It is not a time to gloat. It is a time to pause prayerfully and reflectively to ask a few serious questions. How could so many be so easily misled to allow a person like Trump to become president even once and candidate for the presidency again? What makes it possible for people like Trump get through life swindling, lying, whining and assaulting others without facing accountability or suffering consequences? How did we end up with legislatures with a small number of right wing extremists able to make moral cowards of a majority in their own party?
Before casting self righteous aspersions far and wide, it would be better to examine the logs in our own eyes. We who are stalwart defenders of liberal democracy, we who hover left and right around the center, what have we done and not done, said and not said that has contributed to the current state of American democracy? I think these are questions we need to ask ourselves if the nation is to recover its sense of moral duty, to work on living ever further into the American Promise and to provide the reality of the American Dream for all persons. They are questions that should be addressed in private conversations, social gatherings, and business and academic settings. They should be put to every potential candidate exploring whether to run for public office.
These are among the questions that public thought and opinion leaders most especially should be asking of themselves. They have pandered too long to the forces of civic disorder with enthusiasm for “let’s you and him fight” as a way to keep the presses humming. There is a prayer in the Book of Common Prayer that I commend to all of us who write on public policy for the public’s consumption.
“Almighty God, you proclaim your truth in every age by many voices: Direct in our time we pray, those who speak where many listen, and write what many read’ that they may do their part in making the heart of this people wise, its mind sound, and its will righteous; to the honor of Jesus Christ our Lord.” (BCP 827)
With that said, I want to make two points reflecting on Trump’s convictions. First, he and his supporters have gone on a P.R. campaign to convince the public that the trial was a political stunt to harm a presidential candidacy, a show trial rigged from the first, and a hint of what the future holds if Biden is elected. It’s a curious claim because it rejects the obvious, transparent reality of the trial’s meticulous adherence to the rule of law and because the abuses they imagine are the very ones they have promised to inflict on their political enemies if and when they get the chance. It’s a bold move right out of Goebbels’s playbook, and it works alarmingly well.
The second point is that MAGA leadership has redoubled its narrative that they alone love America, which is in a horrible state of decline and will be destroyed if those favoring liberal democracy continue to have control. The trial, according too them, was a ploy of misdirection to hide the terrible state of issues from the public. They never say what is horrible, terrible, in decline, or threatening to the future of the American way. They talk over questions put to them and change the subject – a classic move at misdirection in its own right. It often leads to interlocutors stumbling for control of interviews.
Major media sources who speak where many listen and write what many read have a moral obligation to confront the lies and real time threats to liberty and justice for all, to call them out for what they are. It’s true that they need to hold the forces of liberal democracy accountable as well, but they would be wrong to imply any kind of equivalency. The same is true for those of us who speak where few listen and write what few read. Whatever limited influence we have is still influence.
We have only a few weeks to get it right.
This is one of the most forceful and important posts you have provided. How can we promote it widely?
I agree that basic questions prompted by the unanimous verdict of a jury of Trump’s peers must be raised “if the nation is to recover its sense of moral duty, to work on living ever further into the American Promise and to provide the reality of the American Dream for all persons.”
Here’s one such question:
What if an entire generation of the children of the upper-middle class attending elite colleges and universities cannot even pretend that their own sense of “moral duty” has any relation whatsoever with “the American Promise..to provide the reality of the American Dream for all persons”?
But actually it’s worse than this generation finding phrases like “American Promise” and “American Dream” utterly empty.
No, what their collective response to October 7th has shown is the depth of utter contempt for an “America” founded on white settler-colonial slavery that then morphed into a late-capitalist Empire whose decline and fall needs to be accelerated “by any means necessary” for the sake of all oppressed peoples much less the ecological future of the entire planet.
How did an entire generation of the elite come to *this* sense of “moral duty”?
Well, from the perspective of one elite liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, they were raised in its social-media atmosphere since elementary school and directly indoctrinated in it since high-school so that it could now bloom by way of activist faculty in college.
Will the increasingly likelihood of Trump’s re-election force this generation into a re-assessment of their sense of “moral duty”? But how could it since it will simply confirm their collective sense that “America” is a lost cause that must be…well, what?
Yes: What will happen when the stark reality of a Trump Administration bent on systematic revenge against *all* its long list of enemies comes for them, or at least comes for the possibility of their having a future in “America”?