By Chris Satullo
It’s understandable to be upset when your side loses a presidential election. It’s normal to worry how some things being planned by this new president you didn’t support might damage the country. It’s OK to suffer some black moods of doubt about the nation’s direction. I’ve been through all that a half-dozen times myself.
But what’s going on with millions of Trump voters right now is more than that.
It’s deeper, darker, more dangerous. And it’s been brewing for a long time. Donald Trump didn’t create it, though he exploits it and worsens it with just about every tweet.
Its roots date back at least to the mid-90’s, when Trump was just another PR-hungry Big Apple B-lister, working on his second wife. It took shape as Newt Gingrich began moving Congress to permanent war footing, as Rush Limbaugh was leading the rise of rabid talk-radio and as Fox News was being born.
“It” is the notion that the other team is not merely misguided, not merely less capable than your side, but is actively unpatriotic, deeply immoral, not even authentically American. They are The Enemy. The Other.
Once this view takes hold, the very idea of allowing such deplorables to vote comes to seem illegitimate. The notion of their side winning an election is not just upsetting or lamentable. It is intolerable. It is calamitous. It is Armageddon.
So, in such a crisis, all tactics, all hyperbole, even all falsehoods come to seem justified.
Now we arrive at this moment, the Clown Coup of 2020, as our Narcissist-in-Chief cheerleads the implausible, fact-free court challenges being flung against multiple walls by his laughably inept legal eagles. We want to believe this is more comic than tragic, more froth than poison. Joe Biden shakes his head ruefully; Jimmy Fallon smirks gleefully.
But millions of Trump voters swallow the Kraken whole, spitting out violent threats and vowing insurrection.
Yes, there is something distinctly Trumpian about the fiercely incompetent recklessness of it all. But this noisy rejection of democratic norms, election rules and plain arithmetic will not just die down once Trump loads up his golf cart and shuffles off to Mar-A-Lago.
This toxic nonsense enjoys the purchase it does with the Republican faithful because those grassroots have been planted so firmly for so long in this soil of hyperbolic hatred of all things Democrat.
If you’re silently objecting, now that the left has its own moments of over-the-top rhetoric sprinkled far too liberally with accusations of evil and words ending in “-ist,” I certainly don’t disagree.
But politics are Newtonian and cyclical. For every excessive action on one end of the spectrum, there is an equal and opposite overreaction on the other, which then in turn serves as justification for more excess on the other side. The playground gibe in this case happens to be true:
They, the Republicans, really did start it. They launched this cycle of total, permanent partisan warfare in the ‘90s.
Two incidents this past week – one in Georgia, one in Wisconsin – underline just how embedded, how normal this belief that Democrats are immoral, unpatriotic and have no right to elected office has become for garden-variety Republican officials. The words I’m going to cite next come not from some Twitter crazies or fringe bloggers, but from a sitting U.S. congressman and senator.
Campaigning for the GOP candidates in the Peach State’s Senate runoffs, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins had this to say about Democratic candidate Rev. Ralph Warnock, who happens to be pastor of the same Atlanta church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once graced the pulpit:
“There is no such thing as a pro-choice pastor. What you have is a lie from the bed of Hell. It is time to send it back to Ebenezer Baptist Church.”
Wait, wasn’t it just weeks ago that Republicans in Congress were primly instructing the rest of us on how impertinent, unconstitutional and horribly wrong it was to even bring up, let alone criticize, Amy Coney Barrett’s faith, her archconservative brand of Catholicism, as she was being considered for a lifelong seat on a Supreme Court already chock-a-block with similar Catholics?
But here’s the difference, in the closed mind of a partisan such as Collins: Barrett’s Christian faith is legitimate, because it leads her to conclusions friendly to secular conservative ideology. Warnock’s faith, by contrast, is illegitimate and fit for contempt because it leads him to a social justice activism that is anathema to Collins, who is himself a Southern Baptist minister.
Perhaps, before knocking someone else’s faith, the Rev. Collins should take a pause from making a fool of himself at impeachment hearings and running his own failed Senate bid to crack open his New Testament to the page where Jesus offers us the Beatitudes.
Meanwhile, up in Cheesehead-Land, Sen. Ron Johnson, another “star” of GOP Impeachment Theatre, was caught committing a faux pas – which in politics is defined as accidentally telling the truth.
As reported in The Bulwark, shortly after the election, Johnson received a call from Mark Becker, a former GOP county chair in Wisconsin, who wanted to urge the senator to distance himself from Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. According to Becker, Johnson told him that he knew Biden had won fair and square, but said he couldn’t say that publicly because it would be “political suicide” in a state where Trump got 1.6 million votes.
That part of Becker’s essay got the most attention, but here’s the other reported statement from Johnson that riveted my gaze. Becker wrote that, after the senator gushed about how people at Trump’s rallies “loved America,”
I told him that “I would be willing to bet that at any rally Bernie Sanders or AOC held, you would see a crowd who loved America just as much.”
Johnson scoffed and said, “Absolutely not. Bernie Sanders and AOC want to fundamentally change our country. And you can’t love something you want to fundamentally change.”
Let’s roll that one around on the tongue: You can’t love something you want to fundamentally change.
By your logic, senator, a family couldn’t hold an intervention with a loved one with an addiction problem. After all, sobering up would be a fundamental change.
A wife whose laid-off husband was sliding into a deep funk couldn’t urge him to get up off the couch, put down the remote and the Fritos and start looking for a job.
To be put it in terms you might grasp, senator, the football coach of the Wisconsin Badgers couldn’t tell his bumbling quarterback to stop throwing interceptions and protect the ball.
And, come to think of it, by your logic, sir, all those people who voted for Trump in 2016 because he said he’d undo everything that the nation’s first black president, elected twice by big margins, had done…well, they couldn’t possibly love their country, either. After all, they wanted to fundamentally change the direction America was heading.
Fundamental change is precisely what presidential elections are about. That’s why they matter so much, why they have vast consequences that ripple over decades.
It has taken decades, but the Republican Party has wandered so deep inside a dark, funhouse mirror version of America, full of distorted images and scary shadows, that many of them, Collins and Johnson included, can no longer find their way out.
Of course, it is neither accidental nor beside the point that the people these two white male office-holders chose to attack in these incidents were a Jew, a Latina and a black man.
Fact is, American society has changed fundamentally since Collins and Johnson were in elementary school. It is far more diverse, more tolerant, with a greater yearning to be just, to be less hateful to women, to blacks, to The Other. Power is not the White Guys Club anymore.
The last four years have been a virulent, depressing but doomed – yes, doomed – reaction to these irreversible changes.
Congressman, Senator…this is what America is, where it is heading. It is beyond your poor grasp to stop trends so powerful. So, I guess I’d advise this:
Love it. Or leave it.
—
Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.