Wednesday, December 01, 2021

There Will Always Be An England

This spirit and these conventions? The darkest days for Britain since WWII were arguably Brexit, a self-inflicted wound that threatened at more than one point to sunder the Union as well as reignite the Troubles. And yet I don’t think at any point did anyone seriously opine that British democracy was done for.

Why not? And why do our pundits reach for “the end of democracy” constantly to bemoan whatever they think is happening in America? Maybe it’s their love of clichés, which is certainly easier than thinking!
I mention that because NPR actually says we are slaves to cliches:  Dems in disarray being the one under discussion there, though the evidence (as argued there) is that it's the GOP that's a shambles now.  But that story doesn't get told because, well, the political press can't quite imagine it.  One can blame cliches; I blame laziness and herd mentality.  After all, who wants to sound like an outsider?  The whole point of life after high school is to sit at the cool table, and one doesn't advance in corporate America by sounding like Noam Chomsky, or even just thinking outside the box.

So we're stuck with the decline and fall of America, because despair is always easier to talk about, and hope sounds so sophomoric.  Or maybe the fact is we realize, secretly, that American democracy really is "very, very young."  Maybe we imagine it's more like the Emperor's new clothes than not, and we're terrified some gang of perspicacious kids is going to declare the whole affair naked!  Which betrays an ignorance of the entire system as fundamental as that of Mike Lindell or Michael Flynn or Donald Trump.

The simplest rejoinder to this "Democracy is doomed if we don't all agree Donald Trump lost!" is the courts.  They are sentencing the fools who stormed the Capitol on a daily basis, and giving no quarter.  60 times the courts rejected Trump's efforts to overturn the election (every one of them a joke that wasn't funny); the Supremes weighed in twice or three times, refusing to get involved or lend the affairs any of the high court's dignity (I think one or two justices wanted to, but that's cause for concern another day). Now the terror is Trump will "install his people" at the state level and control the vote there.  Which will go over like a lead balloon if even one state's agency decides the ballots in that state are fraudulent, but only as to Trump (or the GOP candidate) in that state.  That is where the courts WILL intervene, to prevent fraudulent behavior by the state, not by the voters of that state.  It may even be that Congress rejects that state's electors, which it has the power to do.  Messy, messy, messy, but when has American democracy not been the rock thrown at the top hat, as (IIRC) Mr. White put it?  Jules Verne memorably had his world traveler Phineas Fogg cross the American West, where he came upon a town where a riot was taking place.  It turned out he was wrong; it was no riot, it was a local election.  The office being contested was the city's dog catcher.

Many a truth is told in jest.

We exert a huge amount of energy to pretend the vote was sacred and above reproach and the duty of the voter was protected from all comers.  Harpo Marx in his memoir recalled going as a child to vote with his grandfather, a non-citizen and unregistered voter.  He and his grandfather rode in a car sent by the local "machine" to get him to the polls, get his vote, and take him back home.  Both grandson and grandfather, at the time anyway, considered it a grand part of America.  Today we would consider that proof the entire affair was crashing into the abyss.

Yes, Trump is bad; but he's been defeated twice (he lost the first time, but for the foolishness of the electoral college), and he won't rise from the ashes a la Nixon a third time.  Republicans may adore him, but they are a minority of the voters and despite Trump's best efforts, the majority still rules this country.  For better or worse.

Meanwhile, the best we can get is bad analysis:
The thrust of the argument there is this: 

“The parallels between the Leninist power usurpation in early 20th century Russia and the Trumpian brigades in today’s United States are becoming ever more eerie.”

I'm sure they are, except we don't have a czar who is so divorced from his people he's clueless about the state of his nation, and a long history of tyrannical rule finally unwinding in Russia as it had already done across Europe from France eastward, especially after the first World War tore Europe apart and didn't put it back together again.  For a brief history lesson:  Europe was run largely by one gigantic extended family, cousins from England across the Channel to Germany to Russia:  literally.  The whole thing came undone in WWI, setting the stage for Russia to finally catch up with France from a century and change earlier.  And France's revolution was fomented by:  the American one.  So are we likely to go the way of Russia?  Is Trump our Lenin?  No, he's too big a boob.  Bannon?  He fancies himself so, but he is less persuasive on his best day than Lenin ever was.  Bannon wants the revolution to make him czar without his putting any more effort into it than to stand on the sidelines and say: "Let's you and him fight!"

Frankly, as cantankerous as we are, at bottom our political culture is too British to fall to dissolution so easily.  If we were so fragile, the Civil War would have ended the whole experiment long before we could get to the 1960's and start giving the vote to all those people denied any privilege of citizenship for so very, very long in this country.

The argument in that Raw Story article never addresses any of that, it just takes it as a given that:

...the GOP is mob rule arising from the right. It seeks to maintain, to the point of open warfare, the hierarchies of power by which rugged white individuals stand on top. 

Actually, drop the "rugged."  Nothing rugged about Steve Bannon or Donald Trump or Patrick Byrne.  They're all just white men who want to stand on top, and are afraid neither their money nor their whiteness will keep them there.  At bottom it's not that, as the Raw Story article tacitly contends, that the people are sheeple.  It's the same old American story it’s always been:  fear of a brown planet.

If that's what's going to bring the American Experiment to an end. then it's a self-inflicted wound started when Columbus got here.  But while it's our original sin, I don't think it's our fatal flaw.  National hubris may sound good to some when spouted by Donald Trump; but most of us don't rally to that cause, and we never will.  There will always be troublemakers in American democracy; and we will always be ready to thwart them. It’s how our democracy works.

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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal7:51 AM

    I made a big mistake a couple of weeks back, wanting to read a Raw Story story that they required allowing them to invade my browser to read I clicked yes. The pop-ups from them are the worst I've ever had apart from a virus I got from downloading a piece of free-ware from C-Net after CBS bought them out. Apparently I'm not the only one who wanted to get rid of it because I found a comment board where they told specifically how to get rid of Raw Story.

    Alternet should have been my warning that Raw Story was going to be more of a liability for the left than an asset to it. They're essentially an ideological atheist outfit trying to use the legitimate American traditional liberalism as a Trojan horse, sort of like how the Leninist and Trotsyites and Stalinists tried to co-opt the struggle for racial equality to the detriment of racial equality. Reading an article about Lenin and Trotsky's plan to set up a Black bantustand in the American South, an article PUBLISHED BY THE IDIOT COMMUNISTS HERE IN THE 1920s was a milestone in my getting shut of Marxism as anything but a huge mistake.

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