The Phantom Revolution
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... -hysteria/
At the moment, however, and for the foreseeable future, we are also living through an extended period of what can justly be called the Phantom Revolution, in which we rebel against threats to our liberty that don’t actually exist but that we create for ourselves. It is not a revolution of the mind. It’s a revolution of the gut. It is not a revolution of ideas. It’s a revolution of the id. We have so cheapened the idea of revolution that the emergence of this revolution manqué was inevitable. It has manifested itself in spasms over the past several decades, primarily through the development of the modern conservative mind, which has chosen a series of imaginary enemies against whom to stage a very real counterrevolutionary struggle. The Clinton Death List. The Birther Conspiracy. The Tea Party. Then four years of an administration* based on phantom policies, run by a president* who’d made his entire career out of phantom success and phantom wealth and who discharged his phantom duties with phantom competence. Donald Trump did not create the Phantom Revolution. But on his watch, the Phantom Revolution manifested itself in actual revolutionary activity, some of it violent.
On January 6, the Battle of the Phantom Election raged at the U. S. Capitol. It subsequently raged in a stadium in Arizona, where a Kabuki “audit” of the 2020 vote, engineered by the Republican majority in the state senate, encouraged the notion of the Phantom Election as something to oppose by any means necessary. The Phantom Revolution has also fought another battle of the Phantom Threat, this time against critical race theory, an area of study that was highly controversial at Harvard Law School almost 40 years ago. But through the dynamics of the Phantom Revolution, it was converted into a vast, sprawling enemy empire, dedicated to undermining the military, the law, and public schools. The battle raged at school-board meetings where activists loudly denounced the teaching of critical race theory in public primary and secondary schools. This was not something that was truly happening, except in the minds of the people who were fighting it, which was real enough for them.
[...]
The Senate will not confront the Phantom Revolution even when that revolution becomes quite real and arrives unbidden, right on the Senate’s doorstep.
For a revolutionary nation, we’ve become so bad at revolutions that we find it necessary to locate imaginary oppressors against whom to rebel, many of them the most powerless people around. We saw the beginnings of something real in the summer of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, and the country is desperately in need of revolutionary change—to face the climate crisis, to rebuild itself, to address challenges undreamed of only a decade ago, to adjust its 18th-century government to the needs of the 21st, and, dammit, to run its elections in a sensible way. We should be better at all this than we are.