An untouchable lib opts out of Florida's political undercaste

Ruling castes can't exist without undercastes. I'm leaving one in the effort to destroy both.

I’m currently reading this book by the great Isabel Wilkerson, whose Great Migration epic The Warmth of Other Suns, is in my personal top 5 history/non-fiction works. Caste is very different, stylistically; and I’m still fairly early in it. But reading and thinking about it certainly affected this essay. You should read it.

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As of Memorial Day, I am no longer a No Party Affiliate. I have changed my voter registration to Republican; and I will probably remain so until Florida’s political system is no longer a caste system — until the castes (Brahmin and Untouchable/Dalit alike) splinter into normal political parties again.

I hope to help that happen; but it will take time, if it can be done at all.

My new party registration does not repudiate NPAs or Democrats.

In fact, I see myself as part of a civic coalition with NPAs and Democrats aimed at defeating the gross criminal dictator worship, J6ism, unlimited grifting, and total lack of personal agency that passes political ideology for most GOP political candidates and “leaders.” Local and national voting data suggests I am not alone in this among my newly fellow GOPers. But we’ll see.

In the most practical, immediate sense, I want to vote for my own state sub-dictator. And I want some say in who my community elevates as its particular useless legislative clerks, ferrying legal bribe offers back-and-forth between the sub-dictator and the handful of private interests and political grift consulting shops that finance/enable him or her in Florida.

But actual voting accounts for only a small part of my motivation. Indeed, voting is always a lagging indicator of the existential forces shaping any political and social entity.

More fundamentally, my party switch recognizes how strangely power over the public good is distributed and used in the state of Florida — and how untethered that power is to any actual coherent policy or ideological point-of-view other than the raw self-interest of a few private capital owners.

The difference between party and caste

A decade ago, I would have felt dishonest putting an R by my name. But Florida’s GOP no longer has any actual beliefs or policy ambitions or values with which to align or reject.

Rather, Florida’s handful of important capital owners have successfully muscled the GOP into a caste, rather than a party, in our state. They have weaponized fake religiosity, base prejudices, and the anti-social behavior of the nastiest people in our society against the very idea of a common good — because the idea of civic decency and a common good is bad for their private interests.

In doing so, they’ve set our state on a path of demographic, economic, and environmental deterioration that serves only their very short-term interests.

The unfettered right of the ruling caste to grift is the only “ideology” of today’s Florida GOP. With lying and cynicism that knows no depth, power in Florida has defined “common good” and “civic decency” and “home” and “the future” as the language of the lib undercaste.

To elevate any of these ideas as political or civic goals is to elevate “the libs” who call Florida home as fellow human beings, to count them among a common caste of civic equality. Thus, any crime, lie, cruelty, corruption, or gross dictator seeking to prevent that from happening is justified.

And yet, the open embrace of crime, cruelty, corruption, or a gross dictator is an illegitimate ask for any political party or faction in a representative democracy or a republic. I reject all of that. I won’t give the GOP or capital owners any of those things for my registration. And the GOP can’t do anything about that today except count my vote in its primaries and listen when I write, “As a Republican, I… “

That’s the massive hole in the Florida political caste system. I betray nothing of myself today — or my personal values — to join a party that makes no legitimate political demands on me for membership.

Historically and globally, most castes have been woefully difficult to join or leave. Party affiliation in America or Florida is not one of them.

How forced birth threatens the ruling caste

Forced birth was likely the last “value” or “ideology”-based policy preference remaining for the GOP. Having temporarily achieved it, it is now running from it as fast as it possibly can — refusing to either defend the massive backlash against it or even pretend to try to operationalize comprehensive forced birth in a serious way.

The Florida Chamber of Commerce — the most concentrated voice of the capital owners who have made the Florida GOP a caste — recently trumpeted its poll showing the anti-forced birth amendment pulling 61 percent support. I’m not sure I believe the number; but it shows you what Publix, Disney, and Bank of America are rooting for.

That’s because the backlash to 6-week forced birth in Florida poses a real, long-term threat to existence of the caste itself, the existence of which is far more important to its handful of rulers than forced birth or any fake pretensions about “life.”

Th anti-forced birth amendment polling shows, yet again, that freed from the consideration of caste, simply asked to vote on policy, the people of Florida form a party that behaves very differently from the dictates of the ruling GOP caste.

From medical marijuana to restoration of felon voting rights to minimum wage increases to rejecting tyrannical state government efforts to override local government, the people of Florida through referenda routinely vote contrary — at 60 percent or more — to the interests of the rulers of the ruling caste. At the county level, they routinely vote to support and defend public schools, in red counties as well as blue.

They vote for a future.

And then, driven by weaponized fear/loathing of undercaste power that does not even exist — and to which many of them actually belong — they surrender that future right back to the rulers of the overcaste, who continue to pillage it in advance for narrow personal luxury today.

Why would I weaponize fake me against real me?

In my observation, lesser members of the GOP caste veto their own votes for a future because they think they hate the members of the non-GOP caste they don’t personally know — or at least they hate the idea of sharing a society equally with “libs.” They hate the idea of admitting the untouchable libs might be right about something that is in dispute between us.

And they identify “libs” — almost entirely — through an administrative absence of Rs.

I want to make it harder for people to weaponize their perception of me against the reality of me without really talking to me. If anyone wants to hate me, I’d like them to hate the actual me, not a caste-bound idea of me built from lies and weird fantasies.

For instance, one very lesser GOP caste member recently referred to me as a “Jew hating, baby killing coward.” This was part of an ongoing chat this fellow and I have. I have many of these cross-caste chats and cross-caste relationships. This particular person has personally, clandestinely requested my help over the years — at times fighting GOP caste hanger-on Kelli Stargel.

He did not remotely believe this absurd and impotent insult. He didn’t even try cite an actual observation of jew-hating or killing babies or specific act of cowardice. Indeed, I was the only loud public voice in Lakeland to speak up for our Jewish neighbors last February when some gross Nazi boys sought to intimidate them. The title of that article: “Jewish people enrich Lakeland and the world immeasurably; Nazi boys suck.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But my GOP “friend” was Big Mad that I accurately described some specific, personal behaviors to him — including the fact that he will happily attempt to impose a criminal J6 dictator on me this November.

Rather than simply own this fact and account for his actual personal behavior, he fell back on the power and entitlement of caste as a kind of rebuttal for what he didn’t want to face about himself.

He sought to wound and diminish me based on what he understood my political caste membership to be — and his caste’s superiority to it. As best I can understand it, he was saying that as a non-GOP, non-Trump-loving lib, I didn’t sufficiently hate Muslims or feel enough personal bloodlust toward the children of Gaza. And it’s a bad thing that I don’t feel those things.

This person is told repeatedly by media, friends, etc. that “Jew-hating, baby-killing coward” is what the non-GOP caste is, even as the GOP caste openly contains the most violently anti-semitic elements in American society.

I found the entire exchange extremely useful — and perhaps the final push for this article. By becoming a Republican, I take this weak and lazy mental and emotional crutch away from my “friend” in our interactions.

Even as an NPA, I have been more difficult than most non-GOP caste members to dismiss in public life. But I’m still an untouchable political and civic “Dalit” (which is the more accurate Indian undercaste term) in my home state and community. How so?

Caste identity gives people who don’t know me — and even some how do — license to dismiss me with any number of nonsensical epithets based on ridiculous assumptions.

My time as a Polk School Board member demonstrated this clearly.

The brittlest caste

The actual content of what I say matters little to GOP caste members who don’t know me because of the non-GOP caste container into which I’ve freely chosen to place myself over the years.

For instance, if I say, as an NPA (or God forbid, a Democrat): …

I, Billy Townsend, believe in the full humanity of all people; that capital should produce beneficial things, not extort them for its own narrow benefit; that grifting and incompetence public service is bad, multi-racial representative self-government is good, that we shouldn’t lie about history or ignore what we plainly observe — that there is no one whose rights I am not bound to respect — from trans persons to pregnant women to the most devout Christian, Muslim, or Jew.

… it immediately marks me as a public life “untouchable” to Florida’s ruling caste.

But if I say this as a Republican …

I, Billy Townsend, believe in the full humanity of all people; that capital should produce beneficial things, not extort them for its own narrow benefit; that grifting and incompetence public service is bad, multi-racial representative self-government is good, that we shouldn’t lie about history or ignore what we plainly observe. I believe there is no one whose rights I am not bound to respect — from trans persons to pregnant women to the most devout Christian, Muslim, or Jew.

… I shed the caste baggage for anyone who doesn’t know me, which is most people. And the Republican party caste cannot unlabel me.

If I were ever to run in a primary, as a Republican, on that platform, the GOP couldn’t rip the R from ballot. Low information voters would make assumptions of caste identity affinity based on nothing more than that R — just like the MAGA who called me a “Jew-hating, baby-killing coward” did.

Fine.

Opting-out of the non-GOP caste with a simple act of administration says nothing about me morally. It just allows me to exist publicly without wading through bullshit unrelated to what I actually do, which is fed to the weak-minded by cynical predators who covet their submission and whatever personal capital they can wring from them by grift or force.

It also, perhaps, allows me to use the weak-minded themselves against the predators who use me to extort their future from them.

Grifters desperately need caste to pillage your future

Grifters weaponize those containers against the future constantly. They weaponize these containers against any idea of public good that might restrain their own behavior. Right there in our own communities.

Here in Lakeland, state and local Brahmins have been able to “railroad” and make a “laughingstock” of Lakeland’s public university for the benefit of Southern Group lobbying firm because of caste.

How so?

The unthinkable specter of taking personal civic power away from Brahmins and elevating Dalits provides protection from any political (and often legal) punishment for civic corruption. The Poly fiasco is just one example of the endless grifts that caste-based governance creates and sustains.

A few years back, the fancy Lakeland First PAC, representing our local Brahmins, sought to make Lakeland and Polk County local government, explicitly, into a localized ruling caste by spending lots of money to openly purge the non-GOP caste from Lakeland’s elected public sector. It sort of succeeded, sort of failed, and then went away because its funders don’t like scrutiny and public judgment.

Vote your caste so a few of us can grift you is the truest slogan of the Florida GOP (and the entire Trump-subservient or Trump-addicted GOP nationally).

And yet, there is no real mechanism for enforcing Florida’s political caste system — beyond the simple choice to participate in it.

The ease of changing party registration is what makes the Florida Republican and non-Republican caste system one of the strangest and most brittle. It’s simple to move within castes if you choose to.

Indeed, if I could snap my fingers and magically transfer everyone in Florida’s Democratic and NPA undercastes into the GOP ruling caste, I would. Take them away today, and future-focused, civically-beneficial policies that Florida voters choose by referendum would be much much harder to veto. And the Jennifer Canadys, Colleen Burtons, and Seth McKeels of the world might have to try to govern, rather than just pillage the public good and blame it on the untouchables.

That’s why, to keep the caste-based grift going, the handful of Brahmins who rule the GOP caste in Florida desperately need Democrats and the NPAs to stay an undercaste.

Why should anyone play that game with them anymore?

One-party representative government is what defeated the caste enforcement of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan

Finally, the defeat of the powerful 1920s Florida Ku Klux Klan offers an instructive lesson on the merits of true one-party (which means no party) democracy. I wrote about it extensively in my book Age of Barbarity: The Forgotten Fight for the Soul of Florida

Here’s how a newspaper in Palatka described Florida’s caste system, through a party lens, in 1916. Southern caste power has, of course, switched its party over time. But it’s striking how familiar this rings, isn’t it? Note the equation of the Republican party with sin, a classic tool of caste.

The democratic party pledges that the negro shall have a square deal and that he shall have every opportunity to make of himself a useful citizen; it opens to him the door of opportunity, but not the door of official place. For this one reason he has not been a democrat, if for no other. The negro is a republican because that party feeds him on promises. They are false promises, of course, but the negro hasn’t fully recognized that yet. Once in a while he gets an inkling that he is merely being used by designing politicians and begins to bolt. But he’s soon won back by more false promises and the story of Abe Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He prefers to make his bed with republicans and sinners.

In 1928, in Florida’s Jim Crow caste state, the Ku Klux Klan operated as the violent militia for the most racist, prohibitionist, and “anti-woke” faction of the dominant Democratic caste of the South in those days.

But the Klan wasn’t even true to those fake principles, in any real way.

Its members drank when they marauded, freely miscegenated through rape and power-imbalanced “consent,” conned each other, and generally indulged themselves however they wanted to while mobbing against people outside of their club in the name of fighting the perversion or indulgence they personally embodied.

Sound familiar? MAGA has deep, deep roots everywhere — Florida very much included.

Like MAGAs, Klansmen (and their ladies auxiliary), above all, embraced crime in the service of caste. They liberated themselves from the restraining norms of “respectable” human behavior by masks and the cover of darkness and semi-official protection from cowardly “leaders” who quietly let them get their social freak on whenever they liked lest they turn it on those leaders, too.

Sound familiar?

Ironically, the Florida Klan’s undoing was the very one-party political and social caste system that enabled it in the first place. A different faction of the Democratic caste — one that openly called itself “progress and law” — very narrowly defeated the Klan in 1928, by force and by a crucial Democratic primary election.

I was in Palatka Saturday for the unveiling of a historical marker/kiosk honoring a woman named Mary Jane Lawson and the hospital she operated in 1920s in Palatka, when white Palatka had not produced its own reliable hospital.

The Lawson hospital treated an integrated patient community — and it served as a vital hub of information and community for the “progress and law” faction that defeated the Florida Klan in 1928. You can read about that in my book, Age of Barbarity; and I’ll write a deeper take on the event and the story of the hospital and the Lawson family in a future article.

But joining “Republicans and sinners,” as embodied by the Lawsons of 1920s Palatka, seems fitting to me today.