Trump has, one way or another, changed our national life irrevocably. When one side of a political struggle has shown itself willing to commit crimes, collaborate with foreign powers, destroy institutions, and lie brazenly about facts readily ascertainable to anyone, should the other side—can the other side—then pretend these things did not happen?
Some Democratic leaders are proclaiming that we can go back to the world before Trump—and before Brett Kavanaugh and Mitch McConnell, before Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani, before an invasion of a secure facility at the Capitol, before babies were torn from their mothers and caged, before racist rhetoric from the White House and massacres at a synagogue and an El Paso Walmart—to a world of political cooperation, respect for norms, and nonpolitical courts.
How?
Assume new national leadership in 2021. What leader worth voting for would negotiate with Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy and believe either will keep his word; what sane president would turn over sensitive documents to Republican-led committees; what Democratic president would simply accept that the federal courts are now the property of the opposition, and submit issues of national policy to them, in the confidence of receiving a fair shake? After this night in the forest, can I, or any sane person, ever believe in these people and institutions again?
No. I think he’s right that we’ve gone down a road we can’t go back up.
Comments
6 responses to “After this night in the forest”
It pains me to say this – and I am an ‘outsider’ – but you have to hope that you can go down that road again. The alternative is a reset by civil war, sooner or later.
I don’t think we can avoid at least some kind of balkanization via war or peaceful means (though that’d probably end in war)
There have to be a lot of trials…
We’ve already tried that. The Shrub Administration did every single item on this list, as had Reagan before him. There are, perhaps, a few geriatrics left who fondly remember Ike, but every single Republican since him has either been a venal monster or a milquetoast sop designed to pardon and ameliorate the damage done by his predecessor.
Except this last time, with Shrub, the country tried to repudiate the monster and voted for the reasonable centrist in Obama, who immediately proved eager to act the sop anyway. And all that earned him was eight long years of Republican intransigence and revanchism, since they are by this point constitutionally incapable of anything else when out of power.
The only thing that differentiates Trump from hits fellows is the brazenness of his crimes and the workaday banana republicanism he’s brought to the previously much more high-minded corruption of his forebears…yet I note that the Ukraine business, while inartfully done, is really no more than Shrub and Reagan did to secure their own reelections. They were domestic enemies, as Trump so obviously is. They should both have been impeached and imprisoned for the thousands of lives they cost and the foreign and domestic corruption they enjoined.
Trump is, perhaps, the cancer in its metastatic form. But the cancer has been eating away at the body politic for longer than most of us have been alive.
The only peaceful resolution that I can see would be a truth and reconciliation commission, which may mean amnesty for some of the less egregious and lower level actors, and reparations to the most severely harmed. But such commissions usually do not have the full force of the law behind them, so recommendations can be ignored. For example, South Africa’s comission recommended a wealth tax as a way of providing some of the reparations required to black South Africans, but was never implemented.
Heather Cox Richardson: