The Worse the Better?

The Worse the Better?

There is a phrase from the history of socialist revolutionary movements in nineteenth century Russia that I keep thinking of today. It is “The worse the better.” Some attribute it to Lenin. Earlier revolutionaries like Chernyshevskii and Plakhanov used it. It expresses the idea that the worse conditions become under oppressive regimes like Russian autocracy the better it is for revolutionary movements because more and more people will come to support them and their agendas. I am not a revolutionary, or at least I am not a violent revolutionary. I preach, teach, and try to live Christian nonviolence. Nonetheless, the political situation in my country, the United States of America, has become so dire that the truth and the power of the idea “the worse the better” are becoming clear to me in a way they never were decades ago when I was doing graduate work in imperial Russian history. Donald Trump is a symptom of a rot at the heart of American society, and he makes that rot worse every day. He panders to the racism, sexism, and homophobia that are strong parts of American history and American culture. He doesn’t try to lead us beyond them, he props them up both with explicit statements and with so-called “dog whistle” statements that his bigoted supporters hear as supporting their prejudice and their violence.

The crisis in American life that Donald Trump both represents and fosters became a lot worse on June 27, 2018, when Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the court effective at the end of July. Kennedy is hardly a liberal. Commentators always describe him as the “swing vote” on the Court. Sometimes he does the right thing, as when he wrote the decision in Obergefell that made marriage equality the law of the land. Other times he does the wrong thing, as when he recently voted to uphold Trump’s discriminatory Muslin travel ban. Justice Kennedy is hardly an unmitigated good on the Supreme Court, but at least he sometimes does what is right. That’s more then we can say for the Court’s gang of four far right justices—Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch. They are usually if not quite always wrong. Now Justice Kennedy has announced his retirement. Donald Trump will nominate his replacement, and the Republican controlled Senate will certainly confirm whoever Trump nominates no matter how extreme that judge may be. Kennedy’s retirement is perhaps the worst news we’ve had under the Trump administration that gives us heartbreaking news virtually every day.

Too few Americans understand the power of the Supreme Court over their lives. It has the final word both on the interpretation of federal laws and on the constitutionality of those laws. In Citizens United it opened the floodgates for unaccountable money to determine the outcome of elections. It made marriage equality the law of the land, then let businesspeople ignore that law at least as long as those people claim to be Christian. Over the course of its history it has both held Black people to be without rights (the Dred Scott case) and overturned school desegregation on the basis of race (Brown v. Board of Education). It put its stamp of approval on the unconstitutional and unconscionable incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans during World War II and, in the case approving Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban, overturned that decision. It gave a constitutional guarantee of a woman’s right to control her own reproductive decisions (Roe v. Wade) and has approved state laws that come very close to making that right meaningless. It gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and allows racist state governments to enact legislation that makes it harder for Black Americans to vote. The Supreme Court makes decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives, and it has the power to make sweeping changes in the country’s legal landscape under the guise of ruling on a law’s constitutionality.

Now our American fascist president Trump will nominate a new justice for the Supreme Court. We don’t yet know who that nominee will be, but we know this for sure: that nominee will be a rightwing extremist posing as a moderate. That’s what Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, is, and there is no reason to believe that Trump’s next choice will be any different. That nominee will create a rightwing majority of five on the court, and the consequences for our country will be both disastrous and long-lasting. Kennedy’s resignation, which gives Trump the ability to skew the court hard right for decades to come, is an unmitigated disaster for American people, especially marginalized and poor American people.

And there is nothing we can do about it. The Republicans control the Senate. They can do there whatever they want, and they want to do immensely destructive things. The only thing that keeps them from doing even more harm than they’ve done is that the supposedly moderate Republicans can’t control their extremist right wing, although that’s more true in the House than it is in the Senate. There is nothing to stop them from confirming whoever Trump nominates for the Supreme Court, and we will all live with the negative consequences of their decision for decades to come.

My country is going to hell in a handbasket. Trump’s fascism finds expression in the tearing apart of families at the Mexican border. It finds expression in his cozying up to dictators, most notably Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. It finds expression in policies carried out by his Cabinet departments of destroying the environment, gutting housing programs for the poor, and in so many other ways. It finds expression in his desire to spend massive amounts of money on unneeded and unaffordable military projects. He said he would “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., meaning that he would put an end to corruption and the power of money. Instead he has turned a swamp into the Everglades. He imposes tariffs under a law that lets him do it in the interest of national security though those tariffs in no way actually relate to national security except perhaps to weaken it. He is in thrall to Russian money. He uses his office to enrich himself and his family in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Many of us knew that Trump would be a bad president. I don’t think many of us knew just how bad he would be.

It is a fatal mistake to consider Trump just another bad American president. He is not another George W. Bush, as bad as George W. Bush was. He is a new kind of bad. He is a new order of magnitude bad. He is fascist bad, something that has never before occupied the White House. Trump’s fascism is tragedy enough, but what makes it worse is that something like 40% of the American people think he’s doing just fine as president. That so many of my countrymen can’t see through Trump’s bluster to his psychological instability and destructive policies is a tragedy of enormous proportions. The blindness of so many Americans when it comes to Trump means that for now at least there is nothing legal we can do stop him. Ignorant, bigoted American voters have imposed him on us, and it isn’t at all clear that we will be rid of him until he has served out two full terms as president.

Which brings us back to “the worse the better.” Today we have to ask: Have we have reached the point in this country where we must hope that Trump and his Republican lapdogs do so much harm that enough Americans will turn against them to vote them out of office or get Trump and Pence impeached out of office? It’s unlikely that Trump will do anything that isn’t awful, but the truth is that anything he does that isn’t awful will just prolong the great national nightmare of his presidency. If we are going to save what is decent and honorable in our country, Americans must turn against Trump and the Republicans by the tens of millions. I fear that that won’t happen unless Trump inflicts so much damage on our country and especially on the people who now support him that they turn against him.

So in America today is the worse the better? I’m not quite prepared to answer that question yes quite yet, but I’m closer to making that decision than I ever have been before. I’m very close to saying: Let him put another Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Let him drive more American companies like Harley-Davidson overseas with his stupid tariffs. Let him keep destroying the environment in the interest of more wealth for his already immensely wealthy backers. Let him destroy what’s left of the labor movement in our country. Let him use the highest office in our land to enrich himself and his family. Let him profit from foreign money at the expense of our country’s vital interests. Let him strike deals with murderous dictators like Kim and Putin. Let him keep refusing to follow laws passed by Congress, as when he refused to impose new sanctions Russia as Congress had directed. Let the horrors pile up. Let the lives of real people be diminished by his fascist policies. I fear that those Russian revolutionaries were right, though not in their use of violence. Russia got rid of the tsars only when World War I caused the total collapse of the country. More recently, Russia got rid of the Communists only when Communism’s economic failure gave the country no choice but to get rid of them. Germany got rid of the Nazis only after their country was destroyed by the violence of World War II. When things get bad enough the people will act, but I fear only when things get bad enough. So today, with a breaking heart, I ask: Is it time for us to say the worse the better? Perhaps not quite yet, but the day when the answer to that question will be yes I fear is coming. I don’t even want to think about how terrible that day will be, but I don’t know how we can avoid it as long as Trump is president. All I can say today is, heaven help us.