What Would It Mean?

 

What Would It Mean?

October 28, 2024

 

What if? What would it mean if, one week from tomorrow, the American voters returned Donald J. Trump, convicted felon, to the White House? As of today, just over one week before the 2024 election, we do not know whether or not the American voters will make that tragic mistake; but there is a real possibility if not a probability that they will. To answer the question of what their doing so would mean, we must understand two things: First, America has always claimed to be, and second, what Donald Trump and his MAGA movement truly are and truly would do if put in power. We’ll start with the first of those two issues.

What has the United States of America always claimed to be? What it has always claimed to be constitutes what we must call the American myth, though you can call it “the American dream” if you can’t handle the word myth. By myth, I don’t mean just something that people think is true that isn’t true, though that is part of the word’s meaning here. The other part of that meaning is that the American myth has always been a story about what this country is that has elicited the loyalty of most Americans, or at least most white Americans, to the country. It has been a story through which people have gained an allegiance to the country, thinking that the country is and has been what the myth says it is.

What is that myth? It is the claim that our country is the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” It the story that we are the beacon on a hill, a light of democracy and freedom from which the rest of the world should learn and which the rest of the world should imitate. It is the story that in our country “all men are created equal.” It is the story that in America everyone functions on a level playing field with everyone else, that anyone can become anything through dedication and hard work. It is the story that there is such a thing as a “self-made man” and that becoming such a person is a worthy goal for anyone’s life. People today often express the myth by saying “America is the greatest country in the world!”

Now, there surely can be no doubt that the American myth has never equaled the American reality. That myth denies our country’s horrific country of slavery and racial discrimination against people of color. It refuses to acknowledge the genocide white Americans committed against Native Americans, a genocide so horrific that Adolf Hitler thought it meant America could not object to what he was doing to do to the Jews. It denies our history of white supremacy and male supremacy. It fails to understand the systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that still taint most of our institutions, our legal institutions perhaps most of all. It overlooks the fact that, though we claim to be the richest country in the world, an appalling number of our people are poor, and even completely homeless, without access to any of the things they need to live a decent life. It overlooks the way we are destroying the environment on earth and denies human responsibility for that destruction. It is willfully ignorant of the way money controls American politics and the harm that control does to ordinary people. No, the American myth has never truly reflected American reality.

Which in no way means that the myth isn’t important. It has given ideological cover to most of the things our nation has done since its foundation. That myth has colored the relationship of most Americans to the American nation for all of that nation’s existence. That relationship has been one not only of the allegiance to which the Pledge of Allegiance refers but of enthusiastic support and willingness to sacrifice for what the nation’s powers tell the people are worthy and necessary ends.

The American myth had us fighting World War I “to make the world safe for democracy.” It has us claiming that we are the ones who defeated Nazi Germany when in fact it was the Soviet Union that played by far the biggest role in bringing about that defeat. It had us insisting that we needed to be a world-wide bulwark against Communism, an insistence that led to the utterly unnecessary and tragic Vietnam War. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists and hasn’t for quite some time now, the America myth still has us spending unconscionable amounts of fiscal and human resources on our military. The American myth convinces most Americans that our military really is there “to defend democracy”  and “to defend American freedom” when in fact it is primarily there to project American power around the world for political and economic purposes. The American myth has most Americans accepting the notion that we must be the world’s police force and supporting our leaders when they use our power as such, all under the claim of defending freedom.

The history of American politics is steeped in the American myth. That myth says, actually with some justification, that the US Constitution is the best national foundational document humans have ever produced. It says that we truly are a democratic country. It says that our votes really do matter, that it is in fact the will of the American people that decides who runs the country. It boasts, with good justification until after the 2020 presidential election, of our history of peaceful transition of power from one president to the next and one congress to the next. The American myth about money and freedom of expression led the US Supreme Court to say that giving money is speech and to gut most of the existing restrictions on the power of money in our politics. The American myth of the equality of all citizens led the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, rendering it largely meaningless in the struggle against racial discrimination. The American myth has Americans believing that they live in the freest, most democratic, most egalitarian nation on earth.

So. What would a second election of Donald Trump to the presidency and the elevation of his fascist MAGA movement mean? It would mean that the country has at long last rejected the American myth. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement clearly reject the core elements of the American myth. They reject the myth’s assertion of racial equality and embrace white supremacy. They scorn the country’s history as one of immigrants (at least one of immigrants after the first white people appeared on the North American continent) and cry “Close the border!” Meaning of course the border with Mexico not the border with Canada. Canada is, after all, mostly white, and most of its people speak English. They cry that the immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a fascist statement if ever there were one.

Trump and the MAGA movement reject the legitimacy of American democracy. They reject the legitimacy of American elections and believe that any election is legitimate only if they win. They believe that it is legitimate for them to use any means up to and including violence to put their people in power even when those people have undeniably lost an election. They reject the very notion of constitutional government and want Donald Trump to be, in essence, an American dictator, an American Hitler, something Trump’s vice presidential running mate J. D. Vance once said Trump was. They see American politics not as a peaceful contest between people with differing views of what is best for the country, which is what the American myth says American politics are, but as a war between MAGA and its opponents, whom they call not opponents but enemies. They reject the notion that the national economy should work for everyone’s benefit. They embrace the economic lies that tax cuts for the rich are good for everyone and that tariffs on imported goods are good for the economy.

And there is what is perhaps an even more fundamental way in which the election of Donald Trump as president would mean that the country has turned its back on the American myth. That myth has always asserted, sometimes against all the evidence, that its contentions are grounded in accurate facts. Before Donald Trump took over the Republican Party in 2016 and thereafter, American politicians always asserted that the things they said were factually correct. They weren’t always factually correct of course, but the contention that national policies must be grounded in actual facts has always been part of the American myth.

Donald Trump, however, is an inveterate liar. Nearly everything he says is a lie. Nearly every thing he says contradicts that facts of whatever it is he’s talking about. The “Big Lie” is a classic fascist tactic. Hitler’s Big Lie was that the Jews were responsible both for Germany’s defeat in World War I and for all of Germany’s problems in the 1920s and 1930s. Donald Trump’s Big Lie is that immigrants are responsible for all of America’s problems today. Yet that is, of course, not all he lies about. He lies about everything, and we have to ask: Why does he lie so much?

There are I think a couple of parts to the answer to that question. The first part is that Donald Trump simply does not live or operate within the categories “true” and “false.” He doesn’t think in terms of true and false. He thinks only in terms of “What is good and what is bad for me and my immediate family?” He is “afactual.” Facts don’t matter to him, so he never bothers to find out what the actual facts of a matter are. Everything he says comes from a context in which the truth just doesn’t matter.

The other part of the answer to that question is that fascists telling lie after lie is not actually an attempt to get people to believe that the lies are true. It is, rather, an attempt to get people to believe that there is no truth. It is an attempt to get people to give up caring whether something a politician says is true or not. If there is no truth, then there’s no reason actually to believe anything anyone actually says. But, of course, there is one exception to that part of the answer to our question. People are to believe anything the Dear Leader says, for in an afactual world, we might as well believe what he says as believe anything anyone else says, especially if he convinces us that, as fascists like always claim, only he can solve our problems.

So. If Donald Trump wins next week’s presidential election, we will know one thing for certain. Enough Americans scorn the traditional American myth to put a fascist in the White House. To put in the White House someone who is nothing but a cynical fascist who wants nothing but power and wealth for himself. He will, of course, take the presidential oath to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” but he won’t mean it. His saying that he will do so will, of course, be a lie; but then nearly everything he says is a lie. A Donald Trump victory next week would mean that enough Americans no longer believe in American democracy and therefore would put a would-be tyrant back in the Oval Office. It would establish that truth no longer matters in American politics. It would mean that enough Americans are white supremacists so that commitment to racial equality no longer matters for them. (Of course, most of them would deny being white supremacists, but that in no way would mean that they aren’t.) In other words, the reelection of Donald Trump would mean that the American myth is dead.

Now, of course, the American myth is not a one-sidedly good thing. It covers at lot of reality that in truth contradicts it. So would it matter the American electorate has rejected it? Well, yes, I believe that it would matter. Myths like the American myth exist in every aspect of human life. They give life meaning. They give people purpose. Perhaps most importantly, they can and sometimes do express ideals toward which people can strive. The American myth actually does that, or at least we could use it in that way. It speaks of democracy. Of racial equality. Of equal justice. Of equal opportunity. It says that we must act on the basis of actual facts. None of those things is a pure reality in our country, but they are all worthy goals toward which we can and must strive.

American governments have never acted fully according to the American myth. I mean, the American myth would never sanction Andrew Jackson in the crime against humanity of the Trail of Tears, to cite just one extreme example. Yet the United States has never had a truly authoritarian government, and it certainly has not had a totalitarian one. The American myth is the foundational reason why we have not. It has always said, and most Americans have always believed, that authoritarianism is not our way, and totalitarianism certainly is not our way. It simply isn’t true that Americans are freer than people in many other places in the world, but it is true that we Americans have always valued freedom. We have always valued democracy. Most of us, in more recent decades at least, have said we value racial justice and equality. Most of us, in more recent decades at least, have said that we value gender equality. All of those things are part of the American myth. Valuable, worthwhile parts of the American myth. Parts of the American worth keeping, worth clinging to. Donald Trump and his fanatical followers in the MAGA movement have rejected all of those parts of the myth. They have turned their backs on the best parts of the American myth. They advocate radically un-American policies and practices. They are, indeed, American fascists.

German president von Hindenburg made a tragic mistake when, in early 1933, he asked Adolf Hitler to form a German government. We face the real possibility that, one week from tomorrow, the American public put Donald Trump and his MAGA minions in power the way von Hindenburg put Hitler and the Nazis in power. Our doing so would indeed be a tragic mistake. I don’t mean that I think Donald Trump would ever create another true Auschwitz, this one aimed at immigrants not at Jews. He is, after all, an American fascist not any other sort of fascist. Yet he would dismantle as much of American democracy and constitutional government as he could. He would make himself as much of a dictator as he could. He would make this country as fascist as he could. Heaven help us if, in just over a week, we make the tragic mistake of electing Donald Trump. If we do, it will mean that the American myth, the American dream, is on life support if not totally dead. May it not be so.