I wonder where we would be today if 20 years ago Justice Antonin Scalia hadn’t gotten away with leading the Republican partisan effort on the Supreme Court to cheat on Florida’s election results by not allowing a recount, making a mockery of decades of GOP state’s rights rhetoric, and Al Gore had been allowed to win the presidency, as he would have, over George W. Bush? We know for sure that Bush’s Vice President Dick Chaney would not have held the secret meeting with executives of the nation’s major fossil fuel and energy companies that stunted America’s political will to begin reducing carbon emissions. We know we wouldn’t have been left impotent for eight long years contributing nothing to the world’s efforts to stabilize climate change. We can imagine as well that America’s response to 9/11 would not have been to reduce the entire nation of Iraq to dust and rubble, faking reports of weapons of mass destruction as an excuse.
We can optimistically surmise that the United States would likely not be in the dreadful state it is in today with conservative partisan degenerates taking over our country as if they were a parasitic master class.
We can also imagine, I think, that the state of our nation might not be so despicable and disheartening that a hidden majority of Americans cannot stomach the ruthless politics of the moment, finding it so objectionable, so nauseating, that they have started paying as little attention to it as possible. The hidden majority has opted to burrow down into their localities, blocking out most everything but business, household life and family. They don’t scrutinize social media, they don’t read newspapers, they turn off the TV and radio news, bingeing on old sitcoms and listening to “their” music. They are using the technology of the moment not to stay informed about the unbearable condition of their country, but to commit themselves to internal exile as far as their financial condition permits. Any chance to escape from the devil’s circus of Trumpian America they take without a backward glance. Even former news junkies are only rushing through the headlines now.
Conservatives have made politics so odious, so fetid with dirty tricks, personal attacks and political extortion that it’s an alarming possibility that nobody but them wants to play the game anymore. They’ve made their opponents forget the cardinal principle of the American system: if you have the votes you can do anything you want. But you must have the votes. The GOP and its cultists know this cold and will do just about anything to get the votes they need.
For the hidden majority who are tuning out the “information age,” turning away is about preserving their mental health in a beloved country they sense is going quite mad, run by a cadre of misers, chiselers, political hitmen and would-be tyrants. This pack of bullies and bigots follow the current president ever deeper into the black hole of America’s brand of authoritarian capitalism that thrives on bribery, bankruptcy, defaulting on obligations and rigging the government and the legal system to get their way at any cost, no matter how preposterous and damaging to others “their way” happens to be.
They have installed in the White House, inches away from doomsday launch codes, a man who so embodies the “depravity of the business classes,” to quote Walt Whitman in “Democratic Vistas,” that he’s indistinguishable from a cartoon of a greedy little devil in top hat and spats.
The GOP keeps confirming to the hidden American majority Republicanism’s seemingly impregnable force field of corruption, to the point that the hidden majority increasingly finds the degraded patriotism of conservatives too stomach wrenching to bear, as when GOP senators took a sacred oath to be an impartial jury in the Senate trial of impeached President Trump.
For many, the final straw came with the disgusting irony of the Trump administration’s 2021 budget proposal in which the fabulously rich, many of whom haven’t done an honest day’s work in their lives, literally take food out of the mouths of poor families by defunding food stamps, force people with disabilities to find jobs if they hope to get the federal assistance they need to survive being jobless, take funds away from rental assistance programs for low income citizens and reduce the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants to states.
To be a Republican is to be a Trumpian. The GOP has embraced the financial ethics of a business man who uses bankruptcy and defaulting on bank loans as a part of his normal business plan, a business man who happens to be the “leader of the free world” whose financial life is so deep in the shadows that he won’t show his tax returns to his fellow Americans, a self-proclaimed billionaire who uses Deutsche Bank, called by the International Monetary Fund as the “riskiest bank in the world,” as his bank of choice and then, according to the New York Times Magazine, defaults on their loans, too.
Creating a politics to be proud of depends, of course, on the hidden majority of Americans, feeling fed up and powerless in the face of the daily gore of political news, recommitting themselves to democracy and braving the voting booth this November in their millions.
I don’t think it’s a risky gamble to bet that they will, if only to settle their stomachs and come in out of the cold.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
“A greedy little devil in top hat and spats,” yes. But also, and more importantly, a neo-fascist dictator who makes no bones about destroying every government department that dares to walk an independent path. Our “money is everything” electoral game and the free coverage our media gives daily to the tyrant make it hard to pay attention. Our tendency is to try to protect our own mental health. But unless we want a U.S. Hitler, we must defeat this imposter at the polls in November. Our future depends on it.
V.B. Price, thanks for another thoughtful column. I subscribe to D. L. Weatherford’s idea “When faced with a challenge, look for a way, not a way out.” Best wishes!