monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

On a day of hope, tragedy and constitutional affirmation, the United States could at last sense eventual deliverance from the twin menaces of 2020: a murderous virus and a vanquished President's quest to extinguish democracy.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/15/politics/joe-biden-coronavirus-vaccine-trump/index.html

Trump was rammed down our throats

but the large majority chose biden democratically

something you fascist wannabes know nothing about.

In fact, expecting Americans to look the other way, while their election is stolen from them, is the cornerstone of fascism.

A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

Russian President Putin has congratulated Biden on his victory in the November 3 election,

Russian President Putin has congratulated Biden on his victory in the November 3 election

A few days before Barack Obama left office, he invited a small group of conservative writers, all Never Trumpers, for a conversation in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. The mood was dark.

The president was worried about the future of the Republican Party. We worried about the future itself. Someone mentioned the possibility of global thermonuclear war as a plausible outcome of a Trump presidency.

Nearly four years on, it’s worth comparing what was predicted about the Trump administration versus what actually happened.

Among the predictions: The stock market would never recover. We’d stumble into war with North Korea or Iran. The free press would be muzzled. Vladimir Putin would rule Donald Trump through blackmail. Trump-appointed judges would dismantle the rule of law and overturn the verdict of elections. Trump would never leave office.

None of this came to pass. Bad things happened under Trump. But nothing so bad that it couldn’t be stopped by courts (such as his attempt to end the DACA program), prevented by Congress (his desire to ease sanctions on Russia), undermined by underlings (his effort to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria), exposed by the press (the child-separation policy), corrected by civil servants (his coronavirus misinformation), rejected by voters (his presidency) or dismissed by the very judges he appointed (his election challenges).

Yes, there were serious missteps in the handling of the Covid crisis. But those who would blame Trump for tens or hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths ought at least to acknowledge that a pandemic of this magnitude would have gravely challenged any president. Deaths in the United States from Covid-19 (91 per 100,000 people) are slightly worse than in France (87) but better than in Britain (97), Spain (102) and Italy (107), all of which imposed harsher lockdowns and had more engaged leaders.

All of this has convinced many of my fellow conservatives, including those who were initially hostile to Trump, that there’s more than a touch of derangement to those of us who oppose him — a mixture of justified distaste for the man and his manners and unjustified fears about the consequences of his governance.

Trump, as they see him, wasn’t Mussolini II. He was mostly just Archie Bunker II — a blowhard easily kept within the four corners of our constitutional system.

But the catastrophe of Trump’s presidency doesn’t mainly lie in the visible damage it has caused. It’s in the invisible damage. Trump was a corrosive. What he mainly corroded was social trust — the most important element in any successful society.

I was reminded of this again reading an extraordinary essay in The Washington Post by former Secretary of State George Shultz, who turned 100 on Sunday. His central lesson after a life that spanned combat service in World War II, labor disputes in steel plants, the dismantling of segregation and making peace with the Soviets: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

“When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened,” Shultz wrote. “When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.”

What Shultz attests from personal experience is extensively documented in scholarly literature, too. In high-trust societies — think of Canada or Sweden — people tend to flourish. In low-trust societies — Lebanon or Brazil — they generally don’t.

Trump’s presidency is hardly the sole cause of America’s declining trust in our institutions, which has been going on for a long time. In some ways, his was the culmination of that decline.

But it’s hard to think of any person in my lifetime who so perfectly epitomizes the politics of distrust, or one who so aggressively promotes it. Trump has taught his opponents not to believe a word he says, his followers not to believe a word anyone else says, and much of the rest of the country to believe nobody and nothing at all.

He has detonated a bomb under the epistemological foundations of a civilization that is increasingly unable to distinguish between facts and falsehoods, evidence and fantasy. He has instructed tens of millions of people to accept the commandment, That which you can get away with, is true.

Apologists for this president might rejoin that there are also examples of this form of politics on the other side of the aisle, notably in the person of Bill Clinton. That’s true. But it only causes one to wonder why so many of the same conservatives who vehemently objected to Clinton on moral grounds vehemently support Trump on the absence of moral grounds.

It may take Americans decades to figure out just what kind of damage Trump did in these last four years, and how to go about repairing it. The good news: no global thermonuclear war. The bad: a different kind of radioactivity that first destroys our trust in institutions, then in others, and finally in ourselves. What the half-life is for that kind of isotope remains unmeasured.

Yes, there were serious missteps in the handling of the Covid crisis. But those who would blame Trump for tens or hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths ought at least to acknowledge that a pandemic of this magnitude would have gravely challenged any president. Deaths in the United States from Covid-19 (91 per 100,000 people) are slightly worse than in France (87) but better than in Britain (97), Spain (102) and Italy (107), all of which imposed harsher lockdowns and had more engaged leaders.

When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts?
A straight line runs from Reagan to the Trump dead-enders.

Republicans spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a runaway pandemic; now they’re rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss.

What do these rejections have in common? In each case, one of America’s two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didn’t like.

I’m not sure it’s right to say Republicans “believe” that, say, wearing face masks is useless or that there was widespread voter fraud. Framing the issue as one of belief suggests that some kind of evidence might change party loyalists’ minds.

In reality, what Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do, whether it’s ignore a deadly disease or stay in power despite the voters’ verdict.

In other words, the point isn’t that the G.O.P. believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.

Notice, by the way, that I’m not including qualifiers, like saying “some” Republicans. We’re talking about most of the party here. The Texas lawsuit calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election was both absurd and deeply un-American, but more than 60 percent of Republicans in the House signed a brief supporting it, and only a handful of elected Republicans denounced the suit.

At this point, you aren’t considered a proper Republican unless you hate facts.

But when and how did the G.O.P. get that way? If you think it started with Donald Trump and will end when he leaves the scene (if he ever does), you’re naïve.

Republicans have been heading in this direction for decades. I’m not sure whether we can pinpoint the moment when the party began its descent into malignant madness, but the trajectory that led to this moment probably became irreversible under Ronald Reagan.

Thousands of Photographs, and a Year Like No Other
Republicans have, of course, turned Reagan into an icon, portraying him as the savior of a desperate, declining nation. Mostly, however, this is just propaganda. You’d never know from the legend that economic growth under Reagan was only slightly faster than it had been under Jimmy Carter, and slower than it would be under Bill Clinton.

And rapidly rising income inequality meant that a disproportionate share of the benefits from economic growth went to a small elite, with only a bit trickling down to most of the population. Poverty, measured properly, was higher in 1989 than it had been a decade earlier.

Anyway, gross domestic product isn’t the same thing as well-being. Other measures suggest that we were already veering off course.

For example, in 1980 life expectancy in America was similar to that in other wealthy nations; but the Reagan years mark the beginning of the great mortality divergence of the United States from the rest of the advanced world. Today, Americans can, on average, expect to live almost four fewer years than their counterparts in comparable countries.

The main point, however, is that under Reagan, irrationality and hatred for facts began to take over the G.O.P.

There has always been a conspiracy-theorizing, science-hating, anti-democratic faction in America. Before Reagan, however, mainstream conservatives and the Republican establishment refused to make alliance with that faction, keeping it on the political fringe.

Reagan, by contrast, brought the crazies inside the tent.

Many people are, I think, aware that Reagan embraced a crank economic doctrine — belief in the magical power of tax cuts. I’m not sure how many remember that the Reagan administration was also remarkably hostile to science.

Reagan’s ability to act on this hostility was limited by Democratic control of the House and the fact that the Senate still contained a number of genuinely moderate Republicans. Still, Reagan and his officials spent years denying the threat from acid rain while insisting that evolution was just a theory and promoting the teaching of creationism in schools.

This rejection of science partly reflected deference to special interests that didn’t want science-based regulation. Even more important, however, was the influence of the religious right, which first became a major political force under Reagan, has become ever more central to the Republican coalition and is now a major driver of the party’s rejection of facts — and democracy.

For rejecting facts comes naturally to people who insist that they’re acting on behalf of God. So does refusing to accept election results that don’t go their way. After all, if liberals are servants of Satan trying to destroy America’s soul, they shouldn’t be allowed to exercise power even if they should happen to win more votes.

Sure enough, a few days ago the televangelist Pat Robertson — who first became politically influential under Reagan — pronounced the Texas lawsuit a “miracle,” an intervention by God that would keep Trump in office.

The point is that the G.O.P. rejection of facts that has been so conspicuous this year wasn’t an aberration. What we’re seeing is the culmination of a degradation that began a long time ago and is almost surely irreversible.