I wish I could feel more optimistic about 21st century America. It is generally conceded among those who do not have to cheerlead for Democrats that the Republicans will take over both the House and Senate in the 2022 elections, and anything approaching a Biden agenda will ground to an unceremonious, broken-down halt. Indeed, American factionalism is so profound that only three Republican senators could see their way to support the eminently qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Breyer. Almost everything else is strict party-line, except for Democrats Manchin and Sinema who sabotaged Biden’s already much-compromised Build Back Better program. Republicans do seem willing to join Democrats in supporting Ukraine with weapons, but for about everything else, Republicans especially seem willing to put party (and thus power) above country, morality, fairness, and personal integrity. Romney and perhaps Collins and Murkowski in the Senate and Cheney and Kinzinger in the House seem to be the only exceptions.
The party-and-power-over-all-else doctrine seemed perfectly illustrated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who after January 6 did the right thing by blaming Trump for the insurrection, and who now says that if Trump is the nominee in 2024, he will “absolutely” support him. So he is saying that the man that he himself said is responsible for the storming of the Capitol and the intended violent overturning of a fair election will be his man if Trump succeeds in winning the nomination two years from now. That turnabout is worthy of our sober reflection. McConnell, who said the right things in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection—including the fact that Joe Biden actually won—is willing to allow his integrity only to go so far. The president who was impeached twice, who lies from the minuscule (his inauguration crowds) to the epic (saying he won in 2020), who publicly admires Vladimir Putin, who more than any other single human being is responsible for turning normal conservatives—your uncle or mine—into deluded right-wing extremists, and who is and for the last five years has been the single most dangerous internal enemy of American democracy is now the man McConnell is “absolutely” willing to return to the White House.
Perhaps McConnell has been sobered by the fact that Trump still commands the collective adoration of the Republican party, given that 71% still believe, amazingly, that Biden is not the legitimate U. S. president. Thus, unwilling to buck that near consensus, McConnell trades his integrity for expediency. He is too smart, unlike some of the lesser fry of the GOP like Gaetz, Jordan, Cawthorn, Greene, et al., to be unaware that Trump is unequivocally the most demagogic, autocratic president in our history. He absolutely knows this, as do those marvelous contortionists Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham. Even if McConnell couldn’t see it for himself, his wife could tell him, having served in Trump’s cabinet. And yet, rather than say that he could not and would not support a second Trump term, he is willing to embrace a proven would-be despot, to put democracy at extreme risk, to invite the return of a sewer of presidential corruption, to subject the country to another corrosive four years of the degrading of truth as a critical democratic value, and to ignore the probability of future catastrophes Trump could beget during another term in the Oval Office.
This symbiosis of congressional cowardice and collusion, fed by half the populace who cannot see or choose not to see the poison Trump has injected into the body politic, depletes the strength of American democracy. As fantasy substitutes for reality and grievance displaces truth, democracy fades. The toxic mix of cowardice and collusion, fantasy and grievance, is enormously abetted by so-called news channels and a social media which daily, hourly, heaves gobbets of lies and disinformation at an addicted public craving new alleged outrages upon which to gorge. This public expects its Republican leaders to slay their imagined dragons. So McConnell and Trumpism Inc. choose to pretend the dragons are real rather than suffer the fates of apostates like Cheney, Romney, or, worst of all, Mike Pence, who would be dead today had he fallen into the hands of the January 6th mob—the same mob engaged in “legitimate political discourse,” says the Republican National Committee. When Trump told his already stoked partisans that day “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. . . . So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he aimed at the very heart of American democracy, while he himself scooted back to the White House.* Democrats, already reviled by the crazy right as child sex-traffickers, and scorned by the merely deluded right as anti-American, have no standing to convince half our population that Trumpism corrodes democracy. Only Republicans can do that.
*June 28, 2022 testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to the January 6 House Committee revealed that Trump did indeed want to lead the mob at the Capitol in person, even wanting to go into the House chamber. He even grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, saying “I’m the fucking president,” when the Secret Service agent driving the car would not take him there and returned him to the White House.
John Rachal's Blog
Democracy Fading
April 28, 2022 at 10:06 pm (Ethics, Political Commentary)
I wish I could feel more optimistic about 21st century America. It is generally conceded among those who do not have to cheerlead for Democrats that the Republicans will take over both the House and Senate in the 2022 elections, and anything approaching a Biden agenda will ground to an unceremonious, broken-down halt. Indeed, American factionalism is so profound that only three Republican senators could see their way to support the eminently qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Breyer. Almost everything else is strict party-line, except for Democrats Manchin and Sinema who sabotaged Biden’s already much-compromised Build Back Better program. Republicans do seem willing to join Democrats in supporting Ukraine with weapons, but for about everything else, Republicans especially seem willing to put party (and thus power) above country, morality, fairness, and personal integrity. Romney and perhaps Collins and Murkowski in the Senate and Cheney and Kinzinger in the House seem to be the only exceptions.
The party-and-power-over-all-else doctrine seemed perfectly illustrated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who after January 6 did the right thing by blaming Trump for the insurrection, and who now says that if Trump is the nominee in 2024, he will “absolutely” support him. So he is saying that the man that he himself said is responsible for the storming of the Capitol and the intended violent overturning of a fair election will be his man if Trump succeeds in winning the nomination two years from now. That turnabout is worthy of our sober reflection. McConnell, who said the right things in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection—including the fact that Joe Biden actually won—is willing to allow his integrity only to go so far. The president who was impeached twice, who lies from the minuscule (his inauguration crowds) to the epic (saying he won in 2020), who publicly admires Vladimir Putin, who more than any other single human being is responsible for turning normal conservatives—your uncle or mine—into deluded right-wing extremists, and who is and for the last five years has been the single most dangerous internal enemy of American democracy is now the man McConnell is “absolutely” willing to return to the White House.
Perhaps McConnell has been sobered by the fact that Trump still commands the collective adoration of the Republican party, given that 71% still believe, amazingly, that Biden is not the legitimate U. S. president. Thus, unwilling to buck that near consensus, McConnell trades his integrity for expediency. He is too smart, unlike some of the lesser fry of the GOP like Gaetz, Jordan, Cawthorn, Greene, et al., to be unaware that Trump is unequivocally the most demagogic, autocratic president in our history. He absolutely knows this, as do those marvelous contortionists Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham. Even if McConnell couldn’t see it for himself, his wife could tell him, having served in Trump’s cabinet. And yet, rather than say that he could not and would not support a second Trump term, he is willing to embrace a proven would-be despot, to put democracy at extreme risk, to invite the return of a sewer of presidential corruption, to subject the country to another corrosive four years of the degrading of truth as a critical democratic value, and to ignore the probability of future catastrophes Trump could beget during another term in the Oval Office.
This symbiosis of congressional cowardice and collusion, fed by half the populace who cannot see or choose not to see the poison Trump has injected into the body politic, depletes the strength of American democracy. As fantasy substitutes for reality and grievance displaces truth, democracy fades. The toxic mix of cowardice and collusion, fantasy and grievance, is enormously abetted by so-called news channels and a social media which daily, hourly, heaves gobbets of lies and disinformation at an addicted public craving new alleged outrages upon which to gorge. This public expects its Republican leaders to slay their imagined dragons. So McConnell and Trumpism Inc. choose to pretend the dragons are real rather than suffer the fates of apostates like Cheney, Romney, or, worst of all, Mike Pence, who would be dead today had he fallen into the hands of the January 6th mob—the same mob engaged in “legitimate political discourse,” says the Republican National Committee. When Trump told his already stoked partisans that day “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. . . . So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he aimed at the very heart of American democracy, while he himself scooted back to the White House.* Democrats, already reviled by the crazy right as child sex-traffickers, and scorned by the merely deluded right as anti-American, have no standing to convince half our population that Trumpism corrodes democracy. Only Republicans can do that.
*June 28, 2022 testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to the January 6 House Committee revealed that Trump did indeed want to lead the mob at the Capitol in person, even wanting to go into the House chamber. He even grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, saying “I’m the fucking president,” when the Secret Service agent driving the car would not take him there and returned him to the White House.
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