Armed and dangerous ... and headed into the shit

A few months ago,  I participated in a march to express my worries over climate change and to urge action.

Very few young people were in the march.  We were a bunch of geezers.

The march went past quite a few apartment buildings where young people were partying.  A couple of them waved out to us from a balcony where they were partying.

Here we were, middle aged and older, marching to make the world a better place for young people, but the youth didn't care enough to protest!

Beer, sex, and Instagram beat climate change protests!

If that's how it is here in liberal, progressive, and green Oregon, then should we be surprised that the US has not done any damn thing about climate change?

We witnessed yet another regression in this when the fucked up party skipped town, skipped state, and went into hiding in nearby Idaho all because their elected officials did not want to do anything about climate change and were, therefore, opposed to the cap-and-trade bill that was up for vote.

Having killed the climate crisis bill, the Republican senators said they would return to their jobs on Saturday. “Our mission was to kill cap-and-trade,” said senator Herman Baertschiger “And that’s what we did.”

Source

These young people are thanking the Republicans for screwing up their own futures?  How can this be?

When you have guns, everything is possible, it seems.

Joe Lowndes, a political scientist at the University of Oregon who researches rightwing politics, said: “If the Oregon Republican party were a European political party it would be an authoritarian far-right party. It really has that character, that extraordinary truculence,” he said.
During the standoff over climate crisis, Lowndes said, Republicans “were essentially gloating about having an armed wing of the party. That’s when you cut into the structure of constitutional democracy”.

The fucked up party, not only here in Oregon but throughout the country, has become the most powerful far-right country in power anywhere in the democratic world!

the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.

It is frightening to think that this is now the mainstream party!

The difference is that in Europe, far-right populist parties are often an alternative to the mainstream. In the United States, the Republican Party is the mainstream.
“That’s the tragedy of the American two-party system,” Mr. Greven said. In a multiparty government, white working-class populists might have been shunted into a smaller faction, and the Republicans might have continued as a “big tent” conservative party. Instead, the Republican Party has allowed its more extreme elements to dominate. “Nowhere in Europe do you have that phenomenon,” he said.

Will leave it to David Roberts for the last word:

Basically, this is future-of-the-species stuff, getting decided through a spectacle that's barely even able to break into the daily news cycle. And the next time around, there may not even be the pretense of democracy. We are truly headed into the shit.