Maybe not my best presentation, but…I first became aware of *right-wing* interest in changing the constitution, back during the 1st Reagan term…and I only just became aware of Charles Koch’s involvement in such efforts in the last few years - which very much included learning about the creator of modern libertarian crackpot economics & author of the Chilean constitution I mentioned, James Buchanan.
Plus, you may remember things were moving fast then…and some thoughts coalesce at different speeds
to be clear(er): my point was NOT that KochCadreBros had that as their specific intention, but they did have the larger goal of creating circumstances in which the country could be hijacked & run by/for wealth; my point was that AS THINGS CAME TOGETHER, that scenario I sketched out looked truly plausible before the midterm blew it out of the water & out of reach given the dynamics of the moment. It’s not important whether that had always been (or ever become) the primary focus: much more important that such a golden opportunity showed itself out of nowhere - and that its electoral collapse didn’t change anything material for the various overthrow factions.
With or without Trump, THE IMPULSE HAS BEEN FESTERING, GROWING, FOR A VERY LONG TIME: you can pick a variety of ‘starting points’, from 1619 to George Floyd, from Brown v Board of Education to “tax cuts don’t HAVE to be paid for!” The Powell memo, the start of The Moral Majority, Inc, Poindexter’s collusion w/ Ailes & Murdoch to establish the ideologically conservative media bubble centered on Fox News, the rise of Rove & that other guy (drawing a blank, sorry, NORQUIST - Grover, that’s him), McConnell’s weaponization of the senate for the packing of US courts. Lots of key moments and events, all of them illuminating in their own ways.
The core allegiance, to the erasure of “liberal America”, has been center-focus for every scurrilous pseudo-patriotic wave that’s swept through the media, the wrong-wing noise-o-sphere, every trash-panda YouTube channel, every newly-minted “fresh-blood” carbon-copy ‘conservatives’ campaigner since Reagan.
The damage has been cumulative: fixing the obvious stuff in play will leave much of the prior enabling damage to remain unexplored (press of events), and any we don’t nail shut will become avenues of threat in the future: the greatest lesson in all this may be how easy it is to booby-trap a complex set-up like ours - and how seriously we must take the obligation to, um, build back better than we were & it was.