This piece is appearing as an op/ed in newspapers in my very red congressional district (the VA-06 of 2012, when I was the Democratic nominee for Congress.
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I know I tend toward optimism, but I also want to be a realist. I am optimistic about the 2024 election, but I also recognize the reality that even if that election goes well, America will still be troubled.
I am optimistic about the election because anyone who votes for Donald Trump must either be in favor of Trump’s lawless way of wielding power, or be somehow unable to see the obvious truth right before their eyes.
And I believe a clear majority of Americans fall into neither of those categories.
So, I predict the American electorate will reject Trump—and do so soundly.
But, to be realistic, I must recognize that -- even after this Trump force being defeated at the ballot box, even when this leader eventually disappears from the political stage -- the nation would still have tens of millions of its citizens who, troublingly, either 1) don’t believe in the American form of government our Constitution has given us, or 2) somehow fail to see important truths blatantly displayed right before their eyes.
Either desiring fascism, and/or out of touch with reality.
Can America bring those drawn to strong-man government back to revering the Constitution? Can those who can’t see what’s right in front of their eyes. and who believe the unbelievable, be brought into a relation to reality as sane as a healthy democracy needs for its people to be?
About contact with reality: It would be helpful for us to understand how it happened that tens of millions of intelligent people have been led into a place where they can believe such obvious lies as
- that the election of 2020 was stolen. Or
- that the prosecution of Donald Trump is politically motivated.
How did it happen that majorities of the Republican believe things that go against all evidence? How is it that they’ll ignore the evidence and believe instead the lies told by a man who looks likely to go down in history as the most prodigious the world as ever seen?
- How can anyone believe the Stolen Election lie, when it has been exposed as completely false in every way possible? Yet a majority of Republicans in the recent primaries believe it?
- How can anyone not see that Trump has committed serious crimes and has compelled a reluctant Attorney General to hold Trump criminally accountable.
- How does anyone fail to see that Trump’s obvious Big Lie shows that it was Trump who was trying to steal the election, which means launching a fundamental attack on the American constitutional order?
- How can people not see how Trump has openly challenged the Rule of Law, both in committing his crimes and then in his making war on those forces of the American system of justice -- whose job it is to enforce the law equally on all – threatening judges and witnesses in ways that foment political violence, with lies about “Witch Hunt!” being the new Big Lie, falsely making the criminal out to be the victim?
- How do intelligent people not draw the obvious conclusion from the fact that grand juries and juries are looking at the evidence and deciding to do this indicting Trump for crimes and already some voting unanimous verdicts against Trump?
Good answers to such questions could help this nation heal itself in the post-Trump political world, whenever that may come. Could help us devise ways of moving people toward again valuing the American system, and toward judging well enough between the truth and the lie.
America needs to help Conservative America manifest, in its politics, the goodness it has always contained. (Conservative goodness, mixed with some conservative forms of brokenness. But much that Conservative America did in the national system served some form of goodness.)
Much that’s gone wrong when American patriots want a strongman, and when masses of people get caught up in a fundamentally false picture of what’s happening, needs to be brought back toward the right.
That’s after Trump has left the political scene.
Even if Trump loses in 2024, he will likely maintain his hold on his supporters. (And Trump will doubtless use will predictably wield that power for destructive purposes that get in the way of the nation’s moving onward with a healthy democracy that works well for the good of the nation.)
But someday, Trump will leave the scene. What will happen then with those people who were passionate for a fascistic leader, and who believed whatever was said by an obvious and prodigious liar?
What should the nation do to make those groups of people acceptably reintegrated in an American democracy that is working more or less as it should?
How can patriots who now support Trump’s assault on American Democracy and the Rule of Law be moved to support the American constitutional order?
How can good people – who now thrill to the ugly rhetoric of a would-be dictator – be brought back to expressing their goodness in their politics, and not just in the rest of their lives?
To understand how to undo the way that Conservative America has been made unbroken, it would be good to understand how this situation between liar and believer came to be.
Understanding how to be helpful in such a restoration of wholeness in this substantial chuck of our fellow Americans will likely depend on understanding just how so many people with intelligence believed what their intelligence should readily recognize is a Lie, and so many “American patriots” could support a leader who personifies the opposite of a good leader imagined in American culture.
- One challenge will be to bring those who now apparently would welcome an American dictator back to a belief in our constitutional democracy and the Rule of Law.
- Another challenge will be to encourage movement, among those millions who have shown a willingness to believe obvious lies, back toward the kind of contact with reality that a healthy democracy requires of its people.
