A piece I posed here earlier this week — SOME MEN CLAIMING A RIGHT TO CONTROL WOMEN — ran this weekend in the newspaper, and it prompted one MAGA reader to come forward with some comment whose spirit I recognized.
I know from experience how much some people on the right like to use someone’s having “lost” an election to belittle them. When I lost the 2012 election for Congress (in VA-06, against Bob Goodlatte) — completely unsurprisingly, given that the Republicans have a 2:1 majority in the district, and maintain a very closed political subculture — but continued to put my political views out into the district, I became a target of that kind of right-wing attempts to use my defeat to put me down. (If they were in an NFL game, there’d be a flag for taunting.)
My piece about men controlling women was the first to appear after Trump’s victory, and so it was no surprise that this MAGA guy used the occasion to attempt to discredit my voice on the basis of my being on the losing side. This led me to respond in this way:
You seem to think that your victory is a vindication of your allegiance to the side that won.
But the people are not necessarily the judges of what's right.
America's founders believed that Democracy depended on the citizenry possessing what they called "Republican virtue." That meant that they understood that something might go wrong with "the will of the people" that would be destructive of the system that they were establishing.
So when this year the people of "America have spoken," the question to be asked is how — in that electoral result — the people measured up to the "Republican virtue" our Founders believed is required.
When we look at the people's choice in this election -- choosing a man whose record of assaulting the foundations of our constitutional order and the Rule of Law is clear and blatant -- it hardly follows that our Founders, and the four American giants on Mount Rushmore, would applaud.
I would bet heavily that they would say that the conservative who showed the kind of virtue Democracy requires was Liz Cheney. Everything Ms. Cheney has said about Trump, and the Trump Party, can readily be demonstrated to be valid.
Yes, it hurts a good deal that the election turned out as it did. And not the least part of that hurt is that so large a portion of the "Demos" ("the People") of our Democracy has lost what our Founders' system requires of them: the kind of good understanding plus good values it takes for the citizenry to make good decisions.
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Subsequently, an additional thought occurred to me. So I posted an additional comment to observe what seemed to me a paradox.
Over the years I've engaged with a lot of people who, when they win elections, treat the “voice of the people” as though it were Truth handed down from Mount Sinai.
Generally, these same people also take a very dim view of human nature: their view of us is tinged with ideas about our inherent sinfulness.
The paradox is that when “the people” vote their way, they’d taunt the losers as if the judgment of the people made the losers WRONG. The paradox is, I hope it's clear, that if someone thinks we're pervaded with sinfulness, it hardly makes sense to assume that the people are necessarily right.
Then there's my view, where I say that we are better creatures than we have believed ourselves to be. But in that, I mean better BY INHERENT NATURE. That inherent nature, however, doesn't necessarily develop properly in a world where a Force of Brokenness both ARISES INDEPENDENTLY OF OUR INBORN NATURE, and, then proceeds to INJURE people who grow up in them, making them broken in ways that lead them to do wrong-headed and destructive things.
My life's work has been describing how such a FORCE OF BROKENNESS arises, and operates, in the human world as an inevitable consequence of our species being the first to take the unprecedented step of "extricating ourselves from the niche in which we evolved (and thus out of the natural order) by inventing our own new way of life."
As a result, when I look out upon the brokenness this electorate has just inflicted on our nation, and on themselves, I feel both a higher regard of who we humans are born to be and a sympathetic regard for how people can get broken enough to mistake the Evil for the Good.
