All the bad things that Donald Trump and the Republicans have done since 2017 can be grouped into two general categories. The first is Doing the Wrong Thing. This includes items such as weakening Americans’ health coverage, cutting taxes on the rich while reducing benefits for the poor, rolling back environmental protections, persecuting immigrants, and so on.
The second category is Doing Things Wrong. This is a category that many people overlook or minimize. I think it is safe to say that all of us have at least some tendency to regard Doing the Right Thing as being more important than How It Gets Done. So we complain when an obviously guilty person gets off on a “technicality.” We laugh, or at least chuckle, when somebody reminds us that “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.” If the sports star constantly accused of “playing dirty” plays for my city, then those other people are just bellyaching because they don’t like it when my team wins. If a lynch mob gets the guy who really did commit the murder, then justice was done, right? And if my President happens to break a law or two on the way to accomplishing something that I strongly agree with, well, sometimes you gotta break some eggs to make an omelet, right? It’s just politics, and we can’t let technicalities get in the way of doing the right thing, can we?
But Doing Things Right is a fundamental necessity in any democratic society. So much so that we condemn lynch mobs not just because too often they got the wrong guy (once is too often), but because even when the right guy is strung up, it’s still not how we believe things are supposed to be done. A lynching violates our sense of how civilized people are supposed to behave, no matter how ugly the crime and how sure it is that the right guy was punished. So, after World War II the Allies set up the Nuremberg war trials rather than just summarily shooting the people responsible for Auschwitz and Dachau.
Yet there were, it seems certain, many “fine, upstanding” people who stood by and watched those lynchings with approval (mostly in the South, but in the “wild West” and the North, too). There were no doubt many decent people who thought that the Nuremberg trials were a waste of time. Even the most “civilized” people are subject to human frailty; the desire for swiftness in justice, and for revenge following an outrage, lurks even in the best of us. Which is precisely why Doing Things Right is so important: it counters the raw impulses of vengeance and hatred, reduces the probability of unfortunate mistakes, and short-circuits the common cycle of revenge spawning counter-revenge repeated endlessly (see “Hatfields and McCoys.”) Doing Things Right actually helps us to Do the Right Thing, plus it brings closure to those harmed by evil, ending the cycle of evil rather than perpetuating it.
With this in mind, I believe that the two worst things that Donald Trump has done, worse even that his attacks on health care, the poor, immigrants, and the environment, have been to elevate hatred and raw emotion over rational thought, and to cripple the concept of Truth in political discourse. By Truth I mean not so much any particular religious ideal as the simple common-sense belief that actual facts do exist and that they matter. Donald Trump did not invent lying, but he has taken it to levels where it has never been before in American politics, where falsehoods are uttered with utter disregard for facts, and where solid counter-evidence is casually ignored or dismissed as “fake news.” We have never seen this type of intentional, concerted denial of objective reality before. At least not in America; such flagrant disregard for facts has always been associated with totalitarian regimes.
Therefore, looking forward to 2020, I sincerely hope that Democrats will remember that Process (Doing Things Right) matters as much as Results (Doing the Right Thing), and will work to rebuild the trust that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done so much to destroy. That Democratic state legislatures will replace Republican-gerrymandered districts with sensible, logical districts, not Democratic-gerrymandered districts. That Democrats will work to win over those current Republican-voting people (such as my Evangelical friends) who should be voting Democratic, rather than demonizing them the same way that those voters have tended to demonize Democrats. That Democrats will truly work to govern according to the will of the majority of the people, not the majority of the money. and that they will give ordinary people reason to welcome, not despise, our elected government.
In short, I hope that Democrats follow the wisdom, found in the Bible but useful for anybody, which says “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone.” [Romans 12:17]
Evan
