American democracy has reached the level of the Polish liberum veto. Super-rich individuals, like the Koch Brothers or Sheldon Adelson, can block any political action they oppose. They do it by hiring (i.e., getting elected) gangsters willing to do their work, by paying for any hatchet job or smear campaign, no matter how reprehensible. The Koch's have been doing this for decades - they were early funders of ALEC.
There are an increasing number of GOP office-holders under investigation or indicted or convicted of corruption, of intimidation, of insider dealing, and so forth. There are also several GOP office holders who have been exposed as having mistresses, sometimes pushing those mistresses to have abortions. Those are the real GOP "family values". The bottom line here is there are more and more beyond sleazy, beyond nasty GOPers because the 1% funders of the GOP have been hiring crooks, sociopaths, and messianic ideologues - the political version of one-percenters.
Some outlaw motorcycle clubs can be distinguished by a 1% patch worn on the colors. This is claimed to be a reference to a comment made by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) in which they stated that 99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding citizens, implying that the last one percent were outlaws.
- Wikipedia
Intended as a slur, the 1% label has become an outlaw badge of honor.
"We're the one percenters, man - the one percent that don't fit and don't care...We've punched our way out of a hundred rumbles...We're royalty among motorcycle outlaws, baby."
- a Hell's Angel quoted in Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels
Below the orange bike-chain/belt we will examine how the outlaw Hell's Angels have been reincarnated as GOP politocs like Don ("The last guy who touched me ended up on the ground dead.") Young or Michael (" I will throw you off this fucking balcony...I will break you in half.") Grimm.
Totalitarian movements have no problem including criminals and other marginal individuals. With increasing boldness, the GOP demands and votes for totalitarian (in today's language, " eliminationist") actions against their perceived enemies: kill gays, kill illegal immigrants, kill abortion doctors, kill blacks. And they back up those demands with murderous laws like "Stand your ground" and concealed carry. They are first in line to justify the complete immunity of police whenever they murder some innocent person in cold blood.
The new mass leaders'...careers reproduce the features of the earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life. The fact that their lives prior to their political careers had been failures...was the strongest factor in their mass appeal.
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Sounds just like the Palin clan. Which leads us to consider who is willing to follow these 1%-funded gangsters, to consider why anyone in their right mind supports these policies. The 1960s equivalent of today's GOP would have seen the Rockefeller family grooming Hell's Angels for political office so they could support George Wallace. How did we fall so far, so fast?
The answer, of course, is that it starts with the media. Like most of the 20th century, even Hell's Angels started with the media.
The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing...To them, the appearance of Hell's Angels must have seemed like a wonderful publicity stunt. In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome.
- H. Thompson, "Hell's Angels"
And HST was writing back in the early 1960s, when politics was relatively sane and stable, when people could look forward to middle class jobs and careers. Back then, the Angels were outliers...
the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists...the Hell's Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of quietly submitting to their fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don't expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose.
..and they were losers. But they still were noticed and even given some modicum of respect, especially by the media.
There is an important difference between the words "loser" and "outlaw". One is passive and the other is active, and the main reason that the Angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the daydreams of millions of losers who don't wear any defiant insignia and don't know how to be outlaws. The streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed - even for a day - into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders and thunder out of town on town on big motorcycles after raping the bankers daughter. Even people who think the Angels should all be put to sleep find it easy to identify with them. They command a fascination, however reluctant, that borders on psychic masturbation.
The Angel's don't like being called losers, but they have learned to live with it. "Yeah, I guess I am one", said one. "But you're looking at one loser who's going to make a hell of a scene on the way out."
That sentiment has a very long shelf-life. In fact, it's still around today. Oh, and it was around in the totalitarian past.
If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction..
- Joseph Goebbels
To those who only know the drug-addled, gonzo version of HST, the accuracy of the following prediction is, in its own way, soberly mind-blowing:
The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners of anything...(it is) a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like Hell's Angels have been finding for years.
And for the past 30 years, the 1% has set about creating the conditions of mass unemployment and frustration (even for "specialists") in order to provide the warm bodies to follow sick grifters like Palin and nasty, filthy rich sociopaths like Darrell Issa. Other "leaders" include thug and hypocrite, Herman Cain and the disgraced, all-but-court-martialed for violence, Alan West. The zombie followers of these GOP gangsters are diehards: diehard racists, diehard misogynists, diehard homophobes, diehard anti-communists (still hating a system that ceased to exist 25 years ago), and fanatical theocrats.
It has been the media which has laid the mental groundwork for the 1%'s warping of our social sensibilities. From the Godfather, through Scorcese's gangster epics, to the Sopranos, and finally Sons of Anarchy, the media has held gangsters and outlaws up as role models. So that it's hard to tell if the public thinks that outlaw bikers are really losers.
This is not mere verbiage. Sonny Barger, with whom HST hung around while writing HA, was a founding member of the Oakland HA. Fifty years later, he has a recurring role in Sons of Anarchy.
On November 30, 2010, Barger made a short guest appearance on the Season 3 finale of the FX television series Sons of Anarchy as Lenny "The Pimp" Janowitz, about a fictional outlaw motorcycle club, allegedly based on the Hells Angels. Barger returned again on the Sons of Anarchy as Lenny "The Pimp" Janowitz November 29, 2011, in the Season 4 finale, part one. Barger's third guest appearance on Sons of Anarchy as Lenny "The Pimp" Janowitz was during Season 5, Episode 10, which aired on November 13, 2012.
- Wikipedia, Sonny Barger
What a great social message the 1% is paying for: be an outlaw and we will make you a TV star. Its HST's Time magazine quote on steroids. Outlaws have gone from being losers to being role models.
The political problem with this role model is that outlaws don't negotiate and don't compromise. Hence the top-dog gangsters that populate today's GOP.
...a belief...in total retaliation for any offense or insult is what makes the angels a problem for the police and so morbidly fascinating to the general public. Their claim that they don't start trouble is probably true more often than not, but their idea of provocation is dangerously broad, and one of their main difficulties is that almost nobody else seems to understand it. Yet, they have a very simple rule of thumb; in any argument a fellow Hell's Angel is always right. To disagree with a Hell's Angel is to be wrong - and to persist in being wrong is an open challenge.
As for the followers - wannabee Koch's Angels, people like Joe the Plumber - they are just full-bore losers, rigidly locked into a paranoid ideology by hourly doses of Fox News propaganda.
A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on what ever he has left, and he can't afford to admit - no matter how many times he's reminded of it - that every day of his life takes him further down a blind alley.
Have you seen a better description of the Neanderthal base of the GOP?
So what is the takeaway? It's the "duck test". The GOP walk, talk, and act like gangsters, thugs, and outlaws. It's time for the Democrats to grow a spine and call them out on it.