“Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”
Lou Mannheim … “Wall Street”
The line between being a thoughtful young man, who asks intelligent questions and considers even thoughtless answers, and becoming a bitter old fart, who attacks those he judges insufficiently agreeable with his contentions, while refusing to modify his disdain toward any effort at changing minds, is very fine indeed. How thin it becomes can be influenced by a number of factors: health and the discomfort aging often brings on; the vagaries of a hard life getting old renders more difficult to balance; and the unrepentant foolishness of certain blocs of peers others appear far more successful at distracting themselves from. All have had their say on me during the Trump era. I’m now often prone to visceral impulse at the expense of prudent deliberation, where my first inclination quickly becomes my last before I move on to another indignity. The worst of it is my capacity to care about becoming too rash and less thoughtful is waning… fast. Like my aching back, it’s become just another inalterable fact of life. Thanks Trump!
Where we are now has been in the cards since John McCain was practically booed off the stage at his own concession speech after Barack Obama routed him in 2008. Anyone who took note of the ugly mixture of fear, anger and resentment toward the election of America’s first black President in that ballroom couldn’t help but be concerned about what kind of backlash was in the offing. Sarah Palin, perhaps the worst and most consequential mistake McCain ever made, was there preening before the aggrieved, itching to extend her fifteen minutes in the spotlight, rebranding preposterous embarrassment to “common sense” conservatism. Obama was never going to be Jackie Robinson with this crowd, two Americas now existed.
Four years later, the GOP could no longer escape its reckoning after Obama had little problem dispatching Mitt Romney. The delusion of a Romney landslide Fox/AM “experts” like the vile Dick Morris and Karl Rove – who literally would not accept his own network’s projection – were able to create in the weeks leading up to Election Day presaged a party base intent above all else to see only what it wanted to see, only what reinforced the narrative its beloved “conservative personalities” spun on the hour, day in and day out.
Like McCain, Romney went from savior to loser in a heartbeat; and while serious establishment GOP players made clear US demographics now rendered a “big tent” strategy an existential necessity for the party’s future relevance, Roger Ailes and loathsome mega-donors like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Timothy Mellon, to name but a few, were having none of it. The low road was the route big money would demand Republicans travel moving forward. Forget about competing for more votes, fewer would be better, less would be more.
Getting the flyover faithful out of their recliners, while leaning hard on GOP-dominated state legislatures Tea Party activism had proliferated to create voter suppression mechanisms not seen since the heyday of Jim Crow, became option A, B and C Republicans chose to maintain power. Voter ID became an umbrella concept; a handshake may be more than enough to turn over ownership of an AR-15, but voting is a sacred civic duty… bring your paperwork.
Of course, the real threat to election integrity came from south of the border, immigrant rabble the Democrats imported for votes. Not only were they taking all those in-demand agricultural, landscaping and hotel cleaning jobs, they were essential for voter fraud that elected libs – see Alex Jones for the proof. What could be worse? Most all thought America would soundly defeat the disgusting wretch this strategy offered up as the Republican nominee in 2016, including the candidate, himself.
All of this has led to today when, six weeks after Joe Biden was projected a decisive winner of Decision/2020, and a day since the Electoral College certified an election won by more than 7 million votes, GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went out on a limb and congratulated the winning ticket. At about the exact same time, the defeated incumbent President was retweeting a psychotic lawyer named Lin Wood’s promise the Republican Governor of Georgia, heretofore a Trump sycophant, would be arrested because he certified the state’s election results rather than break the law and refuse to do so for no other reason than the President wanted him to. Moreover, while McConnell was willing to finally grant Biden legitimacy, most others in his caucus would not publicly follow his example. Asked directly by reporters if in fact, after Electoral College certification, Biden was the President-elect, most Republican Senators either refused to answer, or produced word salad so convoluted it was hard to know what topic they were actually addressing.
The French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, an ardent admirer of the US Senate, exclaimed it reflected the best of the American spirit, representing the nation’s “elevated thoughts” and “nobler actions” instead of the “petty passions” and “vices” often displayed by its House counterparts. Sen. John Barraso of Wyoming, a McConnell appendage and third in the Senate GOP chain of command, never received that memo. Asked today whether he considers Joe Biden the President-elect, Barasso snarled it was “a gotcha question.” Susan Collins of Maine, considered perhaps the most moderate Republican Senator, still hasn’t gotten around to amending her statement from last month that Biden had “apparently” prevailed. Her Twitter feed is filled with everything from her bipartisan Covid relief breakthroughs to big federal money for lobstermen. However, a paragraph or two against active coup attempts by the leader of her party has proved a bridge too far.
Biden finally stepped forward last night to call a spade a spade and clarify the extremism this GOP now is beholden to. The President-elect correctly noted Trump’s seditious campaign to overturn an election far more decisive than his own in 2016, which he pointed to ad nauseam as a “historic” landslide, has never been seen before. He rightly celebrated the triumph turning out 150 million voters during a deadly pandemic represented, and that “nobody” was going to disenfranchise its participants. Tell that to Fox News Facebook commenters, most of whom proudly affiliated themselves as the “not-my-President” variety of Republican. A friend of mine, who has actually explored the depths of the Parler platform, the new preferred social media venue of the GOP base, told me the trending expectation among the Trump faithful is that Biden will CONCEDE by the end of the week! Allow that one to percolate for a moment.
Four years of Trump has done immeasurable damage to American democracy and the once effortlessly peaceful transfer of political power global economic stability is wholly dependent on. That one of our major political parties now, not only tolerates, but actively supports a President’s clumsy, comical efforts to invent his own narrative about how he won an election he in fact lost by a decisive margin, means only that it is subservient to him and the nihilist political class he successfully created.
Worse, it means our family, friends and neighbors who continue to support Trump and his party are also nihilist and authoritarian.,. seditious enemies of American democracy. We all must do what we will with that understanding and relate it to our relationships accordingly. Whatever excuses or individual dispensation one is willing to issue MAGA faithful based on ignorance or indoctrination provides precious little comfort regarding our cancerous national condition. Any degree of satisfaction we will feel about the survival of our essential institutions when Biden’s hand goes on that Bible will be offset by the certainty we all now have that the fate of our republic has become a zero-sum proposition. Republicans win, democracy loses. That will age anyone faster than they’d prefer. BC