Transforming the Host

“A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party’s ideas but on massive disenfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the talisman of humanity that voting represents.” Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote

Lazy Sunday afternoon in Santa Barbara town, blue sky and sunshine and a very comfortable seventy-one degrees. My son is in the kitchen behind me, baking cinnamon rolls. He’s twenty-four and never stops eating. My daughter is in her bedroom, door closed against the entry of her brother who pesters her endlessly. My wife is perched on the sofa with her laptop, pecking away at work. Yesterday I watched my steadily improving Chelsea football team beat Newcastle United, 2-0 away at St. James’ Park. Solid win. Tottenham is next on the Premier League schedule, at home. Tottenham beat Manchester City, 2-0 at home yesterday and moved top of the league. City have experienced a rocky start, and against Spurs they struggled to solve Jose Mourinho’s tactical set-up. Midweek there is Champions League group action. The poor players are being run ragged by a compressed fixture schedule and, no surprise, the training room of many clubs are full of players with muscular injuries. Christian Pulisic for Chelsea. Sergio Aguero for Man City. Many others. The injury bug and positive Covid-19 tests have hit Liverpool hard. They lost star defender Virgil van Dijk for the season with an ACL injury. Still, the Reds roll on, cruising past Leicester by a 3-nil margin. Jurgen Klopp has built a winning machine. 

Winners and losers. The presidential election is staggering its way toward certification, though the Trump campaign is slowing the process with lawsuits and demands for recounts. The president, always on alert for another democratic norm to subvert, intervened personally by calling two Trump Party vote canvassers in Michigan; he then invited a delegation of Michigan Trump Party lawmakers to the White House, presumably to coerce them to ignore the will of Michigan voters (who overwhelmingly chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris), and award the state’s electoral college votes to him. Since I didn’t read about or hear a peep of protest, I assume this kind of election interference is legal. It just looks like the kind of thing a mob boss might do. 

Democracy in this country relies on norms, on faith in processes, and on those in power putting the country’s welfare ahead of their own. 

Trump will never concede, never lend a hand to the incoming Biden team, and never stop moaning about voter fraud, fake ballots, and how the election was stolen from him, the greatest US president of all time. That’s the Trump narrative.  Get used to hearing it, or some variation thereof. Maybe Trump will adopt Rudy G’s theory that Hugo Chavez rose from his grave in Venezuela and, along with secret operatives from Cuba and China, financial help from George Soros, and wizardry from Big Tech, rewired voting machines and deviously flipped millions of votes from Trump to Biden.  Until his last breath Trump will repeat, “I won in a landslide.”

Truth. Facts. Logic. Reason. Trump and his minions have stomped on this quartet for four years, almost rendered all four of these vital components of a liberal society irrelevant. It’s an astonishing achievement to make millions of people believe in things that are demonstrably false, like Trump’s fantasy auto plants in Michigan, steel mills in Pennsylvania, and resurgent coal mines in West Virginia. Millions of American voters obviously want very much to believe in the charade Trump has waged on them. In his excellent book, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World, investigative journalist Tom Burgis documents how a new breed of global leaders obtain and maintain power by widely disseminating alternate truths. Putin. Bolsonaro. Xi JinPing. Modi. Mohammed bin Salman. Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump.  Here’s a quote from Burgis that illuminates the situation: “To hold total power you didn’t need your truth to beat your enemy’s, but to destabilize the very idea of truth, neutering its power to challenge any narrative you might select.”

Undermining the truth is what Trump has done in the United States, and now he’s casting about wildly in an attempt to delegitimize his defeat by Joe Biden. It probably won’t work in the end, but it will do lasting damage to our country. Democracy in this country relies on norms, on faith in processes, and on those in power putting the country’s welfare ahead of their own. Trump, of course, has turned these notions on their head. Here’s another quote from Kleptopia that applies to what Trump has been doing for the past four years: “But the new kleptocrats were subverting the state, using its institutions against itself, to seize for themselves that which rightfully belonged to the commonwealth.”

On his way out the door and into litigation hell, Trump will grab Uncle Sam’s frayed coat and try to drag the old man down with him. Though Trump will be gone, Trumpism will live on. Here’s another quote from Tom Burgis that should give us pause and also make us consider how we can strengthen our laws and institutions to prevent the next Trump from rising out of the swamp: 

“Those who resist them believe that, once they are gone, the institutions they have distorted will snap back to how they were. But like a parasite altering a cell it invades, so kleptocratic power transforms its host. Those who use their public office to steal must hold on to it not just for the chance of further riches but in order to maintain the immunity from prosecution that goes with it. When elections come around, losing is not an option.”