An Unbelievable Week

No… really. A week some people refuse to believe.

On November 18, 2016, journalist and Russia expert Sarah Kendzior penned an essay that will surely end up in the Smithsonian.

Her piece - 10 days after the election of Donald Trump as president - was a warning of what was to come. It was a warning of what happens when democracies die.

“Write a list of things you would never believe,” wrote Kendzior. “Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.”

She also wrote: “It is not a matter of having a president-elect whom many dislike, but having a president-elect whose explicit goal is to destroy the nation.”

Ah, the Old Days

These are the things we knew as reality at the beginning of 2016:

Abortion was safe and legal.

Our Supreme Court was evenly distributed along ideological lines.

If a Justice died, another one replaced him or her within a few months, if not weeks, after a president interviewed and chose his preferred candidate.

Colleges and universities could take race into account when they looked at applicants.

Businesses couldn’t discriminate against groups of people they didn’t like.

Teachers weren’t seen as the enemy.

Defense bills were funded with unanimous votes.

Two years after Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s murders, we as a nation were starting to come to terms with our racist history, and our racist institutions, as more videos of police killing Black men were coming out every other month.

Elise Stefanik was seen as a conscientious, moderate Republican.

Russia was the enemy. And Putin was a dictator who was a danger to democracies across the world.

Wisconsin liberals thought they were virtuous.

As did so many other academic types, who had suddenly turned into broken Bernie records on social media, in their quest to deny their own sexism.

Today, July 23, 2023, none of that is the same.

OK, so the last two examples probably haven’t changed, since there is nothing so stubborn as a Wisconsin liberal and/or an academic type that thinks they know everything. But everything else has slipped away.

Who Are We Anyway

I’m tempted to say we are not who we were in 2016. But that’s not true. We were exactly then as we are now, but we were more in denial about the unspoken anger and hatred that was the underpinning of our society. 

I would say instead that today, we are not who we believed we were.

We believed what news and popular media portrayed.

I knew, as a journalist who covered film and theatre and television, that the media being made in Hollywood angered my incredibly talented Black and Latino actor friends. These were people who did Shakespeare in Chicago, but were only cast as thugs and gang members in LA.

Many of us knew, watching local television news, that there was a lot more emphasis on the crime going on in west Chicago than there was on how our laws regarding redlining and restrictive covenants and lack of investment in neighborhoods had created the conditions for that crime.

Those of us from rural areas knew that the one factory in our hometown had closed, and our relatives blamed people from the countries those factories moved to rather than the owners of the factories or the politicians who passed laws that made it OK for businesses to look at workers simply as costs that must be managed.

But most of the country - most of the white people who identified as liberals; or Democratic or Republican moderates (the latter who said without awareness of the irony, “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”) - they were clueless. And not to be moved.

I Know Things Now

This week I have learned two things: our country is in even more grave danger than I thought in terms of losing any semblance of being democratic; and there are still too many people who simply won’t believe that.

And the whole, “Well, they’ll see they’re wrong when we get there” argument doesn’t wash. Because being wrong about what you are certain is a huge bathtub of lukewarm water, but which is actually a vat of boiling oil that you just unleashed on a roomful of people, doesn’t makes us better.

Stockton Rush was certain his submersible was safe. Now he and four other people - one of them 19 years old - are gone.

I fear, though, that we are going to have to lose everything in order for the people who don’t see it to understand.

This week a New York Times story came out that shot me back to that Kendzior essay in which she notes that Trump “wants to destroy the nation.”

The Times piece lays out explicitly how the country’s conservative apparatus plans to change the basic institutions that are the underpinnings of our democracy.

Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman looked at policy proposals that are publicly available from Trump’s campaign, and talked to Trump advisors John McEntee and Russell Vought, who have proven that there is no sense of pretense left within the Republican Party.

The trio writes:

“Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

This means the judicial system will have to answer to Trump - or another Republican who may be elected. The Attorney General will have to do his bidding, perhaps go after his enemies. The Federal Reserve will have to create monetary policy that Trump wants them to make. The Treasury will have to fund whatever a Republican president wants them to fund. Even funding that was approved by Congress - which constitutionally is the only branch with the “power of the purse” - can be ignored by Trump or another Republican president.

I have sent this story to many people. I have posted it to social media. A lot of people are horrified. They are generally the same people who saw the U.S. for what it was in 2016. My comfort level, though, is having trouble handling the people whose response is, “I don’t want to read it. It’s too scary to think about.”

“If you don’t think about it, it’s not real.” This might as well be our country’s official motto.

The people who are too scared to look at this terrifying piece about how close the U.S. is to the precipice, fall into two camps about how they are dealing with it. The ones who say they are fiscally conservative, but refuse to understand the part about how conservative fiscal policy harms Black and Brown people - they are looking seriously at Joe Manchin and No Labels as a third-party choice to keep the status quo of what they believed the world to be before 2016.

Then there are the folks who tell me with earnestness that Biden is too old. He stutters when he speaks. He’s not ideologically pure enough. He didn’t get all of what progressives wanted in his 2020 economic investment bills. The very fact that he had to compromise makes him a traitor.

These are people who jumped on the Bernie Sanders bandwagon in 2016 when he was 75, and again in 2020 when he was 79. And they see no contradiction in calling Biden too old.

The person they’re looking at now is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Because in their eyes, someone like Sanders, who has fought for progressive ideas within the given system of government, and has opened the door to other progressives to enter Congress and become strong enough to have a seat at the table, is the same as a guy who thinks vaccines cause autism and traffics in racist and anti-Semitic tropes.

Which proves to me that Bernie Bros didn’t really care about Bernie. They cared that he was an outsider. And whether that outsider is connected to reality (as Bernie is) or not (as Kennedy is) is really not that important to them.

This terrifies me.

Because if we put our support behind any third-party candidate, then Trump will win. And our democracy will lose. We will all be in boiling oil - even those who support him.

Believe me. Please, don’t wait till it becomes true.

I leave you with a picture of me and my sympatico cat on a lazy Sunday afternoon, as I wait for my editors to get back to me.