Riley Tenor

Now we know. It can happen here.

 

I’m haunted by this picture, which seems to capture the mood of the Trump campaign and today’s Republican Party. For God’s sake, please don’t let this be the face of our nation’s future. It is, of course, not up to God — we are a democracy, so our destiny is in our own hands.

The founders of our republic knew better than to institute a pure democracy; they did not expect us to govern ourselves directly. But they did ask us to recognize and elect to represent us women and men (well, back then it was just men) of courage, character and wisdom, who would fairly represent our values and interests — and to reject the bullies, the blusterers, the con artists, the gabblers of wild lies who substitute anger and insult for reasoned argument. They bet that they could trust us to do that, at least in the long run — or, as Winston Churchill put it, more sardonically: “The Americans will do the right thing, once they’ve exhausted the alternatives.”

We’ve exhausted the alternatives. Tomorrow we find out if we’re still up to the responsibility the founders charged us with.

 

Among all the comments about last night’s debate, I thought these brief sentences, by J. D. Vance, were notable:

The headline from last night’s debate nearly writes itself: A major party presidential candidate refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election.

This is unprecedented in recent political history, and Donald J. Trump will undoubtedly wallow in the scorn of the mainstream press over the next few days. Yet I found myself wondering, as debate co-watchers gasped over Mr. Trump’s statements, whether any of the Trump supporters I know back home in southern Ohio will actually care.

The answer is probably no. At the core of his appeal is a rejection of mainstream political norms, and this is just another example of Mr. Trump slaughtering a proverbial sacred cow.

The question now is not whether Mr. Trump will lose the election — he will — but whether the segment of our country that gasps when he delegitimizes our democratic institutions can ever be reconciled to those who cheer the same.

Vance’s assertion that a sizable minority in this country cheers the delegitimization of our democratic institutions is probably correct. The word “treason” comes more readily to the lips of the political right, as a kind of invective (Ann Coulter made a pile writing a book accusing liberals of it, apparently just by being liberals). Here, it’s just plain descriptive. You have to wonder how we got here, to where millions want to make America great again by overthrowing it; and, much more important, how we engineer a U-turn. Decades of Republican malpractice are part of the answer: political purposes were served, and individuals enriched, by egging on the ignoramuses. I’ll confess to feeling a little Schadenfreude that these reckless games have finally blown up in the Republican Party’s face.

But only a little. Schadenfreude literally means “pleasure in harm” (implicitly, harm experienced by someone else). In this case, we’re all harmed. “You broke it, are you happy now?” isn’t an adequate response. Coming up with something better, and soon, will be essential.

Still, understanding how we got into this situation may help us figure out how to get back out. George H. W. Bush has said he’ll be voting for Clinton this year. I wonder if he sees the line that runs back from Donald Trump through Willie Horton and attacks on “card-carrying” members of the ACLU (an organization whose express mission is the safeguarding of the Constitution!), and has second thoughts about what must have seemed merely expedient at the time.

It’s hard to believe that Tony Judt has been gone for almost 6 years. I recently re-read some of the short, more intimate pieces he wrote toward the end of his life, and marveled at this passage, from Edge People, a deeply personal defense of cosmopolitanism and rejection of the political uses of “identity” on both the left and the right:

We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability. Globalization itself—the “flat” earth of so many irenic fantasies—will be a source of fear and uncertainty to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for protection. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.

Being “Danish” or “Italian,” “American” or “European” won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps. Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will demand “tests”—of knowledge, of language, of attitude—to determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of British or Dutch or French “identity.” They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people. My people.

The reference to the “flat” earth is a gibe at Thomas Friedman, whom Judt found glib and facile. Six years on, Judt looks almost implausibly clairvoyant, and the reference to “political trumps” is an unintentional pun before the fact. The time of troubles Judt spoke of is upon us now.