gracchusdixit

In the New Testament, it is written:  “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things.”  In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, it is time for us to put away, once and for all, some of the most childish things we have spoken, understood, and thought about ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our country.

Let us begin by putting away the childish notion that Donald Trump’s supporters are deserving of special empathy, understanding, or forbearance.  When they voted for Trump in 2016, it was possible to chalk up their decision to an innocent, albeit misguided, naïveté.  After all, there was, and still is, plenty to complain about in our public life, and it was not entirely unreasonable for them to hope that an outsider, untrammeled by convention, might shake things loose.  That excuse is no longer tenable.  After four years of watching a sociopathic gangster lie, cheat, steal, and stumble, more than 70 million Americans went to the polls and decided, with their eyes wide open, that such a monster is precisely what they want in the White House.  If Trump’s voters have suffered real economic or political injustices, those injustices should be remedied.  That does not entitle them to foist their social and cultural bigotry on the rest of us, because they feel their so-called “values” and “way of life” are in danger.  Instead, they should ask themselves why a large majority of Americans have adopted other values.  If they are spurned and looked down upon by their fellow citizens, they should reflect upon the reasons they have earned such contempt.

Let us also put away the childish conceit that our Constitution and governing institutions are a uniquely virtuous model to be emulated by other nations seeking freedom, democracy, and political stability.  The truth is that the Constitution of the United States is a profoundly anti-democratic document, designed to protect the property rights of its authors—most of them rich, many of them slave-owners—against the depredations of the great unwashed.  While the Declaration of Independence spoke boldly about “the consent of the governed,” the Constitution was fashioned to stifle that consent.  For more than 200 years, the perverse governmental architecture it created—”checks and balances,” the electoral college, lifetime judicial appointments, a senate in which the smallest state has the same power as the largest, a thicket of prerogatives that allow those states to defy the will of the nation—has succeeded in doing precisely that.  It is no accident that both George W. Bush and Donald Trump became president even as they lost the popular vote.  Nor is it accidental that Democrats routinely win far more votes than Republicans but find it nearly impossible to control all three branches of government.  If we ever hope to become a true democracy, we will have to toss out our Constitution like yesterday’s trash and begin anew.

It is time as well to put away the childish dream that, with the defeat of Donald Trump, we can now “return to normal,” to an era of bipartisan cooperation and compromise, a day when there were “no red states or blue states, only the United States”.  That day, if it ever existed, is long gone.  The Republican Party has become nothing less than a criminal enterprise, dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only:  achieving and retaining power.  The only way to deal with such an enterprise is to defeat it, and then, to destroy it.  There is, more broadly, no hope of restoring the sense of “national unity” that prevailed during the Second World War and the Cold War that followed.  That unity was an artifact of a particular set of historical circumstances, and it masked, briefly, the bitter divisions that have riven the country from the beginning.  Those divisions have surfaced again, with the result that we are engaged in an irreconcilable conflict between those who believe in democracy, reason, and tolerance, and those who don’t.  One side must win, and the other must lose.  No other outcome is possible.  Those who cling to the belief that a mythical national unity can be restored must confront the reality that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are, as I write, refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.  They are denying democracy, and they are doing so in the open. 

We must, morever, put away the childish idea that any of this is new, that Donald Trump is an “aberration,” that the last four years have been a strange detour on the otherwise straight road of American history.  Far from being aberrant or strange, Trump and what he represents are all too familiar.  Andrew Jackson, our 7th president, was a genocidal murderer who was quite happy to beat his slaves to death, and the “common people” of his day loved him for it.  For all his patrician veneer and personal charm, Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th president, was an imperialist warmonger and bully; he, too, was adored by the average man on the street.  Joseph McCarthy, who made a name for himself by launching a witch hunt to root out fictional “communists” in the federal government, was a drunk, a liar, and a cheat.  When he was finally censured by the United States Senate and driven from office, drinking himself to death in disgrace, nearly half the country was still supporting him.  Americans have always admired violent and lawless “strong men,” because this country was cobbled together by means of violence, theft, and slavery.  Those are the “values” and that is the “way of life” Trump’s supporters long to preserve. 

Our 44th president, Barack Obama, has frequently invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Barack Obama is a manifestly good man, and Martin Luther King was a tragically noble one.  That does not alter the childishness of the sentiment.  Neither the moral universe nor history bends inexorably toward anything.  Instead, they twist and turn, bending toward evil no less often than toward good.  If we hope to achieve justice, we must put away childish delusions.  If we hope to achieve justice, we have no choice but to fight for it and against those who would deny it.