“As democracy is perfected, the Office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”
¬— H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
“Democracy has prevailed.”
— Joseph P. Biden, January 20, 2021
For the moment, Mr. President, only for the moment.
Let us dare not forget for a single solitary second that in his inaugural “Unity” speech, President Biden also made note that “democracy is fragile,” a worrisome truth never more evident, outside of the years during the Civil War, than during the last four years as Donald Trump and the Republican Party ran roughshod over the Constitution and exposed its long-hidden flaws. I will go one giant step farther than the new President and state that our democracy remains in peril.
The war against ignorance has not yet been won, not by a longshot. Yes, a number of QAnon adherents, evangelists, and followers of extreme right-wing and white supremacist organizations have belatedly confessed they were misled, lied to, and duped when Trump’s “Storm” that would materialize on the day of the inauguration and mete out biblical justice to the alleged “Deep State” party of Satanists and pedophiles didn’t happen. But we must not overlook the fact that 74 million citizens voted for Trump in the last election, and tens of millions of them remain and will continue to remain diehard followers of their false and incredibly flawed messiah. Furthermore, these misguided people are far better armed than the cognoscenti.
Let’s examine some of the facts:
A recent CBS poll, closely reflecting the results of similar polls, revealed that 69% of Republicans still believe that Biden was fraudulently elected. This defies logic. Forget the 60-odd cases of voter fraud alleged by Republicans that were laughed out of court, including the Supreme Court, due to lack of evidence, and that many key members of Trump’s own administration investigated and determined the election was cleanly run. These deniers need to ask themselves that if the Democrats did “steal” the election, how did the Republicans manage somehow to pick up seats in the House, and why didn’t the Democrats “steal” a Senate majority outright on Election Day instead of spending two months sweating out the Georgia runoff? But they won’t.
A Gallup poll last year determined that a mere 10% of Republicans trust the mainstream media while 73% of Democrats do. When tens of millions of Americans choose to get their “news” from Fox and other right-wing TV and radio commentators and outlets that don’t even pretend to present opposing views, and white Christian evangelist pastors who preach to their congregations that Trump, an unrepentant sinning outsider, will deliver them to God in spite of his well-chronicled human imperfections, convincing these people to return to the mainstream, which would include a Republican Party based on pre-Reagan values, seems to be an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task.
“If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls,” says Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, “we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies.”
“A democracy can only survive if people make informed choices,” argues Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College. “And people can only make informed choices if their source of information is reliable. And if their source of information is unreliable, full of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, then inevitably people are going to make bad decisions and choose demagogues.”
Changing the minds of tens of millions of willfully blind people cannot happen overnight or even in a few short years. The Republic does not have that much time, only two to four years to begin and advance the process at this critical juncture in our history. As Lilliana Mason, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland puts it: “Polarization is not the problem anymore. Now it’s the threat to democracy.”
I applaud and wholeheartedly endorse Biden’s stated desire to unify this fractured nation. As the leader of the Republic, that’s his job. But privately he must acknowledge that he cannot allow us to forgive and forget and put the recent past behind us for the sake of unity. There are still tens of millions of dangerous zealots out there who are committed to ending the Republic while duped into believing they are saving it, and many of them are heavily armed.
For that reason Biden must allow the Department of Justice to do its job and prosecute these seditionists to the full extent of the law and hand down long prison sentences to send a clear and forceful message to these millions of malcontents that advocating the violent overthrow of the government cannot be excused and will be dealt with harshly, that if they are to take power someday they must do so peacefully and according to the provisions of the Constitution. In his first days as President, Biden has already promised to strengthen the nation’s code of ethics that Trump ruthlessly exploited, and I trust that means a hands-off approach to the DOJ.
Biden must also begin to take steps toward closing the loopholes in the Constitution that allowed Trump, with a Republican Congress behind him that flat out refused to do its Constitutionally-mandated job to check the power of the President, to trample all over it. It’s obvious the founders of our nation and authors of the Constitution never imagined hordes of citizens would be so unenlightened to elect a Donald Trump to the Presidency, but it happened, and it must not be allowed to happen again. If that means censuring and even expelling Members of Congress who continue to espouse dangerous conspiracy theories and endorse acts of sedition, so be it. Republican legislators must have the courage and the fortitude to stand up to, not only wannabe dictators like Donald Trump but, their own constituents if the Republic is to survive this crisis.
In the sagacious words of the famous English conservative Edmund Burke: “(A representative’s) unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
