This past week, I’ve sunk into despair about the state of the country. It’s like a quagmire that has sucked me down in a slow but inexorable paralysis. I can feel it slurping and gulping against my flailing limbs, and after four exhausting years, the belching muck feels too strong to resist.
Somehow, knowing what would happen with Trump’s impeachment didn’t make it any easier to watch. Instead, it managed to be worse than I had expected. That’s saying a lot.
I knew Trump would lie and gloat. Of course he would. That’s what he does. I knew the Republicans in Congress would stand behind him despite all evidence that he had abused his power. That, too, was a given. It’s all been the state of things since his election, reinforced by the fact that the handful of honorable Republicans who have called him on his bullshit have swiftly been fired by him. Everyone left in Republican leadership at this point is a spineless sycophant, which is the inevitable outcome when a leader tolerates no dissent.
I knew all that. But still, I was surprised—no: alarmed, nauseated, aghast—at the brazenness not only of Trump’s lies, but of many Republicans’ lies to the American people. I watched in impotent, numb outrage as Devin Nunes and Ken Starr and others wove a tale so absurdly out of step with the truth as to defy even my own grim expectations. That it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who had prevented witnesses from appearing at the impeachment trial. That it was the Democrats who had thrown up obstacles at every turn and ignored the mountain of evidence against their case.
How do you argue with people who have no qualms whatsoever about lying? How do you make their supporters see the inanity of their argument? If Trump was innocent, he would have been happy to hand over witnesses and evidence. Period. If he’s guilty, he must be punished. Period.
The problem is just that, though. You can’t argue with such people. They have willingly blinded themselves by choosing to follow a man who we’ve all known for decades is a con artist. In making that choice four years ago, they abandoned truth in favor of power. This week’s events could have been predicted back then. Really, didn’t we all see this coming?
To my amazement, the word “patriot” has flipped in my mind over the past year. It is liberals who are patriotic in today’s America. It’s Democrats who care about democracy and American ideals. I’ve never had such an attachment to the word “patriotism” before, but my attachment has grown fierce.
As our country lurches toward tyranny, I am discovering just how fervently I love what we’re in danger of losing. I never knew, until now, how sincerely I love my country.
The Republican Party has become the party of blind loyalty to a single person. That’s not patriotism, not American patriotism. It’s the definition of tyranny.
All through this presidency, I have wanted to ask Republicans: What would a leader have to do—what would Trump have to do—to make you turn against him? Is there anything at all? What if he did shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue? What if he burned an American flag, or shat all over the Constitution? Because honestly, the latter is pretty much what he’s been doing since he took office.
I keep thinking about a horrible, maddening catch-22. If Trump and his followers care only about loyalty to him, and not about the truth, then any critique of him is instantly branded untrue. That is the magic, the diabolical sorcery, of authoritarianism. Truth is defined not by facts but by agreement with the Supreme Leader. Whatever he says becomes truth, facts be damned.
Every politician and public figure who has stood up to Trump in the last four years, no matter how noble and upright, has undergone the same tragic transformation. From John McCain to John Kelly to Mitt Romney, I have watched as first their outcries drew a wave of relief and support from the left and center, and then that wave crashed against an impenetrable brick wall of Republican indifference.
The very act of speaking out renders a person untrustworthy in Republican eyes. It doesn’t matter who that person is. Contradicting Trump makes you the enemy, and therefore wrong. No matter your conservative credentials—James Comey, Robert Mueller, and John Bolton are three more dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who have met this same fate. As soon as you publicly state that Trump has done something wrong, you become wrong yourself.
In his chilling novel 1984, George Orwell said: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The book portrays Winston Smith’s struggle to wrest his own mind from the grasp of the ruling Party, a regime that demands absolute loyalty and thus the sacrifice of independent thought.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
“Is Truth Dead?” asked a 2017 cover story in Time magazine. After the last few years, my answer is unequivocally, yes. For the Republican Party, yes, it is.
I wondered, during Gordon Sondland’s testimony at the impeachment hearing, whether he and the Democrats were intentionally referencing Orwell. Sondland—another dyed-in-the-wool Republican and even a Trump loyalist—was one of the few who had broken step with the Party and testified despite Trump’s demands that he stay silent.
When asked why he thought Trump withheld Ukrainian aid to pressure Ukraine into investigating Trump’s own political opponent, Sondland agreed with the Democrats in saying that “two plus two equals four.”
It should have been no surprise, and yet still felt to me like a sucker punch, when Sondland was fired by Trump just two days after the impeachment trial ended, with only the feeblest of protestations from Republicans. Two plus two does not equal four, Trump is saying. It equals five—or you are out.
Just days earlier, Trump had delivered a speech laced with more lies. His lies have become so commonplace as to raise only a sigh in the media, a sort of resigned, muted whimper. These were not only lies about his own “exoneration” from impeachment but also lies about the direct harm he is doing to Americans’ lives.
He took credit for the healthy economy when it was actually Barack Obama who spearheaded the current expansion, and when growth is expected to flag in the next couple years.
He promised to protect preexisting conditions when in reality he is backing a lawsuit to overturn the law that protects those conditions—a lawsuit which, if successful, will endanger the lives of untold thousands or millions (including myself).
Seeing his many lies called out in most mainstream media outlets offered me some small comfort. But that feeling once again crashed up against the brick wall in my mind. I know that the people who matter—Trump’s blind followers—will not read these fact-based articles. Even if they did read them, they would refuse to believe them. So what’s the point?
All of this has left me both fearful and helpless. I’m stuck in my quagmire. We’re on the highway to dictatorship, and although this highway has many exit ramps, we haven’t yet taken one. No one has yet found a way to yank the steering wheel from Trump’s clutches. It’s only his general incompetence that has prevented us from careening into tyranny.
Trump is a wannabe fascist. Like Hitler, he cares only about his own personal power, but thankfully, he doesn’t have Hitler’s vision, discipline, or leadership acumen.
What scares me more than Trump himself is the precedent this administration is setting. One of our two political parties has chosen power over freedom and party over country. Somewhere, another, more competent leader is witnessing this and taking notes. When that person seeks power and the Republican Party again refuses to see the danger, God help us all.
I turn this problem over and over in my mind. How do you combat a culture in which truth is defined not by truth but by loyalty? How do you circumvent the willful ignorance of millions? How do you argue with someone when the very act of arguing triggers their dismissal of everything you say?
You can’t.
So far, I’ve found only one glimmer of hope, one way I can slightly imagine short-circuiting such a culture. That glimmer is civil dialogue.
Indulge me for a moment as I try this thought on for size. If it is indeed impossible to argue with the other side, then what if the answer is not to argue, but to humanize ourselves in their eyes? Trump has convinced them that we who disagree with them are the enemy. What if we refuse to play that role? Would that somehow help?
In “How to Culture Jam a Populist In Just Four Easy Steps,” Andrés Miguel Rondón makes precisely this argument. Rondón, a Venezuelan, wrote the article in 2017 as a warning. “Trump and Chávez are identical,” he says, comparing Trump to the socialist Venezuelan dictator: “they are masters of Populism.”
The recipe is universal. Find a wound common to many, someone to blame for it and a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Cartoon them. As vermin, evil masterminds, flavourless hipsters, you name it. Then paint yourself as the saviour…
Pro tip: you’re the enemy. Yes, you, with the Starbucks cup. Trump needs you to be the enemy just like all religions need a demon. As a scapegoat. “But facts!”, you’ll say, missing the point entirely.
What makes me the enemy, you may ask? In their mind it’s very simple: if you’re not among the victims, you’re among the culprits.
Nevertheless, show no contempt, cautions Rondón. Instead of feeding the polarization, “disarm it.”
The problem is tribal. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them: that you are American in exactly the same way they are… [S]truggle relentlessly to free yourself from the shackles of the caricature the populists have drawn of you.
Without naming it, Rondón is describing the American civility movement. This is the growing movement that has inspired me over the last decade, and for which I’ve been a cheerleader on this blog. It’s a collection of grassroots organizations working to depolarize and humanize our national politics and bring back our lost civility.
And yet, I must say that as I try this thought out, it feels trite to have landed here in this essay. I just spent over a thousand words outlining my own outrage and despair over our national predicament. That has been a dramatic departure from my usual civil themes on this blog. It has felt refreshing to lay bare my anger. To arrive back here now, at civil discourse, feels like a…shrinking. A hamstringing. The shackling of my true, authentic instincts.
It also feels like naïve, Neville Chamberlainian spinelessness. To first describe the egregious sins of an authoritarian leader as he manipulates a once-free government into kowtowing to his every whim, and to then turn around and state that the answer is kumbaya-ing with his followers, just seems obviously, and dangerously, wrong.
No. I think the answer cannot be civil discourse.
Or, perhaps: it cannot be only civil discourse.
The answer—the response, the appropriate response to Trump—must include a fight.
Yes. Writing that, I feel its truth, its necessity. We must fight, fight, fight—against everything Trump stands for. We must rally against him, band together, rise up. We need a new wave, a wave so mighty, so indomitable, that it crashes over that brick wall of Republican ignorance and scatters those bricks across the sandy shore. Now, in this election year, is the time for action.
That’s especially true because of how much we have to overcome to wrest control from Trump. There are many dark forces conspiring to undermine our democracy.
There are Russian troll farms and far-right misinformation campaigns seeking to drive wedges between liberals, so that we’ll distrust various Democratic candidates and many of us might be dissuaded from voting altogether.
There are Republican state administrations working unapologetically to restrict voting rights so that people of color and the poor cannot vote.
There are corporations and military-industrial complexes drawing from their vast coffers to spread lies about the reality of climate change, the price of pharmaceuticals, and the success of our wars in order to drum up support for disastrous policies that endanger us all.
And there are Trump and his inner circle and their many, many lies.
We must overcome all of that. Our focus in 2020 must be clear and true: to get out the vote, to educate and inspire voters and rock the election. The ballot box is how we win. It’s how we pry the steering wheel out of Trump’s clutches. We may be on the highway to tyranny, but we have not yet arrived. That means that if there are enough of us, we can still overcome all the obstacles thrown in our path.
But perhaps civil dialogue has a role to play in the process.
Civility can’t be the entire goal—that space is reserved for democracy and justice. But just as surely as it can’t be the whole goal, it also occurs to me that it must be a part of the goal.
That’s because what we’re fighting for is a country in which truth is about truth, not loyalty. A country in which two plus two equals four again. And building such a country would mean, among other things, the restoration of dialogue and the tolerance of disagreement.
When democracy is fully functional, truth is arrived at through discussion. That includes civil, respectful discussion with those on the other side. Loyalty tests would have no place in such a country—including loyalty tests among those on the left. It could not be seen as traitorous to agree with the other side, or to question our own.
We need to draw back the darkness and bring about that country.
And so, if what we are fighting for is the restoration of democracy, then part of our fight must include the practice of civil discourse.
In our great battle against Trump and everything he stands for, we must resist not only his assault on the truth and his abuses of power. We must also abhor his hatred and fearmongering and divisiveness. We must be bigger than all of that. Bigger than him.
In our resistance, we must learn to be large.
Trump is a small man. Powerful as he is, he’s chronically paranoid and deeply insecure. He hungers for attention and control to compensate for what he lacks: the empathy, love, and belonging that most of us have. As we march toward November, we need to march in the golden light of righteous love, knowing we’re fighting for truth, justice, equality, and liberty.
When you know in your heart that you’re fighting for good and that you stand on solid moral ground, you can find the space in your heart for loving those you are fighting against. Loving them doesn’t mean sacrificing your values or the truth. You can fight against their causes while still reaching out to them.
Reaching out doesn’t threaten you, when you’re large. You can contain it all.
Writing this, I now find myself uplifted by hope. When I first started writing this piece, I felt mired in a paralyzing despair, but we who care about this country cannot afford to be paralyzed. We must transform our despair into action, and through this essay, I’ve found the way out of my personal quagmire.
The way to escape quicksand is to extend yourself outward, stretching out your arms and legs, splaying your body to become as big as it possibly can be. What I’ve landed on here is an expansion of the heart, an expansion into love, and that has freed me.
What we need is a righteous fight. A fight, yes—but a fight that is animated by love and not hate.
As we work for change, let our movement to oust Trump be one of joy, expansion, and abundance. Let our resistance be not only to lies and injustice but also to fearmongering and hatred. Let us march forward in a shining, righteous, expansive love.
Let us be large.
