01/18/2024
Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” — the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his final speech on April 3, 1968, as quoted Monday in historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter
By Will Bunch
Philadelphia Inquirer
On a frigid night when the American hellscape that is the 2024 presidential election nearly froze over, in the most warped perversion imaginable of what would have been King’s 95th birthday, Donald Trump’s march toward a would-be dictatorship planted a giant boot-print in the deep Iowa snowdrifts.
When the swirling snows finally settled before midnight on Monday, Trump and his openly authoritarian drive to return to the White House as a revenge-minded 47th president captured 51% of the caucus-goers against his divided and often inept rivals, signaling that the 2024 primary season is all but over as soon as it started.
The record deep freeze across the Hawkeye State and most of the Lower 48 — with windchills worse than 30-below in some rural outposts — was just the latest foreboding that the battle for the survival of America democracy has ripped a giant tear in the cosmos, with earthquakes from the Sea of Japan to Oklahoma City, molten lava spewing from the earth under Iceland, and Biblical flooding taking place across parts of the United States. Scientists might note that the polar vortex causing America’s epic cold snap isn’t a message from the angry gods but merely the latest climate catastrophe, as global warming weakens the Gulf Stream, but you’d never hear this from a field of GOP candidates soaked to the skin in fossil fuels and denial.
Flip on your TV, and you’ll hear a lot of chatter over the battle for second place in Iowa, as if that mattered. The networks have too much invested in fancy touchscreens and dramatic “Campaign ‘24″ overtures to tell you the truth — that caucuses and primaries are for functioning political parties, and the GOP has become a cult. The fact that judges have already ruled the all-but-certain 2024 Republican nominee is a fraudster and a ra**st even before his 91 felony charges go before a jury means nothing to tens of millions of Americans for whom Trump’s vows to smite their mutual enemies — in the media and on college campuses and Capitol Hill — are a feature, not a bug.
At one Trump Iowa rally this past weekend, a grey-haired backer in a red MAGA hat told a social-media interviewer that he’d love to see repeal of what he called “the Roosevelt law,” meaning the 22nd Amendment that limits Trump to only one more term. He added: “This country needs a dictator. I hate to say it, but this is the truth.”
Yet the TV talking heads still toil to explain Trump’s appeal after Jan. 6 and the two impeachments and the four separate criminal cases. The latest theory is that these voters are convinced they had it better during the 45th presidency, but their economic nostalgia and false memories are just one part of that. They recall it as better because the man in the White House shared their visions of patriarchy and white privilege, as well as of the same educated, left-leaning foes.
While the nattering nabobs were expressing shock over Trump’s Hi**er plagiarism when he declared immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, Iowa’s so-called evangelicals were voicing approval. A new CBS News/YouGov poll found that 81% of Republicans agree with Trump’s anti-migrant tirade (and 47% of all Americans, almost identical to Trump’s percentage of the vote in 2016 and 2020). The same survey found about two-thirds of GOP voters think efforts to promote racial diversity are “going too far,” and a majority back Trump’s schemes to prosecute his political enemies.
“You get the feeling right now in Iowa that we are sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” veteran Iowa Republican lawyer Doug Gross told the New York Times. But maybe it’s time to acknowledge that many of these voters are wide awake and know exactly what they are doing. We don’t even have to wait until January 2025 to see the moral rot of Trump policies. Just look at Gov. Greg Abbott in Trump-fried Texas, where this weekend Abbott’s tin soldiers along the Rio Grande blocked U.S. Border Patrol agents from intervening as three migrants fatally drowned.
As I noted in this space last week, it’s a national travesty that Iowa Republicans laid down this marker for white supremacy on the federal holiday honoring King. What should have been a 24-hour conversation about completing King’s dream for an America with justice and equality for all was rudely interrupted by this backlash. That’s why I was grateful for Richardson’s citation of one of the civil rights leader’s less famous quotes, in which he talked about what it was like to fight oppression in the 1960s, when the challenges facing America were just as great as they are today.
Just as in 1968, there are bright stars illuminating our dark, sub-zero night . We just lost one right there in Iowa — not that you heard about it this weekend from the gun-lobby-addled Republicans seeking the White House. Dan Marburger was the beloved principal of Perry High School when a gunman went on a shooting spree earlier this month. Rather than run away, he tried to distract or calm down the shooter — and sustained the wounds that later killed him. His selfless sacrifice no doubt saved the lives of some of his young students.
Most of us will never be called upon for such an act of courage. But we can all do something to save American democracy, rather than fleeing into the void. The poll numbers and the pro-dictator quotes can be demoralizing, yet they don’t represent the majority of U.S. citizens. On our darkest night, let’s not forget there are millions of potential stars that could set the American sky ablaze.
