117 - Carnage and Resilience, II: An Affirmation of Democracy
The union holds. Americans refuse to be gulled by those who undermine our laws and deny the Constitution.
The Georgia runoff is still ahead, but the Senate remains conclusively in Democratic hands. Control of the House of Representatives is still undecided; whichever side wins will pull ahead only by few seats. Overall, American voters (turning out in high numbers) showed that by a thin but decisive majority they favor problem solvers over bomb throwers. That is a salutary and refreshing outcome. The Republic’s center may hold.
The unexpected performance of the Democratic Party, its candidates and, by inference President Biden — in the face of unprecedentedly high levels of inflation, a near world war, low presidential approval ratings, and a cataclysmic social media wave of lies and purposeful disinformation (including Russian trolling) — demonstrates that a near majority of Americans still believe that fairness, integrity, and truth telling matter. In the face of so much mendacious obfuscation and churlish deceit by Republicans, the electoral outcome indicates that character and purposefulness still matter. Even if only narrowly, we are a civilized nation still resilient. Such tentative conclusions will be tested, of course, once again in Georgia and in the legislative months ahead.
What else have we learned?
·As is by now clear, Americans believe that women have a right to control what happens to their own bodies.
A slim but important majority believe in our democracy. They voted not overwhelmingly but tellingly for honesty in elections. The threat to the nation from those endangered by status compression is still real. But at least this singular electoral test was won (if narrowly) by those who favor traditional forms of democracy and affirm our voting mechanisms.
Voters chose common sense and pragmatism over extremism and conspiracy mongering.
Outside of Florida, Latinos did not abandon the Democratic Party. But they remain anxious about crime.
All Americans want to feel safe. They want secure streets.
They want an end to all shootings, especially school massacres. The $1.5 billion judgment against Alex Jones for defaming parents and denying such carnage may help reduce a Trump-encouraged Republican tendency to overlook and downplay such horrors.
Homelessness is big continuing practical and ethical problem. Governor Tina Kotek’s victory in Oregon (despite huge dollops of Nike money) was much harder won than it should have been because of the perceived failure of officials in that state (and in Portland) to deal with such an immense and disruptive social and economic problem.
·In Portland, where there is now a critical shortage of police personnel, and across the big cities in the country, defunding the police was obviously a dumb cry. Everywhere, as in rural Texas school districts as well big cities, we need more and better trained enforcers, not fewer and not de-motivated ones. If President Biden’s administration can craft a meaningful approach to restoring a sense of security to the nation, his approval ratings will soar.
Much closer to home in Massachusetts, voters ousted a racist chain-gang deploying sheriff who had held office for twenty-five years. Voters, aroused by opponents and the media, finally paid heed and removed a bigot who backed Trump.
Nearby, too, a former governor who was as uncouth as Trump even before Trump was decisively thumped by Governor Janet Mills of Maine.
The victories in New Hampshire of a low-key consensus builder like Senator Maggie Hassan and Congressman Chris Pappas over bizarrely rampant Trumpers were also significant, as was Jared Golden’s ability to hold his rank-choice seat in an immense northern Maine rural constituency against another follower of Trump. Furthermore, in New Hampshire the losers promptly conceded; they did not deny defeat.
·We can also salute the fact that in Michigan and Minnesota both houses of their legislatures are now in Democratic hands. Wisconsin’s chambers remained solidly Republican, however, despite the worthy re-election of a Democratic governor.
Democrats notably won the Secretary of State races in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico over prominent wacko election-deniers and radical Trumpers. Those were major triumphs for democracy and rational electoral processing by adults.
·Overall, and tellingly, Trump’s endorsees performed much less well than expected (except in Ohio and Wisconsin). Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Colorado rejected nearly all of his backers. Is this 1998 all over again?
As a result, former supporters such as Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and the Wall Street Journal both castigated the ex-president. “Trump is the Republican Party’s biggest loser,” said the Journal. The Post pictured him as Humpty Dumpty having a great fall.
A Post columnist (once an admirer) called him “the most profound vote repellent in modern American history.” That strong critique might not be far off the mark. Certainly, just as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s bubble of conquest was punctured in 1954, so conceivably Trump’s ascent may finally have been slowed by American voters coming to their senses.
Douglas Brinkley calls him a “disrupter of civic norms.”
But let us not crow prematurely. It is still early, and the pussy groper has too many times survived and re-inflated his personal balloon. Moreover, as many as eighty-four 2020 deniers now sit in the new Congress, with only thirty or so having been defeated.
Further evidence of Trump’s slide in esteem also comes from Fox News (of all outlets!) where even Laura Ingraham and (more quietly) Tucker Carlson realize that the Trump brand is less persuasive – and even more malignant -- than before.
But where were these new found conservative critics of Trump when he refused to accept losing to President Biden and desperately fomented the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol? And do their opinions matter? Trump’s hard core conspiracist supporters are still legion.
Vice-President Mike Pence’s new book (So Help Me God) also provides revealing testimony of Trump’s fundamental ego-driven shallowness, plus his obsessive fear of being viewed as a defective weakling.
According to Pence, he instructs the vice-president to perpetrate electoral fraud. When Pence refuses, the then president says: “You’re too honest.” “People are gonna think you’re stupid.” Moreover, said Trump to Pence, “you’ll go down as a wimp.” Trump a little later asked Pence if he had been frightened when the Proud Boys and others stormed the capital, shouting “Hang Pence.” “Were you scared,” he wondered. Pence reports that the president never called when the vice-president’s safety was in real jeopardy.
Have at least a proportion of the American voters realized that Trump is a coward, as many braggarts and bullies are, and that he is a blowhard more interested in fame and attention than in accomplishment?
Maybe the penny has finally dropped. But, again, let us not crow prematurely.
These United States are still very much at risk, especially with (as Laura Ingraham rightly says) the Trumpists now a plurality in the Republican side of the House of Representatives and – in some states – in control of their legislatures.
As a columnist in the Atlantic wrote: “If the Republican Party does break with Trump now, it will be for only one reason, which is that he’s costing it power. Everything else he did—the relentless assault on truth, the unlimited corruption, the cruelty and incitements to violence, the lawlessness, his sheer depravity—was tolerable and even celebrated, so long as he was in power and viewed by Republicans as the path to more power.”
The battle for sanity is by no means over. We are at the very beginning of a re-conquest, not even (my view) at a turning point. We will not have crossed the Rubicon of tolerance and decency until senior Republicans denounce the MAGA leaders and pretenders and seek a return to honest dealings.
Again quoting from the Atlantic: “The Republican Party remains diseased. There are a few exceptions… but Americans should consider the GOP a threat to liberal democracy until we see evidence of dramatic changes.”
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There is much more important work still to be done to ensure the survival of these United States. But the election outcomes restore faith in the sense and sensibility of voters, and of majority rule. So does the general acceptance of outcomes.
If (but we are not there yet) the Trump brand becomes toxic, just as the older McCarthy and Gingrich brands lost their luster, we may be able to recover the integrity and civil regard that was nearly lost during the Trump upsurge.
Moreover, Big Ben is bonging again, just in time to ring in a resilient political era across the Atlantic.
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