gracchusdixit

If Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th President of the United States next January—and despite all the polls currently giving him a substantial lead over Donald Trump, that’s still a very big “if”—he will need, almost immediately, to answer the question posed by Vladimir Lenin more than a century ago:  What is to be done?  More specifically, what is to be done about a triad of unprecedented calamities now confronting the nation:  a pandemic that seems to be running amok, an economic downturn of titanic proportions that may soon morph into a depression, and a toxic political and social culture that is eating the country alive.  

It is no exaggeration to say that, if Biden does become our next president, he will face the greatest national crisis since the Civil War.  To steer our battered ship of state through this storm, he will need the moral clarity of Lincoln, the political acumen of Roosevelt, and the rhetorical skill of a modern-day Cicero or Demosthenes.  Our fractured body politic will cry out for consoling and cajoling; our broken economic system will have to be repaired or replaced; and our enfeebled political institutions will demand to be reconstituted.

The first and most pressing of the calamities we face—the global pandemic of which of which we have become the epicenter—will in some ways be the easiest to tackle.  As unpalatable as the medicine may be, we know what it is, because other hard-hit nations have swallowed the pitter pill and brought the virus to heel.   The question, therefore, is less what to do than whether we have the political will to do it.

The economic crisis is more daunting.   With at least 30 million Americans out of work, millions without health insurance, thousands of businesses shutting their doors, and entire industries facing bankruptcy or liquidation, the country hasn’t experienced an economic collapse of this magnitude since the Great Depression.  The conventional wisdom is that this represents a self-imposed, short-term disruption to an otherwise healthy economy.   That is a fantasy.  As the “V-shaped recovery” touted by Trump’s witless economic advisers recedes into the mist of magical thinking from which it came, it has become abundantly clear that our economy was in deep trouble long before the pandemic pushed it over the cliff. 

Inequalities of wealth and income had already reached grotesque levels not seen for a century.  An inefficient and unconscionably expensive medical system was already producing some of the worst health outcomes in the world.  And a self-destructive culture of private profit and debt-dependent personal consumption was already poisoning the planet and starving essential public services to death.  To cure these maladies, wrenching and fundamental changes will be required.  But we have done it before, and we can do it again.  As with the pandemic, the question is whether we can muster the will before it is too late to head off irreversible collapse.

Which leaves us with the question of what is to be done about the most consequential, and the least tractable, of the crises we face.  The essence of the crisis is this:  an authoritarian criminal occupies the White House, and roughly one third of the country is quite happy to have him do so.  What are we going to do about the criminal himself and those who support him?

Removing Trump from office won’t be easy.  He will do everything possible to undermine the election and cast doubt on the results.  He may even try to cling to power by discrediting the outcome.  Even if the system holds and compels Trump to leave office, that won’t be enough to safeguard us against the dangers of his lingering presence and possible return.  Like every lifelong criminal, Donald Trump is an incurable recidivist.  Having stolen his way into the White House once, there is every possibility that he will try to do so again, no matter what our political norms may say.  We cannot allow this to happen.  If and when Trump returns to private life, he must be prosecuted for his crimes.

The same is true for the most egregiously corrupt members of his cabinet.  William Barr, Mike Pompeo, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, and others of their ilk have violated their oaths of office and have used their public offices for personal profit or political gain.  They must be investigated, indicted, tried, and, if convicted, imprisoned for their crimes.  We cannot repeat the mistake made by the Obama administration, when it declined to prosecute Wall Street CEOs for the misdeeds that caused the 2008 financial collapse.  That dereliction ignited the angry populism that led, perversely, to the election of Donald Trump.  That must not happen again.

The question of Trump’s followers is far more complicated.  In 2016, it was possible to excuse their deplorable embrace of Donald Trump on the grounds that they were innocent victims of a pitiless political and economic system that had left them behind.  Today, after almost four years of Trump’s disastrous presidency, that excuse no longer applies.  Those who persist in supporting Donald Trump are either greedy or stupid, or as evil as the man himself.

I don’t pretend to know how such people should be dealt with.  But I do know this:  we have to begin by acknowledging the problem we actually face.  Just as the Germans had to face up to the sins of their Nazi past before they could begin to put that past behind them, so too we must recognize that Donald Trump’s supporters actually are as “deplorable” as Hillary Clinton was pilloried for calling them. They are not the innocent or justly aggrieved victims they claim to be, nor are they entitled to empathy and forgiveness.  They are ignorant or craven bigots, who willfully embrace falsehoods and fairy tales, conspiracy theories and superstitions.  

The greedy embrace Donald Trump because he cuts their taxes, enriches them, or enables them to cling to political power without regard for the democratically expressed wishes of most Americans.  The stupid embrace Trump, because they swallow his preposterous lies and lack any capacity to distinguish between fact and fiction. The evil embrace him, because they are themselves bigots and racists, and have found in Trump the avatar of their venomous hate.

Such people are a danger to the nation, and, if Trump is defeated, we must decide how to deal with them.  Social norms and public shaming won’t be enough.  If five years of bloody civil war and a decisive victory by the Union were not sufficient to prevent the defeated South from reconstituting slavery under the banner of Jim Crow, why should we imagine that Trump voters, if their man is defeated, will be any more compliant than the Confederates of old?