On a calmer note, human beings have been around some 2.4M years. It was only some 15-20,000 years ago that some families proved powerful enough to requisition the arms and uteruses of other families. Globally, only in the common era did settled communities begin to overtake wandering communities as the “preferred” pattern of social and economic reproduction. And only in the twentieth century that urban populations overtook rural.
This means that for 99 per cent of their history, human beings have preferred small, <150 member wandering communities whose members worked <5 hours per day in exchange for all the food and drink they could want, plus an endless supply of songs, dances, painting, laughing and wonder. For less than 1 per cent of their history, human beings have found it desirable to purchase the lives of others for their own personal, private, marginal benefit, at the expense of the vast majority.
All of this is small comfort to that sliver or speck (or whatever the suitable metaphor is) of humanity that is witnessing before its very eyes the death throws of a very, very, young empire. We — or at least those of us hyper-educated in that useless domain called “history” — more or less grasp, as a trained oncologist more or less grasps cancer, what we are watching, the metastasis of a malignancy whose only cure would be a nation of citizens as healthy, wealthy, and wise as ourselves. (At least that was Aristotle’s judgment in 334 BC.) Which means that, even should Joe Biden win, which is likely, and white Christian nationalist America gives him permission to assume office, which is less likely, this will not make up for the two hundred and fifty years of denial during which we told ourselves (and none more convincingly than Democrats) that Republican values and Democratic process could survive even when citizens are sick, poor, and ill-informed.
Should humanity survive their self-inflicted cataclysm, the United States, at best, will stand as morality tale #3, right after Rome and Greece, for what can go wrong.
Chris Wallace can go wrong. “Oops. My mistake.” The entire Republican leadership can go wrong. “We don’t really endorse white Christian nationalism.” And the entire Democratic Party can go wrong. “Fully funded public education through graduate school? Fully funded health care? Student loan forgiveness? Take military grade weapons away from police departments? How horrid!”
These are unusual times. But the saddest part of it all for me is that the Republican rank and file are so completely ill- and mis-informed about the history of their own nation, to say nothing of the very meaning of republicanism, that they are absolutely convinced they are defending America. Absolutely convinced. Thank you Rupert Murdock. Thank you Roger Ailes. Join Hitler and Stalin in the depths of hell. The rank and file, of course, have not the slightest inkling that they’ve been completely swindled down to their last dollar. But rather than actually take the time to read the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention — its, still, all right there at loc.gov — they would rather trust that their leaders aren’t misleading them. After all, their pastor told them that Trump was sent by God to make sure that women will remain subject to their husbands.
So, no. Pro-Trump Republicans are not neutral. Just as most of Hitler’s and most of Stalin’s sycophants were followers by default, so most of Trump’s followers have no choice. But this does not make their choices any more defensible. And that is one of the clearest indications that we are living in unusual times: that the leading political party in the US, the party that won the last Presidential election, by whatever means, is now publicly on record defending positions and policies in opposition to which the US fought a bloody world war.
Unusual times.