TRUMP, THE GOP, AND THE MORLOCK FACTOR

 

In 1895, when he was twenty-nine years old, the “father of science fiction”, H.G. Wells, celebrated a couple of major events. Having left his first wife—his cousin Isabel, whom he had married four years earlier—he was re-married to his former student, Amy Robbins, and then, he promptly published his first work of fiction. It was a novella that he titled The Time Machine. It was that book that made him decide to become a serious writer. Fifty more titles would follow before his death in 1946, a number of them in this genre known today as sci-fi.

While The Time Machine is seen by sci-fic buffs mostly as an early reference to time travel and to the dream-adventure of being a time traveler, it is also, on a deeper level, a darkly dystopian story about class struggle and culture wars. Wells pictures the far distant future—802,701 AD—as a place that, on the surface, appears idyllic, a land of peace, love and plenty. But it is also a world that belies a dark and dangerous secret. That world is, of course, visited by the protagonist of the story,  a Victorian-era English scientist known only as the “Time Traveller”.

The Time Traveller tells his academic colleagues that he has built a machine on which one can literally travel into the future. The machine moves through time rather than space and can take one to the same spot on which it stands at any point time. He carries out his experiments in time travel privately. He sits in the strange machine, throws its levers and, voilà, the images of future times pass by his sides in a blur, his home and laboratory collapsing and being replaced by a sometimes frightening, sometime inspiring  landscape.

When the Time Traveller sees the most attractive landscape  of all, a lush, green, Garden of Eden-type image in that far-distant future, he activates the machine’s levers again and stops. It is indeed a beautiful, almost heavenly place.

H.G. Wells

Long story short, the Time Traveller comes across a small civilization in the forest, a people Wells calls the Eloi. They live in a benign climate and seem not to have a care in the world. They are immune to stress and are unencumbered by intellectual curiosity or cultural development. They are just content to live in this beautiful place, this Eden, in small peaceful villages. It is a place of love and beauty, where the inhabitants apparently want for nothing, a place ostensibly untouched by violence, in which they live entirely on the plentiful fruits that grow everywhere.

The Time Traveller is introduced to this idyllic humanoid non-culture by a beautiful Eloi named Weena. He quickly becomes infatuated with her but knows he will eventually have to return to his world. He toys with the idea of taking Weena back with him to his own era. But when he hikes back to the place where he has hidden his time machine, it is gone. In searching for it, he enters one of a number of strategically located, deep dry wells, and it is there that he encounters the cave world of the Morlocks. The Morlocks are a simian-like race which, on the one hand, is in charge of maintaining all of the underworld machinery that creates the heavenly environment in which the Eloi blithely live, but, on the other, depends on the flesh of the Eloi for its own survival. 

Never has the gist of the social principle involved been better explained than by actor Gary Sinise in the 1996 film, Ransom.  Sinise plays the part of a rogue New York City police detective, Jimmy Shaker, who has formed an underground gang that kidnaps and holds for ransom the young son of multimillionaire airline owner Tom Mullen (Mel Gibson). Mullen decides to ignore FBI protocol and pay the ransom Shaker’s gang is demanding. He has gone to great lengths to lose his FBI tail and is  going alone to the meet. As then scene opens, he is receiving instructions by car phone from Shaker as he drives.

 The dialogue goes like this:

Shaker tells Mullen about Morlocks

Det. Jimmy Shaker:
[talking as they are both driving in separate cars and out of sight of one another]

You a movie fan, Tom? Ever seen that movie, The Time Machine?

Tom Mullen:
No.

Det. Shaker:

It’s the land of the future, right? There are only two kinds of people left in the world now, the Morlocks and the Eloi…

Mullen:
Okay.

Det. Shaker:
The Eloi, they live above ground... they wear togas, they're all blond.  They eat grapes and shit like that.  It’s like the Garden of Eden out there, I mean basically everybody just plays around.

Mullen:

How do I get my boy back?

Det. Shaker:
The Morlocks, they live underground, all right? Big hairy ugly suckers, like you wouldn't wish on an ape.  Down there with all this machinery, they're doing all the labor, they're making sure that the Eloi have enough food and togas...

Mullen:

Are you gonna answer me?

Det. Shaker:
Oh, great deal if you are an Eloi, right?  There’s only one thing—every once in a while, a Morlock comes up to the surface and snatches an Eloi, takes him down there...

Mullen:
All right, I’m done driving until you tell me what I want to know!

Det. Shaker:

The Morlocks, they don't eat grapes... They're cannibals. They eat Eloi.  So when I think of The Time Machine, it kind of reminds me of New York City, you know? See, you’re an Eloi. You and all your friends walking around like zombies with no fucking idea of the shit going on down below. So…does this make me a Morlock? I don’t like to think of myself like…(pauses) I guess it does.  And every once in a while, one of you gets snatched.

Chilling.

But, okay, so why am I telling you this story about H.G. Wells, and Mel Gibson, and Gary Sinise, and the Eloi and the Morlocks, and all that?

Well, because, in a sense, we’re living it. And we’re living the chilling plots of a lot of other dystopian novels as well. The story just struck me when I was trying to explain our current climate to myself. And I can’t promise it will be the last time I’ll make references to the clairvoyance of dystopian writers. Indeed, I can guarantee you that I will be referring to other such stories, because a number of them are coming true, all at once, right before our eyes.

But for today, let’s look at the evidence for this comparison.

Prior to January 6, 2021, the Republican Party—or at least the most traditional segments of it—still had the deluded notion that the party belonged to them. Indeed, many in the GOP leadership felt that they were using Trump. They, like many Americans, thought the checks and balances, so carefully crafted into the Constitution by the framers, would take care of any populist authoritarian tendencies Trump, or any other candidate, might have. They trusted a long and, until then, sacred history of democracy and tradition, of separation of powers. They trusted in the peaceful transfer of power that had always characterized the American way of life and of politics.

They were slow learners and believed their own nonsense about Trump having a peculiar way of talking, but that it was “just his style.” They still thought of him as, in the end, rational and, in spite of everything, innately American. They ignored the fact that he referred to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-American “militias” as “very fine people” or that he had told the Proud Boys to “stand down and stand by.” They didn’t find it the least bit insane that he talked about biker gangs as having his back. Or that he had repeatedly hinted that martial law was a presidential option.  

As members of Congress, they had, they presumed, the frying pan by the handle. They were willing to go to unusual lengths to win elections. Even to that of allowing a man known to be bereft of conscience, principles, honesty, sincerity, government experience, ethics, scruples or historical and political knowledge (a man known more for being crafty than for being intelligent) to represent them—as long as he brought his sizable following with him. Besides, if things did go awry, it would be the Democrats on the receiving end, and hey, who cared?

They thought of the MAGA folks as an amorphous if critical mass of unsophisticated votes. They had that in common with the Democrats. It was that attitude, by both parties, which permitted the rise of Trump and MAGA. Trump and his team got it. They were strategic. They simply played on the fact that there was a very large segment of the population that would follow this reality show host and grifter no matter where he led them—an ignored and disenfranchised segment who feared becoming even more invisible in the future, and who were willing to follow anybody who could come along and convince them that he was going to take vengeance for them, that he was a superhero, and that he was  going to blow it all up. They were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. The GOP leadership didn’t understand what made those people tick—Trump did—but they knew there were a hell of a lot of them and that Trump could bring their votes to “the party”.

But then, Trump lost. Just as he had lost the by-elections for the party in 2022.  In the face of that defeat, a large part of the Republican elite was thinking that they’d had four years, and the loss was bad for the party, but maybe now they could take the party back from this guy and send him home. There was just too much drama with him in government. Surely, in the end, he would accept the election result, come to heel, follow the long-held democratic tradition, shake hands with the victor and go home. For good.

Not Donald Trump. He kicked and screamed and fought and shouted fraud. He disputed the election results in the courts, and when his campaign’s cases were found to be without merit, when his own attorney general said there was no fraud, he sought to pressure state officials, anyway he could, to rig the results and snatch the victory out of his opponent’s hands. He falsely accused poll workers and voting machine makers. He stubbornly refused to concede, and tried to get his own vice president and MAGA members of Congress to back up his story of a rigged election and refuse to certify the election results. And when none of that looked as if it would be enough to return him to office, he scraped the bottom of the lowest reaches of his movement for the most violent elements he could find. 

In other words, Trump gave his very own Morlocks permission to rise up from the dark, disenfranchised, violent underworld. And this time they had permission from their leader—indeed, for many, from their god—to remain on the surface and to wreak havoc. Their mission was to devour the Eloi in Congress. And it was on that day that fat, complacent, millionaire Republicans perennials in Congress realized for the first time that when the crap hit the fan, they too were in the line of fire. Being an Eloi wasn’t exclusive to their political opponents. They too were Eloi, and the Morlocks were coming for them.

So that day we witnessed Trump’s own vice president running for his life, GOP members cowering in the chamber next to their Democrat counterparts. Even MAGA mouthpiece Josh Hawley who had given a raised-fist salute to the Morlocks outside was now filmed booking through the halls of Congress to escape the Morlock advance. The Morlocks, it was clear, knew no authority but their own, the leader whose bidding they were doing. Whoever got in their way was going down—as attested by the policeman they killed and the one hundred forty they injured. And their king, their god, watched it all on TV and never lifted a finger to stop it.

That was the day that the GOP officially ceased to exist and became the Party of Trump. Despite pseudo-patriotic speeches by the traditional old white guys in the former Republican leadership (clearly, they were no longer in charge no matter what their nameplates said) about how this was the last straw, and they were done backing Trump, in their frightened arrhythmic hearts, they realized that Sergeant Jimmy  Shaker was right: They were Eloi. Them and all of their fat, privileged, entitled friends, “walking around like zombies with no fucking idea of the shit going on down below.” And in a matter of hours, they had all changed their soiled trousers, and their tunes, and were kissing the ring of their new party leader.

It was a Morlock-eat-Eloi world, and, clearly, if you were in the Party of Trump, you were either with him all the way, or the Morlocks were dragging you down to the underworld for lunch.