Will We Survive Trump?

 

Will We Survive Trump?

I don’t mean to be alarmist. Well, yes actually, I do mean to be alarmist. I think a situation we’re facing today really is cause for alarm. The political system of the United States has survived and functioned for over 230 years. It has produced some God-awful results. Even in my lifetime it have us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, disasters all. In earlier times it gave us the Indian slaughterer Andrew Jackson and other 19^th century disasters. Still, it has functioned the way it is designed to function. That we have had really bad presidents is only partly the fault of the system. It’s mostly the fault of the American electorate, which seems addicted to making really bad choices from time to time. The Electoral College system has outlived any sense it may once have made, but it still works the way it was designed to work. The states run the elections not the federal government. States set up their election law, and state officials operate under it to produce an election result that complies with that law. The American political tradition is that the party that has lost an election accepts the results of the election. Even when the losing candidate really won, as Al Gore probably did in 2000, the candidate who is found by the states (or on very rare occasions by the courts) to be the loser concedes and accepts the result of the election no matter how disappointed they may be or how much they hate the result. Four years ago Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote. She didn’t go running to the courts to try to reverse the outcome of the election even though a great many of us realized, at least in part, what a disaster Donald Trump would be. That’s how it has been with us.

Until today. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. There really is no doubt about that. Joe Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral College result. There isn’t a shred of evidence that there is anything out of order about that result. Yet Donald Trump is screaming voter fraud. “I really won, and won big,” he shouts. “The Democrats stole the election,” he rants. That the President of the United States makes such baseless claims is bad enough, though it isn’t surprising given who Donald Trump is. We’ve known for a very long time that he is a narcissist with a weak ego who can’t stand to lose anything and will do anything to stay in power. What is surprising is that a great many other Republican politicians are going along with Trump’s deranged lies about election fraud. It’s not surprising that Attorney General Barr has changed longstanding Department of Justice policy and authorized the US Attorneys to investigate election fraud before the states have certified the election results and despite the fact that those US Attorneys have nothing remotely approaching traditional DOJ requirements for opening an investigation. We’ve known for quite a while that Barr is just a Trump stooge who gives not one good God damn about the rule of law. It is surprising that Republican senators, including those who were just reelected like Mitch McConnell, are going along with this destructive charade, surprising and deeply concerning.

In these baseless attacks on the results of the 2020 presidential election we are facing nothing less than a fascist challenge to our entire political system. Democratic political systems depend on the people of the country accepting the legitimacy of the system. Totalitarian systems can worry much less about what the people they rule think. By the 1960s at least almost no citizens of the Soviet Union thought their Communist system was legitimate. They were more than ready to overthrow it, but they couldn’t because it was so powerful. It had everyone convinced that they were the only ones who opposed it. Political systems that lose their legitimacy with their people fall, usually into some form of fascism. Russia is a good example. That empire fell into a leftwing fascist system called Communism because the people of the country lost faith in the legitimacy of their tsarist government. Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s is another. Hitler was able to overthrow the democratic system of the Weimar Republic through that republic’s own political system (combined with a lot of street violence) because the German people lost faith in the legitimacy of that system.

Something similar could happen here if enough of the American people lose faith in the legitimacy of our political system. False claims of election fraud by supposedly responsible public officials probably aren’t enough by themselves to delegitimize our political system enough to lead to its downfall. They are however a very disturbing sign of things possibly to come. No president before Trump has raised questions about the legitimacy of our political system the way Trump has. No Senate majority leader has gone along with such a president the way Mitch McConnell has. That these things are happening now must cause great concern to all true Americans.

Donald Trump has a base of radical, fascist supporters prone to violence who may some day be strong enough to challenge our political system violently. We aren’t there yet, but Donald Trump appears to have started us on the slippery slope to such a demonic result. We must all be aware of what’s happening. We must all do whatever we can to stop our country’s slide toward fascism. Fascist systems are simply evil. They oppress people and destroy their lives. Donald Trump is an American fascist. He’s being abetted by Republican politicians who I would have thought knew better. We’re in trouble folks. It’s way past time for us to wake up.