Confederacy of Zombies
I ran out of patience a long time ago with a bruised and battered News business trying desperately to cover American politics as if it were an honest game between two perspectives about public policy priorities, on face value and in all good faith.
But no, our national struggle has long been one between the Enlightenment values of our Revolution, whereby “all men are created equal,” and a cynical impulse to revert back to the autocracy of those medieval monarchies that founded these New World colonies — and if not by gerrymandered votes, then by force of arms.
The communication breakdown goes much deeper than mere rhetoric. Out of the abortion debates, for example, a fetus emerged as an “unborn baby.” A fetus is not even considered human life in the Bible, but now Republicans and other right wingers get to condemn Democrats and other pro-choice liberals as “baby killers” in our valuable public discourse.
Since the fetus is arguably “potential human life,” we may be able to flip the script on the Christian nationalist abortion narrative by characterizing them as undead. This may suggest that the rank and file of our All-American Christian nationalist death cult are Zombies — but then we would have an opportunity to publicly soften that language into something more politically correct, like “legacy human life.” We can learn and speak this language, too.