IN THE MIDST OF POLITICAL WINTER

The need to find our invincible summer

Relics from the Rust Belt/Spencer Platt

For those opposed to the moral and legal criminality of the Trump regime, we have a lot to do. But we also have a lot to think about. To own. And to atone for. We have to ask ourselves how we let this happen.

It will not be enough to resist totalitarianism. We must analyze how it got through the front door, committing to the creation of a society on the other side of this in which it will be far less likely to return.

Hitler could never have done what he did had he not been aided by otherwise decent people who didn’t come up with his evil ideas but didn’t have the moral courage to say no to them when he did. Each generation’s task is to guarantee ourselves a society in which, even if such a dictator appeared, he wouldn’t be able to act on his worst impulses. And we failed at that. Trump did not come out of nowhere. He emerged in a society already so ethically compromised that his appearance could have been foretold.

The Trump phenomenon was preceded by a great betrayal of the American people by those who should have known better. It was not just the big things, such as NAFTA or the repeal of Glass-Steagall or the Citizens United decision. It was also a pattern of small things; compromises with ethics and justice in public policy that didn’t each amount to much, yet cumulatively formed the threat to our democracy of death by a thousand cuts. Destroying economic guardrails plus repealing safety and environmental regulations in favor of vast accumulation of wealth by a relative few. The withhold of resources required for a life of health, happiness and dignity for the average American. The cancerous tumor of wealth, power and influence held tightly in the grip of a political, media and economic elite. All of this has been going on for decades. A Republican President started it, and no Democrat ever stopped it.

Rome was in trouble long before the barbarians got there. It’s revisionist history to claim Trump just came out of the blue and started taking a hammer to our democracy. Our system had already been weakened to the point that we were too vulnerable to his machinations. A hopeless, desperate, angry population resulted from carelessness and arrogance in Washington D.C. While one party doubled down on policies that caused the despair, the other party became hostage to corporate elites who took an incremental approach to assuaging it. “A necessitous man is not a free man,” said President Franklin Roosevelt. Too many in America became unfree.

What had once been thriving neighborhoods were then riddled with crime and violence. The only one winning from this is the private prison industry. Factories that had once employed thousands, allowing people to own homes and support their families with dignity and grace, were then shuttered and those jobs sent overseas. The only ones winning from this are China, India and Mexico. Tens of millions either uninsured or underinsured, leaving hard working Americans to put GoFundMe pages on the Internet trying to raise enough money to save their lives and the lives of their children. The only ones winning from this are private health insurance companies.

My God, has no one in D.C. ever read a history book? There is nothing new that happened here. A Petri dish of mass despair inevitably produces a mix of personal and societal dysfunctions. That includes vulnerability to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces, including attraction to a political strongman. It wasn’t that hard for someone to come along and point out the obvious, then say “Only I can fix it.” People will go for false hope before they’ll go for no hope.

Yet those shouting such things from the rooftops have been deemed socialists by establishment Republicans, and “too far Left” by establishment Democrats. How it became “too far Left” to feed a hungry child I will never understand, but the dysfunction of our political system never shocks me anymore. The biggest tragedy of all is that this threat to our democracy could have been handled, if only the system had allowed more democracy.

If even one establishment Republican or Democratic would stand before the American people now and say, “I deeply apologize. We got it so wrong,” it would do a lot of good - for them, and for us. It’s harder to forgive those who haven’t had the courtesy to apologize. But we must.

And we are where we are. For now we must endure this moment. In time we will transform it.

Resist what’s happening? Yes, of course. And we must also think deeply about what we will do on the other side of what’s going on now. Coming to power at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “It is time for the country to become fairly radical for a generation.” So much had gone wrong, and nothing short of fundamental correction could fix things and get the country back on track. With the New Deal, Roosevelt succeeded at that. And we will, too. We’ll face the difficult task of creating anew from that which Trump and his administration have destroyed and are destroying.

It will take more than “expertise” to do that. We will need humility. We will need understanding. And we will need grace. We will be different people from having gone through all this. We are becoming different people even now. In the words of Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." Millions of us, in the midst of this winter, are finding that summer. And we will bring it forth into the world.