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.
Like John H, I too have reread Yeats and live with the ominous vision of Trump and Vance slouching to Jerusalem! I have never “marched” but am restless with anxiety, and could envision taking my feet to the street. No slouching, but marching for Democracy.
JoAnn, what do you mean by your last paragraph? “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.” Was Trump not eligible somehow?
And Todd, I agree that we can take the broader view and see all kinds of problems with “civilization” and the oligarchic system we live in. But still, I’d rather have our imperfect, often unjust and immoral democracy with its impure blend of socialism and capitalism than any alternatives I see available. Finland or New Zealand seem to be good places to live but that’s based on a superficial knowledge. Humans are a mess, but that’s who we is.
I suppose that in a few weeks, the choice between authoritarianism or the liberal democracy of our Constitution will be made, and both sides will assume the same stance of spreading their beliefs through the government. Voters will have empowered one to have the upper hand.
Politicians will start working towards making that choice as permanent as possible, countless speeches will be made, and eventually, the tumult will get around to forging a country in its image.
Authoritarians will try to change government to suit their favorite nostalgic memories. In contrast, liberal Democrats will try to restore what brought us to planning for what we can guess the future will be.
Authoritarians will try the great move backward, and liberal Democrats will search for the way forward.
This choice will be as monumental as the one our ancestors made to insist to the King of England that the Constitution be our ruler. We will have made the choice that Benjamin Franklin quipped about when he answered a question with, “A Republic if you can keep it.”
Authoritarians will celebrate victory by ending the Republic by choosing their own King.
Superb and horrifying column, but, of course, not at all surprising, and the comments, all essential reading….sharing is the thing to do and I copied and pasted every word to my Facebook page and encouraged all “my friends” to do the same. We need to wake up to this defining, existential moment and not “wait to see.”
What you feel depends on who you have around you. One of my kids and I are helping Karen Whitney in her run for state rep from Hendricks County. She knows what’s going on in the county, and in some other parts of the state. Her campaign has been distributing thousands of door hangers letting people know how she is, the have been phone banking hundreds of people, and they are about to start going door to door talking top folks who their system (which I am not familiar with) has identified as leaning liberal but not sure they are going to vote. The response has been affirming, including one person saying something to the effect of “Oh, that’s right, I can split my vote!” If I wasn’t involved with the campaign, I would likely feel like nothing is happening. It is happening, but at this point it’s mostly happening at the local level, so if you aren’t involved in local politics I could see how you could feel this way.
Todd, YW.
I keep watching the polls and being told that we’ve got a margin of error election. I find that hard to believe, until I remember the innate misogyny that is still present in our electorate, including in white non-college-graduate women.
Reminds me of a comedy troupe that was popular in the Schlafly days. Ladies Against Women were a laugh riot depicting the ladies on the right attacking women’s rights campaigners mostly on religious grounds. This seems vaguely familiar today.
The current craziness reflected in Kurtz’ comments reminded me of another Kurtz’ oratory in Apocalypse Now. It’s the never ending story, only horrifyingly rushing, gushing to a possible new apocalypse. the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassinations of JFK, MLK Jr., RFK, Malcolm X, et al, Civil Rights, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contragate, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan (the longest in our history), etc., etc.; we weathered all of it, leaving scars but nothing fatal to our republic. This seems, no IS, different. No one in my lifetime, perhaps in the history of our nation, has demonstrated the lack of so much necessary to leadership, let alone being human. You know, things like giving a damn about history, geography, the Constitution, world and national politics, and so on. There is no curiosity, only greed. No compassion, only a malignant narcissism. The lack of any redeeming quality doesn’t qualify him for anything. He cannot be given a second opportunity to do irreparable damage to our great country, imperfect and messy as it is. He has managed to bring out the absolute worst in half of this nation, somehow, and we can only hope that enough of the electorate will grasp enough of that to refuse to cast a vote for the worst candidate ever. No contest.
NO TRUMP!!!!!!!!! NO VANCE!!!!!!
Remember that there is a 25th Amendment to the Constitution and that it can be invoked by a Vice President!
The oligarchs Plot Against America (apology to Philip Roth) is to elect Trump, get him inaugurated, and have Vance invoke the 25th Amendment. JD Vance is the real threat to our freedom.
Well said, Mitch D. Agree!
The convicted felon losing won’t be the end of the angst and fear for our democracy. Republicans are nothing if not patient, and they will continue to weave their political web of hatred, fear, bigotry, and misinformation while they prop up younger, less insane sounding, yet equally dangerous candidates for the next presidential election. Those of us who care about this country and ALL the people who call it home will still have MUCH work to do if Harris wins. 🤞🏼 In fact, rather than the “wait and see how to goes” attitude Democrats seem to have after elections, I would suggest we keep our sleeves rolled up, continue to seek out and encourage qualified candidates for state and national offices, make their names and qualifications known to the public earlier in the game than we typically do, and stay energized and focused over the next four years. Republicans have their repugnant playbook ready to go, and if the convicted felon isn’t the one who’ll be using it, you know they have their list of creepy candidates at the ready for next time. I mean, if a presidential candidate can stand on stage and sway to music for 30 minutes rather than answer questions, and still have people willing to elect him? Then yes, we still have work to do, if, WHEN, Harris wins!
So what is Plan B? What do I do if the unthinkable happens, either by the Electoral College or insurrection?
I am old, with some physical limitations. I would be a detriment to any physical remonstrance. I could be one of those invisibles who can move without arousing suspicion. A resistance fighter was not how I ever envisioned my old age. Would I risk it? Yes. My only concern would be to keep myself at a remove from my family, especially my children and siblings. But the authoritarians know that is a vulnerability they can exploit effectively.
Go back and look at the many accounts of resistance to authoritarianism, especially in recent history. Remember that so many lost their lives in the efforts. Also remember that there were and still are those who would be willing and enthusiastic supporters of those authoritarian rulers, executing orders without any ethical or moral restraints, acting in self-interest only.
So, again, I ask the question. What do I do if the unthinkable happens, either by the Electoral College or insurrection?