans stood up to the tyranny of President Andrew Johnson to see the power of an ideology being used to protect life, liberty and freedom.
As such, the heretofore passive Resistance must become more radical ideologically and make its basic tenet the immediate impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate of one Donald John Trump, 45 president of the United States installed illegitimately on the people of the United States by a hostile foreign power.
Furthermore, Radical Resisters will withhold their political support from any candidate — be they Republican or Democrat — who does not advocate the immediate, lawful removal of Donald J. Trump. It is self-evident that Donald J. Trump is not only lacking the temperament to lead the American people, but his craven nature and anti-democratic behavior on any number of obvious accounts leave the citizens of this “city on a hill” to demand immediate representation on the part of their elected officials.
Should the various members of the House and Senate not represent the approximately 60% of the electorate who continue to vouchsafe their intense opposition to the autocratic, nay, fascist and un-Constitutional behavior of the illegal and illegitimate Trump regime, the people should, en masse invoke their Constitutional right to peaceful assembly in protest until such time that Congress heeds the will of the citizens they purport to represent.
As witness by the peaceful, regular and massive protests on the part of the citizens of the Republic of Korea, it is possible for a People’s Impeachment to occur when the more traditional methods of invoking pressure on the elected fail.
Thereby, the Resistance must begin to think seriously of a People’s Impeachment should the Congress continue to fail to properly represent the will of the People.
The question of why we haven’t begun impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump, 45 president of the United States, is something I struggle with on a daily basis.
The short answer is, of course, that even though his high crimes against the Constitution are legion at this point, there simply isn’t the political willpower to do anything about it.
This comes in no little part from the basic paradox of Democrats impeaching a Republican President — they won’t do it unless they feel they have some bi-partisan support. Republicans, meanwhile, are always locked and loaded to impeach a Democratic president, damn the consequences because they’re shithead dipshits. As such, Democrats simply won’t do anything until either a Mueller Report comes out that would give them some sort of cover, the economy collapses or some sort of enormous bombshell drops independent of Mueller’s investigation. The only place I can think of that this might happen is from the SDNY.
Remember, it was SDNY, not Mueller, who gave Cohen an investigative root around about as deep as you can get without seeing sunshine on the other end. To date, of course, they, too, haven’t really come up with anything that would be the tipping point.
What really, really bothers me is we have Trump dead-to-rights about several things and because the economy is doing well and MAGA people are cult members, nothing is happening. Any other president would be at least impeached for the Stormy Daniels crimes, but as it stands…nothing.
I don’t really expect this to change anytime soon, either. Trump has a bloodlock on about 37% of the electorate, enough to defeat any attempt to convict him in the Senate. So, in a sense, Trump is a king right now. An elected dictator who is, for all intents and purposes, above the law.
And this isn’t going to change.
What I fear is it won’t change in time for it to really matter, even if Mueller drops a bombshell. If Mueller doesn’t drop a bombshell within the next six months, then the people who would otherwise think about impeaching Trump will kick that particular problem down the road into 2020 and say, “Let the people decide.”
The problem with that, of course, is the “people” won’t really decide, but rather a bunch of craven plutocrats who are rather content with the traitorous, felonious nature of the Trump Administration.
This whole thing of waiting for Mueller to “save” us is such a huge cop-out. It’s a national tragedy. For me, there’s no excuse at this point not to immediately at least impeach Trump. We have him dead-to-rights on massive violation of campaign finance law…and yet the Democrats are being fucking wussies on this one.
Our only recourse may be to start to be Radical Resisters and to primary anyone in the Democratic Party who doesn’t make it part of their basic policy to do everything in their power to impeach and convict Trump ASAP.
Because Trump is going to be re-elected, no doubt about it. What damage Russian fuckery doesn’t inflict, asshole American plutocrats will happily take up the slack.
Like I said, if we don’t get Trump by August 2019, we’re going to have to wait until August of 2021. And, really, it’s very possible that because Trump is an avatar for the rotting of the American civil society, it’s very possible that all of my personal gnashing of teeth over the lack of impeachment of Trump will simply bleed into my personal gnashing of teeth over Trump hurding someone like Sen. Tom Cotton to the presidency in an effort to protect his “legacy.”
Fuck MAGA.
Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer in Richmond, Va. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com. He’s working on his first novel.
I feel bad for the singer Peaches that Trump would sully her name with his stupid “you can call it peaches” quote about the wall, so here what are meant to be dance pop lyrics.
Peaches Lyrics by Shelton Bumgarner @bumgarls Please give credit if you produce or perform
You can call it whatever you like
You can call it peaches if you like
If helps you fuck the pain away
But no matter what you say
No matter what you do
It’s still fucking wall
Peaches won’t separate us
Peaches taste so good
Let’s eat them not built them
Peaches won’t separate us
Peaches taste so good
Let’s eat them not built them
Don’t you worry
Don’t you fret
The best of peaches is to come
But these peaches are based on love not hate
You’ve just got to see what freedom is
To accept my plea
Peaches won’t separate us
Peaches taste so good
Let’s eat them not built them
Peaches won’t separate us
Peaches taste so good
Let’s eat them not built them
(bridge) Bridge peaches with a smile Overcome your peaches fears A latter is all you need Nice and strong and ready to come When asked
Peaches won’t separate us Peaches taste so good Let’s eat them not built them Peaches won’t separate us Peaches taste so good Let’s eat them not built them
