For a number of years now I’ve tried to be a witness to the world from the outside rather than a mover and shaker on the inside. Start taking your witnessing seriously, and you’ll live in a much bigger and more interesting and probably more terrifying world than you thought you lived in. You’ll also give up any ambitions to be a mover and shaker, because, upon careful inspection, you’ll see that those people are miserable, and often enough, batshit crazy.
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Julie and I witnessed the recent super-spreader event in the Capitol with a deep sadness and an even deeper relief. The sadness comes from understanding that this country is divided into warring tribes who see each other as the embodiment of evil.
The relief comes from seeing video of Donald Trump that indicates he is old, sick, and demented, and won’t be able to run for president in 2024. That may seem a cruel thing to say, but he’s been a bad president, an incompetent administrator and strategist, and he’s brought out the worst in the American people. The country will be a kinder and gentler place if and when he becomes incapable of politics.
He may be incapable of politics now. The people who know him best no longer trust him. They watched him set his mob of supporters on poor old loyal Mike Pence—who foolishly thought he had been chosen as Vice President for his deep Christian incorruptibility—who had to be escorted out of the Capitol Building by Secret Service officers responsible for his safety. Pence may see himself as a future Christian martyr, but like St. Augustine, he’d prefer not to transition just now.
We still worry that the world is in danger of being destroyed if Trump decides that launching a nuclear weapon toward Tehran or Pyongyang will let him stay in the White House for the duration of a national emergency. (It would be a national emergency all right, but like the nation, it probably wouldn’t last any longer than his current term. There’s a reason it’s called Mutually Assured Destruction.)
But nobody in the Pentagon is going to jeopardize their retirement by firing off a nuclear weapon. The military aide with the nuclear football has already been briefed not to let Trump near the codes, and they’ve been changed since the Russian hack anyway. Barring a suicidal chain of command, we all will live to vote another day.
What we will vote for is likely to be a creature put together by a marketing team to appeal to exactly half of Americans.
It’s important that we have contested elections. The Deep State exists, and it consists of millions of people dedicated to keeping Americans at each other’s throats.
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If this idea sounds far-fetched, consider who besides Donald Trump benefits when this country splits between opposing factions. There’s Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the news business, the ad agencies, the lawyers, the free-trade economists, the retailers of cheap Chinese goods, and the resource and energy companies.
In the case of other countries, a giant enemy paralyzed by infighting is safer than one that knows exactly what it wants. You also get an object lesson that sells your citizens on the advantages of a one-party totalitarian state.
In the case of corporations, equal opposing forces can be tipped one way or the other with a minimum of lobbying. With lawyers, it’s always nice to have an unending supply of people in your waiting room who think they’ve been cheated.
For ordinary Americans, it’s like rooting for one football team or another, which at least keeps our minds off rising sea levels, hurricanes, and economic collapse.
Get all these people giving what they can to right- or left-wing boys’ clubs, and you can keep the pot boiling for another election cycle or two.
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Yet the recent election was more honest than most. Safeguards were put in, ironically because Trump had insisted the last election was fraudulent.
Eighty-one million people voted for Biden against Trump’s seventy-five million. The Republican Electoral College strategy worked until it didn’t.
One of Trump’s mistakes was telling a lot of people who had lost a lot and are set to lose a lot more that they would be winners, for once. They’re probably disappointed at the moment, having finally seen that they still look like losers on TV.
Another Trump mistake was thinking that he already had the election fixed. He made a typical political newbie’s mistake, thinking that people he had bought were going to stay bought. That’s the reason he’s so enraged at the Georgia governor and secretary of state right now.
Yet another Trump mistake was underestimating the level of violence he was generating in his followers, and how frightening yet familiar it was for the rest of us. Watching on TV, what we saw happen in the Capitol generated not the Shock of the New but the Shock of Recognition. We had seen those expressions on those faces before, in supermarkets and gas stations and waiting at stoplights. We had known exactly what they wanted to do the minute they looked at us.
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A problem arises with engineered chaos. It soon becomes the real thing, and refuses to stay within safe parameters in a world of declining resources and climate phase-changes and pandemics. As Trump has discovered, trying to craft a little instability risks a collapse of the entire system.
In a worst-case scenario—pretty much where we are now—civil war begins. Institutions that were supposed to last forever disappear. We are led by a series of military men dressed in civilian clothes if we’re lucky. If we’re not, we get a Stalin, a Mao, a Mussolini or a Hitler or a Franco. One thing we won’t get is a Trump or even a Senator Cruz or Hawley.
In any event, the America we knew before January 6 is gone forever.
I expect more violence before, during, and after Biden’s inauguration, more and more strident allegations of a stolen election from Trump supporters, a gradually escalating war between police and people of color, multiple versions of the truth for everything, a lot of innocent people dead, a lot of once-nice people no longer innocent.
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Sigmund Freud has been justly condemned for his misogyny, homophobia, pathologizing of outsiders, prurient Puritanism, his shoehorning of all human motivation into the Oedipus Complex, and his annoying compulsion to tell you what you’re really thinking. But our own culture has, in cancelling Freud, thrown out a number of babies with the bathwater.
Among these are the ideas that the unconscious exists, and that its contents consist of what we know but refuse to think about, and that we project onto others those things we don’t like in ourselves, and that any civilization has multiple traps and snares that cause deep pain to the people forced to follow its rules. The attack on the Capitol was carried out by people made unconscious by rage, who wanted to destroy a civilization that has by definition stunted their lives, and who were looking for someone they could blame for making them destroy it. It was appropriate that they were called to action by a person who hasn’t possessed conscious awareness for years.
One of the reasons that Trump can tell lies and have them seen as deeper truths is because he operates entirely on an unconscious level, and so can connect directly with the unconscious of his followers. It’s like God talking to them, if God lives caged in the darkness within.
In such a situation, impulse substitutes for critical thinking, and impulse becomes the only reality. Impulse does not allow for self-doubt, nor does it allow for any distinction between truth and lies. It does allow for unrestrained violence against the people whom their God says deserve punishment.
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Even if you’re stuck hunkering down at home, dependent on screens for information, you’re not completely at the mercy of people who tell you only what they want you to believe. You can stop listening to only one network, for one thing. You can start reading history, for another.
Critical thinking has been around for three thousand years, and it’s teachable to anyone capable of reason and skepticism. You don’t believe what you’re told just because the person telling it roots for the same football team, is one way of putting it. You never look at the world through the fogged-over lens of ideology, is another. You approach new data knowing you’ll have to work hard to make sure it’s true, and once you decide it is true, you have to be willing to renounce any cherished belief that it shows to be false.
Critical thinking has been codified as the scientific method, and it’s a powerful way to get at the truth. It’s not perfect. Scientists, like any group of humans, can be stampeded into asking the wrong questions of the world, sometimes for centuries. And the scientific method is slow. Humans are sometimes too impatient to wait for solid evidence to base their actions on, especially if they’ve discovered the sheer exhilaration of acting on rage.
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I have watched the Republican party struggle with critical thinking since Richard Nixon was wandering the halls of the White House with a glass of scotch, talking to the portraits of his predecessors. From that time on, instead of subjecting their own doctrines to skepticism, they’ve doubled down again and again. Magical thinking has taken the place of honest observation of the world. Where reality intruded, reality has been blamed on Democrats. Where lies were needed to get elected, lies were told. Where votes needed suppressing, votes were suppressed.
When fighting for principles was called for, they fought for lies and called them principles.
When George W. Bush’s advisor Karl Rove told a reporter that, “we’re an empire now, and an empire creates its own reality,” he was talking about a purely Republican empire. He was also talking about lies becoming the truth if you apply enough pressure. It’s an assertion that devolves down to the ancient doctrine of might making right.
It has been a process of decades, and generations of lies and liars have culminated in the compulsive liar Donald Trump becoming president. To turn Karl Rove on his head (something I’ve always wanted to do), when you destroy a reality with lies, you destroy the empire that created it.
Trump’s followers, in the aftermath of trashing the Capitol, suddenly find themselves in a world where wishes don’t come true just because you want them to, with warrants out for their arrest and termination notices in their corporate email. The Republican Party, which once trumpeted law and order, has corrupted the law and promoted disorder and defiled the temple of our democracy.
Trump’s militias brought zip-tie handcuffs into the Capitol, looking for members of Congress. They erected a gallows and noose across the grass from the marble steps, which recalled the terrorism of the Jim Crow years. They tried to overthrow an elected government before it could be installed. They killed a cop.
Then they tried to blame their own actions on Antifa, their go-to scapegoat.
It’s rare when an entire ideology collapses so completely into incoherence, but that’s what has happened to Republicanism. I know the Democrats don’t have a comprehensive and accurate vision of the world, but they’re masters of realism compared to Republicans. They at least know that the hard work of critical thinking can discover, however slowly, a reality that all Americans can believe in.
That requires that all Americans become critical thinkers. It’s a nice thought, but unrealistic.
The real masters of realism, of course, work at Johns Hopkins. From the Johns Hopkins Covid Map this morning: 22,410,609 U.S. infections. 374,348 U.S. deaths.