Fluid ImaginationFrom Trump Proved That Authoritarians Can Get Elected in America:
Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill.
It is 3:19 PM EST on November 7, 2020. I just returned from a therapeutic dispensary (curbside pick-up while masked), where I retrieved a self-prescribed package of medicinal-grade cannabis. It has been over a week since I last took my prescription. I take it for anxiety.
As the man said, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”
But now it is Saturday, and I have returned from the therapeutic dispensary, and the people of planet Earth have been introduced to President-Elect Joseph Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris.
My very first thought upon hearing the news was, “C’mon, Georgia.” See, when you have an anxiety disorder, you don’t get to experience the same level of relief and enjoyment as everyone else; instead, your anxiety leaps to the next closest obstacle.
You might think I’d be anxious about the Supreme Court. After all, President Trump and the Republicans out-shamed themselves to rush Associate Justice Barrett onto the bench for just this purpose: to side with the Republican Party if and when the validity of the Presidential Election come before the Court. While the Republicans already had a majority on the Court, Chief Justice Roberts’ decisions have raised some valid concerns about his willingness to rule from a place of naked partisanship, so they appointed and confirmed Justice Barrett to the Court to ensure the Republicans a favorable outcome.
Justice Barrett’s decision to recuse herself from the pre-election case in Pennsylvania gave me hope that the Republican leadership misread the strength of her character, although I am not delusional enough to imagine her loyalty to the Constitution will override her loyalty to the Party if a particular case provides her with the moral wiggle room to avoid her Catholic guilt.
While the Republicans on the Supreme Court could still reveal the partisan horrorshow beneath their dignified black robes, even my anxiety has too much faith in democratic institutions to fall into that abyss.
Our democratic institutions, unfortunately, also include the United States Senate, which has been controlled since 2015 by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Senator McConnell famously led The Party of No during the Obama Administration, which was a “daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance” to the Democratic majority’s agenda. He is also the first Senate Majority Leader since the Civil War era to deny a president the right to fill an open seat on the Supreme Court.
As it stands, experts predict the Republican Party to retain control of the Senate for the 117th United States Congress, but their prediction rests on the likelihood of the two special elections in Georgia resulting in two more Republican members being added to the Senate in January. With Alaska and North Carolina almost guaranteed to send two Republican members as well, the outcome of the Georgian special elections will determine which political party controls the Senate.
I find hope against that happening in the surprising results of the presidential election in Georgia, where the Democratic candidate defeated the Republican candidate by (as of the afternoon of November 7th) roughly 12,000 votes.
I also find hope in Stacey Abrams, a Georgian who parleyed her gubernatorial defeat in 2018 into a powerful force for fair elections and who deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the surprising results in Georgia.
Political strategists expect the two parties to spend upwards of $200 million on the two special elections. I don’t know anything about the four candidates who will be facing off, but each race has a Republican running against a Democrat, and I don’t want Senator McConnell and the Republican party to continue their stranglehold on progress.
So yes, it is a Saturday night, President Trump has been defeated at the ballot box, my self-prescribed anxiety-soothing herb is back in the house, and I’m about to leave to celebrate the nation’s victory around a campfire with my family, friends, and neighbors, but still, the anxious voice in my head won’t stop repeating the phrase, “C’mon, Georgia.”
It is morning on the eastern coast of the United States of America on Election Day in the year 2020. Over 100 million Americans have already submitted their ballot to their local officials, and the media estimates over 150 million Americans will cast their votes before the day is complete. With roughly 255 million eligible voters spread throughout the country, the participation of 150 million voters would give this election a participation rate of roughly 58%, making it the highest turnout since the election between former Vice-President Richard Nixon (R) and incumbent Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (D) in the tumultuous year of 1968.
I am one of the 100 million Americans who voted early this election, having mailed my Vermont ballot to my town clerk early last week. My wife plans on voting in person later this afternoon. I decided to vote early because, as a teacher of dozens of students whose families are doing who knows what in terms of protecting themselves from the coronavirus, I run the risk of having been exposed, and I want to limit any potential exposure that our polling-station volunteers (virtually all of whom are elderly) have to face today. My wife, on the other hand, feels it is symbolically important for her to cast her vote in person, and I respect her decision.
As a resident of solid-blue Vermont, the outcome of our votes in the Electoral College is as close to a foregone conclusion as one can have in our messy democracy. I fully expect (as does everyone else) that former Vice-President Joe Biden will receive our state’s three electoral votes. If you read this blog on the regular, you won’t be surprised to learn I cast my vote to help make the pundits’ prediction a reality.
While I put my mark next to their names, I was not voting for former Vice-President Biden and Senator Harris. I suspect former V.P. Biden will make a passable president and Senator Harris will make a serviceable vice president (in that she will continue to have a pulse and she will break in the direction I favor if there are tie votes in the Senate), but if I had my druthers, I would have voted for Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, the two Democratic candidates I most favored in the primaries.
Instead of voting for the Democratic nominees, however, I voted against giving President Trump and Vice-President Pence another four years of power. Some of my Republican-leaning friends have argued against this particular stance, asking for me (and others who feel like me) to defend our votes without referencing the Republican incumbents, but I don’t accept their premise.
It’s just as important to keep the wrong people out of power as it is to put the right people into power.
Our country has shown that, for the most part, its democracy can survive corrupt politicians, white supremacists, serial sexual assaulters, paranoid and insecure old men, connections to organized crime, and even secession, and I have complete faith that former Vice-President Biden’s administration of the executive branch will be just as palatable as virtually any other of the non-great men who have held the title of President over the office’s 231 years of history.
But I have serious doubts that it will survive the reëlection of President Trump. The most pressing concern is the Trump Administration’s response to the coronavirus. In September, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote that “through his actions and inactions, this callous, self-absorbed president and his administration are responsible—by standard statistical measures—for well over half of all US coronavirus deaths.” In other words, over 111,000 Americans are dead today because Donald J. Trump is the overseer of the executive branch of the United States government.
The second most pressing concern is this administration’s denial of the existential threat that is human-caused climate change. Policies enacted by President Trump and his partners in the Republican party have, as one scientist put it, locked in “permanent, irreversible damage to our environment[, and] once we go beyond key tipping points…there is no going back.”
This administration’s weakening of fuel-efficiency standards, removal of national coal-power regulations, opening of gas and oil drilling on federal lands and offshore, support of oil pipelines in protected areas, withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, loosening of restrictions on methane emissions, refusal to send the Kigali Agreement to the Senate for ratification, and so much more, threatens to destroy the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans over the next several decades, not to mention the national security of the United States (see Sec. 335 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018).
To President Trump’s coronavirus response and tragic stance on environmental regulations, we must also add his rhetorical and legal challenges to the country’s democratic institutions, including his incitement of violence against members of the free press, his repeated calls for the extrajudicial incarceration of his political opponents, his flirtation with ignoring the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, his refusal to address the racism inherent in so many of the nation’s systems, his tacit and not-so-tacit support of violent white supremacists, his recruitment website to organize illegal militias (a Trump Army) to secure the integrity of the voting process (rather than trusting state and local governments to do it), his repeated calls for his subordinates to make a loyalty oath to him and to uphold that oath rather than the one they made to the Constitution, and so much more.
I fully believe — and all evidence supports the belief — that President Trump is dangerous.
While I might not be a full-throated supporter of the Biden/Harris ticket, I am a full-throated opponent of four more years of President Trump.
If you are one of the 50+ million Americans who have not yet cast your ballot today, I beg of you: please vote for anyone other than President Trump.
From This Is Why Republicans Fear Change:
Name a proposal that would enlarge the scope of American democracy — more states, a national popular vote, a larger House of Representatives — and Republicans (or their conservative allies) are almost certain to oppose it… The Republican Party as currently constituted is a minority party representing a demographically narrow segment of the American electorate. It needs stasis — institutional and constitutional — to survive.
With the swearing-in of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett last night, we once again have a full Supreme Court. At 48 years old, Justice Barrett is younger than my oldest brother, and she will be partly responsible for answering every constitutional question that arises for what I assume will be the rest of my lifetime.
She joins two other justices appointed by President Trump. The first, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, is two years older than my oldest brother, and the second, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is four years older than my oldest brother.
Here’s what I know about them. Justice Gorsuch is either an idiotic judge or a convoluted corporate bootlicker because those are the only ways a person could talk themselves into finding against the frozen trucker. His written opinions since his inauguration have done nothing to change my own, including his opinion on Bostock v. Clayton County, which recognized for the first time the legal right of homosexuals and transgender persons to be free from discrimination in the workplace thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
While I adore the result of Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, I loathe the language and logic he used to defend it. It is pretentious and pedantic, the result of the worst tendencies of low-grade philosophers. The only emotion present in the writing is whatever we want to call the motivating force behind every man’s “Well, actually…”
Justice Kavanaugh, meanwhile, quotes the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s non-court writings as if they were the law itself. His use of the quotations is not an issue — hundreds of the Court’s opinions and dissents quote from literary and scholarly (i.e., nonlegal) texts, after all. The issue is that Justice Kavanaugh believes so strongly in the textualism that Justice Scalia was selling that he forgot to wipe the man’s shit from his lips.
While I enjoyed Justice Scalia’s writings, I disagreed vehemently with where he allowed his thoughts to take him. Justice Scalia’s textualist approach to the law is necessarily conservative, and by virtue of our legal and political history, necessarily oppressive to minorities. It reinforces the status quo, which again, by virtue of our legal and political history, is necessarily oppressive to minorities. Finally, it ignores the dramatic changes that can occur in a culture above and beyond the legal and political realm, a realm that has always been defended and protected by the wealthy and their citizen soldiers, and thus necessarily oppressive to minorities.
And now, to the frozen-trucker fucker and Scalia’s human centipede, President Trump and the Republicans in the Senate have added Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Here’s what I know about her. She’s super Catholic, super anti-abortion, and she disagrees with the current legal standing of the Affordable Care Act.
I tried watching some of her confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee so I could learn more about her, but I only had time to watch it on the first day, when all of the senators on the committee spent their allotted minutes speechifying about their opponents rather than interrogating the nominee in front of them. I couldn’t watch anything she said on the second or third day of her testimony because, despite speaking into the microphone for all to hear, she didn’t actually say much, choosing instead to obfuscate her thinking and deny the public a fair and transparent airing of her thoughts, opinions, and legal style.
After commiserating over her confirmation, I said to my wife that we have no choice but to give Justice Barrett the benefit of the doubt, but I fear any doubt she won’t be a terrible force on the bench comes more from my ignorance of her legal writings than from any legal opinion she has delivered — which is to say, due to the makeup of her supporters, I find it hard to doubt she won’t be a terrible justice, but I guess I ought to start there?
The problem, of course, is that she allowed herself to participate in this anti-democratic process in the first place. Any individual with integrity would have stood up for the American people and declared that while she would be honored to serve as the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, she couldn’t in good conscience do so until the American people affirm their faith in the President’s leadership (what with her swearing-in ceremony coming just eight days before election day and several weeks after tens of millions of Americans have mailed in their ballots).
Justice Barrett’s decision to participate in this political farce demonstrates her inability to defend our American experiment from corruption by this nation’s powerful and corrupting oligarchy. Her decision to accept the timing of this nomination, more so than any decision she may have filed from the bench, removes whatever doubt I wish I could hold about the positive potential of her tenure.
However, like all good Americans, I truly, desperately, and heart-achingly hope I am wrong.
From There’s a Word for Why We Wear Masks, and Liberals Should Say It:
In “On Liberty,” [John Stuart Mill] wrote that liberty (or freedom) means “doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, as long as what we do does not harm them even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong.”
Nearly two weeks on, the first Presidential debate feels like it was a real moment in this country’s history. I recently assigned one of my students to read and analyze the persuasive techniques used by Charles M. Blow in one of his Op-Eds in The New York Times. While the students focused on the mechanics of the essay, the content called for the end of presidential debates because “they are too much theater, too little substance.”
But Blow wrote his article the day before the debate, and while his critique wasn’t disproved (there was precious little substance in all that chaos), the debate gave Americans ninety uninterrupted and unvarnished minutes of the car crash that is President Trump.
I know some of the President’s most hardcore supporters loved what they saw, but anyone who still had a shred of an open mind and open eyes and open ears (including some of his supporters) found themselves disgusted by his vileness, rudeness, and mean-spiritedness (not to mention his support of white supremacists).
After the debate, my wife kissed me goodnight and headed up to bed. I tried to muster the ability to put on something less horrendous, but instead, I sat on the edge of my couch and cried for my country.
Then we got a puppy. Her name is Pepper. She was just over eight weeks old when we picked her up from a friend’s veterinary clinic on the Canadian border. Like all puppies, she’s just about the cutest thing in the world. She’s a confirmed Shih Tzu, beagle, blue heeler mix, and we suspect she has some kind of terrier in her as well.
I didn’t grow up with pets (if you don’t count fish, which you shouldn’t, since fish are basically houseplants that move a little bit). In fact, I grew up with a complete phobia of dogs. I didn’t go inside most of my friends’ homes because they owned dogs. Some of those dogs were big; others were small. Some were nice; others, not so nice. It didn’t matter. They all scared the shit out of me.
But then I fell in love with a young woman who owned a Lhasa Apso, and if I wanted to spend time in her home, I needed to get over my irrational fears. Thankfully, her dog was well behaved (if a bit stubborn), and over time, he was able to teach me how to be around him, and by extension, other dogs.
With our daughter being an only child, my wife and I decided that a dog would be the next best thing to a sibling that we could give her. We searched for the perfect puppy throughout the summer, but the puppy rush that followed in the wake of the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders made it difficult to find the dog for us. When our friend let us know she had a little cutie for us, we jumped at the chance.
Here’s what I didn’t understand: how fucking hard it is to have a puppy at home. Don’t get me wrong: I totally get it. She’s a baby with nipping teeth and four fast legs. Like all babies, she has needs and impulses she cannot control, and it’s our job to keep her safe, make her feel secure and loved, and teach her how to behave. I understand and understood all of that.
But there’s a difference between knowing how hard something will be and then going through it. With the new family member, the whole dynamic of our household has changed.
By day three, my daughter confessed that she “both love[s] and don’t love[s]” Pepper, mostly because she’s anxious to be alone with the puppy because of the nipping (we’re working on it). Later in the week, her jealousy at the attention her parents and friends were giving to Pepper caused her to stomp up the stairs and slam the door to her bedroom because “No one appreciates me!”
By day five, after little Pepper took what felt to be a spiteful shit on the rug in front of me, I was exhausted. But the next morning, I heard a ding on my phone and looked down to find an email notification from Reddit, linking me to articles about the puppy blues.
As I sat on the edge of my bed reading the threads of that discussion, I began to tear up. All of those people sharing their stories reminded me that I wasn’t alone in having conflicting feelings about my puppy and that it gets better.
Later that night, I attended a memorial service for the late father of two of my former students. It was a private affair arranged by my school, with our staff members and the members of the grieving family being the only ones in attendance. We hosted it at the cabin he built for our school, a project that saw him teaching several of our students (including his son) how to build an incredible, beautiful, and large structure out of wood. The ceremony included the christening of the cabin with a beautiful, hand-made plaque carved into a piece of local slate, naming it forever after the man who built it.
We gathered in a circle in front of the cabin, and his widow read the eulogy that she shared at the family service earlier in the week, but she followed her written statement with some extemporaneous words about the difficulties she and her late husband had, difficulties we knew about as a school because schools generally know what happens behind everyone’s closed doors thanks to the effects on the children.
The upshot of my friend’s words was found in the request she made to all of us: “Forgive someone.” She and her late husband were able to forgive each other during the last few months of his life, and they lived those months in joy with each other. While cancer ate away at the last of his body, his heart and his soul helped his family to heal.
After she finished, we all stood awkwardly silent in the circle, most of us with tears in our eyes or knots in our throat. I looked across the circle at one of my best friends, my brother from another mother, and I watched as he quietly poured a bit of his drink onto the ground in a sacred act of farewell.
I’ve stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I’ve watched powerful avalanches tear down Little Cottonwood Canyon in Utah. I’ve seen the Mediterranean Sea from the coast of France. I’ve driven through the majestic mountains of Alaska. And yet this one act, this one moment, may have been the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.
I followed his lead, and the tears poured down my face.
Last night, I watched this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Bill Burr. From the monologue to the powerful performances by Jack White’s trio, the show reflected the anxiousness that seemed to overwhelm this country since the first Presidential debate.
During the show, one of the head writers for SNL, Colin Jost, remarked several times how dark the jokes were. As an example, Michael Che compared President Trump surviving his COVID-19 infection to “when there’s a car crash and the only survivor is the drunk driver.”
With each sketch and each joke, my anxiety about the state of our country, my puppy blues, and my grief for my friend and my students lessened, and then came the moment I needed more than almost anything: Kate McKinnon, breaking down in the middle of a bit and speaking for all of us whose state of mind is reaching its limit:
It’s all a lot right now. But we can do ‘dis. And we know ‘dis.