The Neighborliness Option

Chicago officials have been terrified that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would inundate the DNC with migrant buses. But the people of Chicago may have already called Abbott’s bluff.

BY RICK PERLSTEIN AUGUST 14, 2024

The sharpest illustration of the Republican Party’s slide into fascism came during a presidential primary debate in late 2023. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held up a map he claimed documented every time someone defecated in the streets of San Francisco. Practically the entire city was blotted out by brown. Here, in graphic form, was a central argument of Donald Trump’s party: Democratic governance has drowned the nation’s cities in shit.

As with so many right-wing arguments, its greatest vulnerability is contact with reality. As startled NASCAR fans from conservative areas kept telling reporters two summers running when visiting Chicago for the races on the downtown streets: Wow, this place is really nice! But not content to merely lie about reality in order to dehumanize their enemies, fascists will create a reality if it helps them more effectively demonize their enemies—flooding the zone with shit, as it were, to borrow Steve Bannon’s metaphor for his work to befoul the public’s trust in the media.

For over two years now, the most striking right-wing project to invent a dystopian reality while claiming only to describe it has been practiced by Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas.

In April 2022, President Biden announced that he was ending Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that restricted the entrance of asylum seekers in the interests of the public health. Abbott promptly addressed the press in Austin. “They’ve been dumping large numbers of migrants in cities up and down the border.” Texas state troopers would help the administration to “more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border” by intercepting and shuttling them to Washington, D.C.—“We are sending them to the United States Capitol,” he pledged.
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-14-neighborliness-option-chicago-migrants-dnc/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Collapsing%20Mortgage%20Securities%20%20Broken%20Processes%20%20No%20Accountability%20%20Sound%20Familiar%3F%20%7C%20Weekend%20Reads&utm_campaign=Weekend%20Prospect%20Reads%2008172024