gracchusdixit

In the first book of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno, the poet is guided by the spirit of his Roman predecessor and artistic idol, Virgil, to the gateway of hell.  He encounters these chilling words, inscribed above the lintel: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.  “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”  This admonition not only sums up Dante’s vision of the damnation awaiting sinners, it is a fitting description of the political world we inhabit today.

After months of dithering and delay, the United States House of Representatives has finally launched an official inquiry into the possible impeachment of Donald Trump, which is moving faster than anyone could have imagined.  It has long been clear that Donald Trump eked out the narrowest of electoral college victories in 2016 by conspiring with a hostile foreign power.  Once he was installed in office, it quickly became clear that he is the most corrupt president in American history—a self-absorbed huckster determined to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies.  

Despite all this, it took an absolutely unprecedented act of criminality to get the impeachment ball rolling.  That act was Trump’s brazen attempt to extort a promise from the president of Ukraine to investigate his political nemesis, Joe Biden.  It is hard to imagine a more egregious and shameful abuse of presidential power.  If any of his predecessors had tried to do such a thing, they would have been hounded from office.  It is therefore vitally important that Donald Trump should be held accountable and pay a price for his wrongdoing.  

But that won’t be enough.  Even if Trump is impeached, even if he is driven to resign, even if he suffers a resounding defeat at the polls, two fundamental problems will continue to plague us.  

The first is that Trump’s presidency has already done widespread and irreversible damage to the country, both here and abroad.  The second is that our country itself suffers from a political and social pathology, of which Donald Trump is not the cause, but, rather, the culminating symptom.  Removing Trump from office, however necessary that may be, will not cure the disease.

The damage done by the Trump presidency should be obvious to anyone who isn’t willfully blind, deaf, or dumb.  He has turned his back on a host of major international treaties and agreements, breaking our nation’s promises to the world; he has vilified and bullied our closest allies, causing them to look elsewhere for global leadership; and he has done everything possible to undermine the very institutions we created after the Second World War to prevent future wars and to foster a stable and prosperous world order.  Worse than any of that, Donald Trump has complimented, cultivated, and kowtowed to dictators, demagogues, and outright killers, as if they were examples to be emulated rather than monstrous evil-doers to be reviled.  Why should the nations of the world ever trust us again, now that they know we are capable of electing such a man?  Donald Trump’s removal from office, if it comes, may mitigate some of this damage, but it cannot restore our reputation or rebuild that trust.  We will continue to be a formidable nation because of our military power and the sheer size of our economy.  But we will never again be trusted as “the leader of the free world”. 

The damage done at home is no less consequential.  Trump and his Republican confrères-in-crime have gutted the regulations that have for decades protected the health, safety, and financial security of the American people.  The Environmental Protection Agency has become an agent of climate-change denial.  The Food and Drug Administration has been stripped so bare that it can barely ensure the safety of the food we eat or the medicines we take.  The Federal Communications Commission has become the mouthpiece of the very monolithic media companies it is supposed to check and contain.  The Department of Education, created to support the public schools that are the bedrock of our democracy, is now little more than a lobbyist for the private, for-profit education industry.  The Department of Justice, charged with the sacred task of enforcing the law without fear or favor, has become an instrument of Trump’s political paranoia.  Worst of all, the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court of the United States are now in the hands of right-wing judges, who will make any attempt to reverse all this damage all but impossible. 

More importantly, Trump’s removal, departure, or defeat will do nothing to cure the toxic political and social pathology of our country—a true sickness that undermines our long-standing claim to be a “city upon the hill,” a beacon of hope for the rest of the world.

The most obvious expression of this sickness is the Republican Party’s descent into the degrading muck of racism to achieve its fundamental economic purpose, which is to make the richest Americans even richer than they already are.  Donald Trump’s corruption is the personal embodiment of this cynical goal.  Which is why the Republican Party has embraced him.  Which is why Republicans are prepared to defend, excuse, and explain away his every crime.

This degrading spectacle did not begin with Trump. William F. Buckley Jr., the founding father of “movement conservatism,” steadfastly defended racial segregation. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1964, famously proclaimed, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” all the while he refused to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, presumably because the “liberty” of white people was more precious to him than the rights of African-Americans.  Ronald Reagan, who is adulated by Republicans as the epitome of all they stand for, was even more cynical.  All the while he joked and charmed his way into the public’s favor, he decided to give one of his first speeches as a presidential candidate in rural Mississippi, just a few miles from the spot where three civil rights workers had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan 20 years before.  Rather than acknowledging, let alone condemning, that atrocity, he chose to extol “states’ rights,” code for racial segregation and the suppression of black people throughout the Deep South. The rot at the core of the Republican Party, in short, did not begin with Donald Trump, not will it will end with his departure.

The same is true of the rot eating away at the heart of the American body politic.  Every time Donald Trump commits a new outrage, we hear the following assurance from the bien pensants who populate academia, the media, and the upper echelons of government; indeed, we have heard it more than once from Barack Obama:  “This is not who we are; we are better than this.”  

If the Trump presidency has taught us nothing else, it is how empty this sentimental cliché truly is.  A large swath of the American people are not, in fact, “better than this”.  On the contrary, they are far worse.  They knowingly voted to elect a corrupt demagogue and would-be tyrant, they persist in ignoring his crimes, and they are determined to stick with him to the end.  To them, social grievance and the settling of cultural scores take precedence over country and common decency.  We may yet be lucky enough to rid ourselves of Donald Trump.  But we must not kid ourselves.  Those who voted for him will remain mired in their ignorance, their prejudices, and their hate.  In 1860, such people plunged our nation into a savage civil war that lasted five years and took more than five hundred thousand lives.  

Let us hope that the poet Dante Alighieri was wrong.  Let us hope that something better will prevail.  And let us pray that hope itself need not be abandoned.