I often refer to Talking Points Memo, one of the most credible and professional online sources of information. But the other day, the site’s Morning Memo blew me away–it was as if David Kurtz, the author, was describing my own fears and moods as we count down to November 5th.
The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion.
It was different in the tumultuous summer of two attempted assassinations against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal from the race, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and the political conventions. That period felt as historic as the decision voters would make in November. But since then, things have settled into a odd limbo, like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.
Kurtz writes that everything seems “frozen in place until a decision is made on whether democracy is the way to go.” Frozen in place is precisely the way I’ve been feeling–as though I am in suspended animation until I know whether the world I will leave to my grandchildren will be habitable and governable–whether I will leave them an admittedly imperfet society that is nevertheless working toward greater fairness, or one hurtling into another Dark Ages.
Because that concern isn’t hyperbole. That is the choice we face. As Kurtz put it,
Compiling Morning Memo each day has been harder in recent weeks than ever before, not because there is no news but because there’s little that seems to capture the present moment in full, which has forced me to think hard about why, instead of building to a crescendo in November, we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump.
He conveyed his “unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss.”
It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing – or a thing at all.
As the essay repeatedly reminds us, Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to American democratic institutions–but the reality and immediacy of that threat tends to obscure what we have already lost–what the last 8 years have cost us, the “vibrant and essential public debates left to molder while we confront the more immediate threat; time, energy, and resources diverted from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.”
The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.
The essay mourns the multiple ways that the persistence of older journalistic constructs has operated to normalize Trump–how it has created false equivalencies, and allowed anti-democratic forces to denigrate, undermine and delegitimize democratic institutions.
What that has left us with is a curdled public discourse in which the pro-democracy side is mostly yelling at each other about what more can be done to stop Trump; holding up scorecards like figure skating judges on the effectiveness of this or that anti-Trump strategy; assessing the purity of each other’s anti-Trumpism; and railing against democratic institutions like the media for wilting in our hour of greatest need. Not all of those are bad impulses, and to be clear they are not the cause but rather a symptom of our current predicament. It’s what happens when the “other side” rejects democracy as a means of resolving these differences. It’s like having a public debate against an abandoned lectern.
I’m holding my breath…
Kurtz references Yeats’ The Second Coming, and it’s a poem that resonates with me in these times. It’s wonderful and terrifying, and worth considering in full:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Half of this country’s political landscape is willing to reject the results of free and fair elections, makes every effort to steal people’s right to vote, and accepts violence as a last resort. I don’t see how a democracy overcomes this situation. Hopefully II’ll be proved wrong.
Thank you Sheila! It is like waiting to awaken from a nightmare for me, a surreal sense of reality.
Frozen yet walking in time.
No one seems able to stop what might be a bleak future for Our Country!
It is not just stopping one man, it is now seeing a wave coming and having no means to avoid the effects. I fear We will All pay some price we know not how much.
“The essay mourns the multiple ways that the persistence of older journalistic constructs has operated to normalize Trump–how it has created false equivalencies, and allowed anti-democratic forces to denigrate, undermine and delegitimize democratic institutions.”
All “journalistic constructs” have always had the option to include a disclaimer when faced with printing obvious lies and distortion and the threats facing us today from the Trump faction that we are in for violence whether or not he wins. My previous generations left openings for change; we should have paid closer attention to those “forks in the road”; such as the warning of a “cashless/checkless future with banks controlling our financial situation and we would all be identified by numbers.” How soon after birth are parents required to apply for a Social Security number for their newborn?
I began holding my breath in 2016 when this government allowed Trump to qualify for the presidential nomination and then be appointed to the presidency. Read the Constitution, Article II, clause 5 for the minimal requirements to be come president.
Nope. I may be helplessly optimistic, but I have been traveling around the state and what I see is a great determination of people who are standing in the breech and doing the work they can to promote democracy. The antidote to despair is action. Do something. Not only will you feel better but your action may spark someone else to do something. Write some postcards, join a phone bank or a texting bank, put out a yard sign, make a donation. GOTV!
Thank you, James Todd! At the risk of being politically pollyannish, I’ve seen the same and heard the same positive movement around the state and on the many national phone bank calls I’ve made for the good guys. With that said, the spectre is still scary as hell.
I find hope in the MILLIONS of Americans who are furious over Roe. I think we win.
Kurtz needs and editor.
I watch MSNBC every day and they are NOT standing still. They are hammering Trump’s insanity and its fetid advancement. Every day. Their challenge is to find words to describe the orange monster without using “insane”, “psychopathic” or “f***ing lunatic”. MSNBC is trotting out everyone of note that they can to show the public that the cult leader is far around the bend. They even showed his 38 minute idiocy of swaying to bad music in S. Dakota with the wretched Kristy Noem acting as cheerleader.
Georgia just had their largest first day of voting turnout in history. I saw a lot of red hats in the long lines, but the fact that so many people turned out was also a middle finger to the Republicans trying to deny their own citizens the right to vote.
Not frozen. Hot.
I still am looking back to the Truman and Dewey election. The issue was the economy and inflation. “Dewey defeats Truman” did not happen. I also think that Trump polls several points higher than people actually vote. I’m bouyed by the fact that the few Trump signs i’ve seen are Trump 2020 signs. Old man Trump is getting such a pass in the media, I can’t believe it and it’s scary. I’m holding my breath so let’s see.
And violence is not inevitable. A lot of those who follow Trump are all talk and no action. A strong showing at the polls for decency and democracy will send them scurrying back down their rabbit holes.
First off, thank you, Peggy, for Twain’s short story yesterday. I read it last night, and it was fabulous. It’s why I say sociopaths gravitate to positions of high authority, like CEOs and politicians. The lack of conscience allows you to do all sorts of dastardly deeds without internal consequences. Here’s the story:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3183/3183-h/3183-h.htm
I stopped listening to the commentaries about how “democracy” is being threatened in this election or how we’re at a “crossroads.” I heard the same thing in 2016 after Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and their side of the media spectrum destroyed Bernie Sanders. They then tried to cover it up by blaming Assange and the Russians. #Russiagate was a fraud created by our oligarchy.
Look at who is financing Trump’s campaign. Washington politicians give billionaires gifts to circumvent our rules of fair play and conduct their dirty deeds in the dark, hidden from the American people. Even SCOTUS is bought and paid for!
85% of the media is owned by the oligarchy. Ten percent is aloof, and five percent is censored from the public readership. The truth-tellers are shrunk by algorithms and social media throttling. Their YouTube Channels were eliminated because they were making money. Without money, you cannot exist in this country.
You conform to the oligarchy, or you’re out. If Kurtz had mentioned oligarchy, I would click over and read what he had to say, but I cannot take anyone in the media seriously who cannot see past our phony facade.
Trump isn’t threatening “American Exceptionalism,” as Obama likes to say in his 500 thousand dollar speeches. Trump is a symptom of our decay. So is #GenocideJoe. It was amazing that those two competed in a primary contest in the USA. The international community is mocking us daily, but not by the phony media. None of the oligarchies would point out the fraud America has become because our allies are a joke as well. The West is in full decline, and the people don’t see it because our media has given us two choices – red or blue.
“…from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.”
That is the issue, for me. That the orange turd can, and does, have so much leverage is horrendous.
Our culture has been taken down a bunch, wounded, if you will, and even if tfg looses badly, and there is no serious violence, the ripple effects of his presence among us since 2015 will have a lasting, deleterious effect.
I do expect that he could loose by a wide margin, however.