Not a Mea Culpa, But Like Unto It

When Trump won in 2016, I was genuinely flummoxed—disappointed and angry and frustrated as well, of course, but mostly just confused. It signaled the breakdown of practically every electoral pattern that I'd spent the previous 25 years schooling myself in. One of the results was that, while I'm not sure I ever fully believed all the screams about Trump as a Russian agent and all the other "resistance" stuff (what if Clinton called upon the Electoral College to reject Trump as unfit and just pick some other Republican as president? what if the deep state simply refused to acknowledge him as Commander-in-Chief and created a shadow government behind closed doors?), I gave it all far more credence and sympathetic attention than any subsequent, actually reasonable assessment of the situation showed it deserved.

This time, I'm not confused; I can see how it is both politically and electorally possible for a stupid, corrupt, wanna-be authoritarian to craft a message that works, relative to the other option on the table, for what will be, in the end, probably over 75 million Americans—almost certainly only a tiny fraction of whom are themselves inclined to fascism, and probably only a moderately larger fraction of whom rejected the other option on the table for what might be considered fascist-adjacent reasons. I didn't want to believe that, to randomly guess, some 60 million American voters would actually either disbelieve Trump's criminality and authoritarianism or consider it forgivable in light of various issues (like my mother's belief that Trump will keep America out of wars). But the evidence is there, and it's eminently believable.

For 20 years, since Bush's re-election in 2004, I've heard Democrats, liberals, leftists, progressives, Christian socialists, and whatever else the people on what is mostly my side of our endless political divides call themselves, look at Republican candidates and look at election results and say: "too bad for America; it was nice while it lasted." As much as I sympathized with the sentiment behind that phrase, and as much as was—and probably always will be—open to taking seriously the presumptions behind it, I really don't think I ever fully believed it. As Dr. Manhattan made very clear, nothing ever ends, so I don't believe it now either. But good grief, my fellow 66 million Americans who made the what I believe to be the right choice, if we don't (and I truly do include myself in that "we") see this as the conclusion of one more iteration of the story of the boy who called wolf, then where the hell are we?