I need to get something off my chest. I’m beginning to hate politics. I’ve been a political junkie my whole life, and that’s something I’ve never felt before. Something has changed.
What has changed is that this is the first time in… ever? … that one of the two major political parties in the United States has decided they don’t want to do politics anymore but instead to do autocracy — dictatorship — rejecting the results of a democratic election.
Playing chess can be great fun, but it’s not so fun when the guy who loses his queen decides to just flip over the chessboard.
The last time something like this happened was in the aftermath of the 1860 election, when the southern states who voted against Abraham Lincoln decided to secede from the Union instead of accepting the results of the election. As bad as that was, at least they only tried to separate themselves from the country, rather than attempting to force the entire country to accept their preferred candidate as the victor instead of the duly-elected Lincoln.
Today, a defeated president is falsely claiming he won an election that he lost by millions of votes and several key states in the electoral college. He is forcing government officials to comply with his delusional or nefarious scheme to undermine public confidence in the election and the world’s confidence in the United States as a stable democratic country. Republicans in Congress, and even the Secretary of State, are publicly denying the fact that Joe Biden will be the next president.
That would be bad enough if the election had been close, but it wasn’t. Biden clearly won — in fact he won by a greater margin in the key states than Trump’s narrow defeat of Clinton in 2016 — and no evidence has been presented to suggest otherwise.
What this means is that American politics is now a contest between one party that believes in democracy (the Democrats) and another party that openly resists democracy (the Republicans). That changes everything.
Politics could be an enjoyable pursuit when it was about debating issues of policy: Should taxes be higher or lower? Should the government spend more or less money on various public services? Should America be more involved in the rest of the world or more focused on our internal affairs? It was great to be able to have such debates in a country where both sides of the issues accepted that we would have the debates, count the votes, and then shake hands and be one country together.
But now, that’s no longer possible — because one side is no longer willing to accept when they lose an election. There can’t be a handshake if only one hand is extended. If the loser refuses to gracefully acknowledge defeat and instead makes their hand into a fist, it undermines the legitimacy of the whole political process going forward.
I know there will be many Democrats saying, “Oh, don’t worry, nothing has really changed, pretty soon it’ll all go back to normal.” As much as I wish that were the case, I disagree. I don’t think things will go back to normal. Now we know that one party has an authoritarian worldview, preferring a leader with autocratic aspirations over democracy. In other words, now we know that one party is un-American.
It has never been this way before, except perhaps in the Civil War era. I don’t believe we’re headed for another civil war, but I do believe it’s going to be very hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Unless Republicans quickly and firmly denounce Trump for his false claims of election fraud and for acting like a wannabe dictator rather than a defeated president, that party has lost its legitimacy. Every election from now on will be an existential struggle for the survival of American democracy. Republicans will believe that Democrats will cheat in the elections, and Democrats will believe that Republicans will not accept defeat if they lose.
In other words, politics won’t be fun anymore. It’ll be grim, somber, a grave civic duty to resist evil and preserve our basic American values from perceived threats from within our own country. It won’t be about taxes, or health care, or whatever other issue you care about. It’ll be about whether you’re for democracy or fascism.
I am deeply sad that this is where we are in our once-great nation. I used to like politics — the debate about important issues of how to make our country and our world a better place. That’s what American politics was supposed to be. That’s what it was, for the most part, until now. But now, our country is a laughingstock, not certain of whether we will even be able to have a peaceful transfer of power after an election. We are becoming like one of those “shithole countries” that Trump referred to. Because he has made us one.
Perhaps there are brighter days on the horizon, after the Republican Party somehow purges itself of the moral rot that has overtaken it. But I think that fair horizon is years in the future. In the meantime, politics will be like cleaning the toilets — an unpleasant duty you have to do, because otherwise things would stink really bad.
How far America has fallen.
