LAWS AND TREATIES are useless if there’s a general agreement by one side or the other to ignore them. Native American tribes have known this since the Indian Removal Act. African-Americans have known it since Reconstruction. Women have known it since Roe v. Wade. With the advent of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, white men in America are beginning to get a glimpse of this reality, but they’re still–for the most part–in denial. And the higher one climbs up the socioeconomic ladder, the less likely it is to see any acknowledgement of this fact. For this reason, our representatives in Congress–especially the white heteros among them–can hardly be expected to see things any differently. They’re pretty high on the ladder, and making laws is what they do for a living. The chronically hidebound among them continue to cling to the belief that some as yet unknown number and configuration of future statutes will someday culminate in a tipping point, finally giving rise to a more humane and just society.
They’re supported in this conviction by their liberal colleagues in the media, along with the think tanks and the legal profession and all the other like-minded public policy actors that lend their voices to the public square. Part of the reason is that–again, for the most part–policy makers are acting in good faith. They believe in the rule of law, the inherent virtue of democracy, and the fundamental righteousness of America. What they forget, or are blind to, is that whoever’s decided to ignore a treaty or law doesn’t believe in those things. They believe instead in the legitimacy of power as both a means and an end. They believe instead in the primacy of their ends, and in the expendability of their means. They believe instead in winning at any cost.
What they don’t believe in are laws and treaties. But they’ll exploit them without any qualms whatsoever. And they’ll abide by them only to the extent they benefit from them. But our representatives in Washington continue to negotiate in good faith. They seem to be unaware that their opponents represent their own self-interests, to the exclusion of what’s best for the country. That’s human nature, one might argue, and been baked into the cake for some time now. But it’s particularly egregious in American politics. Just ask the Cheyenne of Sand Creek, or the Sioux at Wounded Knee. It’s as true now as it was then, just not nearly as brazen. Well-meaning policy makers in the age of Trump continue to be surprised and stymied by the duplicity and deviousness of the other side. These optimistic public servants continue to bring knives to gunfights, and guns to nuclear wars. Whenever outmaneuvered they can be relied upon to clutch their pearls and grope for their fainting couches. They’re outraged, but express it only in the mildest terms. Children in cages. Tens of thousands dead from COVID-19. One can almost hear the indignant gasps as each new atrocity piles atop the last.
In their misguided efforts to appear objective, CNN and MSNBC spend countless hours teasing out the whys and wherefores of every identifiable lie and contradiction emanating from the White House, or for that matter, from any public official. They tsk-tsk from dawn to dusk, patting themselves on the back all the way. They’ve finally gotten around to calling a lie a lie, but it’s too late. The fox, so to speak, is in the henhouse. Those cable outlets have always been ratings-driven, but they’ve deluded themselves (or their viewers, the distinction is meaningless) that they’re seekers after truth, when in fact they’re parsers of the minutiae of politics. Unhindered by such misapprehensions, Fox News gleefully screams bloody murder at the top of its lungs over anything they know will scare or anger their audience, and their wails echo for days afterward down the corridors of right-wing radio and conservative websites. It doesn’t take a degree in poli-sci to determine which types of communications are more effective. Clearly, the American right-wing media-political coalition has committed to memory the lessons of Joseph Goebbels, and just as obviously, the establishment American Left and its media cohorts have skipped those classes entirely. The only reason the tide is turning against Trump now is that the people, finally fed up with countless lies and untold broken promises, have shouted loud enough for their representatives to hear.
Meanwhile, Congress issues subpoenas the White House won’t even deign to acknowledge. House members craft one legislative package after another, and then approach the microphones apologetically, demurely asking why their good friends on the other side of the aisle haven’t bothered to meet them half-way. If they’re even half as angry as their constituents, they sure are masterful at disguising it. Perhaps they are. Angry, that is. Maybe they’re fuming and snorting fire behind closed doors, but then confoundingly, as polite as butlers when called to account for themselves in public. But I don’t think so. There’s exceptions, of course. But for the most part they’re fairly content, I believe, to proceed at the measured pace their law-school training inured them to, and that Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure holds them to. Where’s the sense of urgency? Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are sitting in the attic knitting while the fire rages in the parlor below. Not so their opponents, whose passionate belief in their causes can fairly be described as zealous, if not downright fanatical.
Woe betide the fool, for instance, who treads too heavily upon the hallowed grounds of the Second Amendment, or who suggests that opening one’s argument against abortion with a description of “the mass slaughter of innocents” might be problematic, perhaps not conducive to fruitful dialogue. No, that will not do. A conservative’s right to own a gun is sacred and inviolate, and all abortion is murder. Period. The end. You see, the conservators of traditional values long ago jettisoned the habit of making their case logically and rationally. Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley, Jr. don’t live here anymore. Admittedly, their sober and well-reasoned arguments masked an ugly undercurrent, but that’s a story for another day.
Richard Nixon eventually mastered George Wallace’s knack for riling up the mob with appeals to their deepest (unquestioned) fears and most cherished (unchallenged) beliefs. Unlike Wallace, he had the advantage of being able to practice his stratagems nationally. Nixon invoked the so-called silent majority, rousing the children of the Korean War to answer his call to law and order, that they draw the line against the rising tide of liberalism, whose central crime, apparently, was that it was un-American. Confronting Nixon, first Hubert Humphrey and then George McGovern appealed to America’s rationality. Both lost. Ronald Wilson Reagan famously invoked the uplifting image of a shining city on a hill, but less conspicuously launched his campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney had been murdered in 1964 for the effrontery of trying to register African-Americans to vote. What is it they say about real estate? Location, location, location. His choice of where to stake his claim, as it were, did not go unnoticed. Larger than life, Reagan helped Americans to feel good about themselves, although they had no conceivable right to, trampling first over the pale shadow of Jimmy Carter, who had tried to drag America kicking and screaming to the realization that we were energy hogs and finally getting our comeuppance, and then slicing through the even paler shadow of Walter Mondale. Passion and emotion, overtly displayed and covertly employed, once again won out.
Just as cheating wins out, if you’re good enough at it. And Nixon was good at it. But he had the faith of his convictions as well. As long as he believed in the righteousness of his cause, the means to achieve its success would always be a secondary consideration. As he famously let slip, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” By extension, one might presume that any actions taken on behalf of the President would be, by the same token, justly unfettered by any legal niceties. As vice-president, for instance, he believed in the ultimate necessity and undeniable rightness of his Eisenhower-approved mission to assassinate Fidel Castro. And as President he believed that because liberalism was godless, and that if put in charge the Democrats would ruin the country, preventing that outcome justified his pre-election interference in the Vietnam peace talks, specifically his promises to Hanoi of a better deal than the one already on the table, the one so close to ratification. LBJ knew about Nixon’s meddling at the time, and in a phone call with Senator Everett Dirksen, called it treason; but kept the knowledge secret, because there was insufficient proof to make the case to the American public, and because he feared the trauma would have been too injurious to the American psyche, considerations of the sort Nixon would never have contemplated.
Where within the soft-boiled ranks of the modern Democratic Party would one find anyone so devious, and so driven, as Richard Milhous Nixon? The only one who comes close would be William Jefferson Clinton, but he was such a good-hearted lug that most of his dissembling was spent on maintaining and covering up his affairs. When it came to the good of the country, his strategy was to triangulate with–which is just a nicer way of saying capitulate to–conservatives, because he was just too easygoing, and his liberalism too welcoming, to even consider the sort of scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners approach his opponents brought to the table. While Hillary Rodham Clinton complained–futilely–about her and Bill’s ongoing struggle with what she called “the vast right wing conspiracy,” Nixon’s philosophical offspring, dirty-tricksters du jour Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Frank Luntz, quietly assembled and noisily deployed that very conspiracy. We’ve been suffering the aftershocks of their Machiavellian manipulations ever since. To this very day, a straight line can be drawn between the calumny they disseminated in the nineties–with no small amount of assistance from William Safire–and the vitriol and abhorrence leveled at HRC in 2016. Perhaps because they’d be so loathe to embark upon one, progressives continue to underestimate the power of a well-orchestrated, relentless smear campaign, and to overestimate the power of truth and rationality to overcome it. Just ask John Kerry.
My concern now is that the Democrats are fielding yet another good-hearted lug for 2020, this time Joe Biden. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting there’s anyone else on the Democratic side who could’ve united its disparate factions while at the same time immunizing the party from the (shopworn but still effective) accusations of condoning runaway socialism, rampant debt, crime in the streets, and indiscriminate baby killing. It’s just that I fear he’s grievously unprepared for the ferocity of the onslaught to come. Biden is still trotting out the limping platitudes of “reaching across the aisle” and “uniting the country.” He doesn’t seem to understand there’s no compromising with these fuckers. This country’s never been united and it never will be. Not as long as there’s enough Americans out there who think liberals and progressives are anti-Christian, socialist/communist, abortion-loving one-worlders who want to raise their taxes (it’s always their taxes, as if progressives don’t pay taxes), impose upon the country a “homosexual agenda,” and finally, just for good measure, flood public restrooms with transgender sexual perverts, all because they hate America in general, and hate President Trump in particular. There’s no talking to people who believe shit that hysterically hyperbolic. There’s no give and take with someone who believes racism ended in 1863, or that Barack Obama somehow failed as president (according to a Trump loving coworker) because he didn’t end racism in America. In what context could one possibly hold a reasonable discussion with a person who holds those beliefs as axiomatic? Not on the street, not in the workplace, not on Facebook, and certainly not in the halls of government.
The only way to beat them is to believe in the righteousness of our causes as deeply as they do in theirs. The only way to beat them is to vote them out so thoroughly that their numbers finally wither away to zero, and their hateful ideologies have become little more than a tale to be told. The only way to beat them is to put the boot on the neck and keep it there, even when they eventually say “We’re sorry. . . we promise to be good from now on.”
Fuck them. There’s nothing good about what they believe. And they lie. This is what is vitally incumbent upon progressives to remember. Do not trust them. They may love their wives and families and pets, and they’ll trot them out in a New York minute as proof of their humanity, but they can’t seem to muster up any sympathy for anyone that’s not a member of their tribe. America’s founding motto was e pluribus unum, out of many one, not “I got mine, now you get yours, Jack.” If they want a country where every manjack, woman and child among us has to fend for ourselves, instead of pulling together for the good of all, let them get the fuck out and start their own country. Alternatively, there’s a few libertarian nation-states they might like to emigrate to, more than a few theocracies, many of which are awash in guns. And as a bonus, at no additional cost to them, they’d get to feel what it’s like to be hated and feared simply because of where they come from, or what they look like.
Heck, what am I worried about? They’ll be fine. If they find themselves alone and adrift and unloved in some unfriendly, foreign land, they can just do what they’ve been telling liberals to do since the virus of the Reagan presidency infected this country. They can pull themselves up by their own fucking bootstraps.