If I’m introspective, I’m willing to admit that the reason I am not churning out articles like William Saletan’s latest piece for The Bulwark is because is because I’m demoralized. I’m reading all the court filings and book-teasing revelations and leaked texts and emails that are filling in the blanks of the January 6 conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. I’m putting the pieces together in my mind. But I’m not very motivated to tell the story because it’s all stuff I already knew in my gut, and that you probably knew, too.
Saletan is focused on former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. We now know that Meadows was apprised, usually in near-real time, that his boss’s favorite election conspiracy theories were complete bunk. Yet, he didn’t object when Trump and his allies repeated them over and over and over again. In fact, he helped Trump spread these lies and pressured officeholders, like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to take them seriously.
Here’s the thing. Most elite politicians in our country are not complete idiots. These people never believed Trump’s election lies. All the revelations we’ve seen in the past week about Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy being enraged about the January 6 coup are not actually revelations. Their fury with members of their own caucuses who had whipped up a deluded and violent mob which then assaulted the Capitol was based on their firm understanding that it was all based on complete bullshit. There were true believers in their caucuses, and they thought they were dangerous and should perhaps be removed from social media just as Trump had been in the aftermath of the riot. If we didn’t already know this in every detail, we could easily surmise it.
But we also knew that they stopped Trump from being impeached and prevented from running for office again. We knew that they obstructed the effort to have an independent commission investigate what happened, and that this was in large part because they knew the investigation would implicate many members of their caucuses. Their other motivation was their sad realization that holding Trump accountable was the last thing the party’s strong supporters wanted to see. If they went to war with Trump, they were likely to lose their positions of power.
I don’t know why Mark Meadows didn’t resign rather than deciding to help Trump try to illegally stay in power. But I have always assumed it was because he was trying to protect his own position. If he resigned, he’d be a nobody, but if he remained loyal he’d have a future. And if the coup succeeded, he’d remain the second most powerful man on the planet, serving as the gatekeeper of the Dictator of the United States.
So now we have some solid evidence that Meadows probably wasn’t a true believer in The Big Lie he was spreading. That’s worth something and it might even be prosecutable. But it really only confirms what I already felt was the most likely story. It doesn’t feel like news to me.
But I also feel this way because it’s been drummed into me that the truth alone isn’t going to prevail here. The problem isn’t that more people need to be convinced of what happened, but that people need to be convinced to care. I can explain what happened but I can’t make people care.
I have written countless times these people are fascists and a serious danger. I have begged and pleaded for them to be hauled off to jail, and for their crimes to be treated as sedition, akin in every way to the Confederates. This isn’t about convincing people with arguments and evidence but showing them with action and convictions–the exercise of power and justice to reestablish vital norms.
Mark Meadows is just as guilty as Jefferson Davis, and this is true whether or not he actually believed that the election was stolen. That he did not believe it isn’t exculpatory in the slightest.
We need people to defend our system of government rather than just talk about it. It’s not just McCarthy and McConnell who dropped the ball here. January 6 was the culmination of the biggest crime spree since the Civil War, and we’re not treating it that way. That’s why for every supposedly important story about January 6, there’s a story about how the Republicans-the perpetrators of the biggest crime in a century and a half–are about to win back the House of Representatives and probably the Senate.
That’s all the evidence you need that accountability isn’t working and our future is not being secured.
Well, that’s the thing: no one cares.
I suspect a lot of people simply don’t give a shit about anything anymore, and haven’t for a long time.
You may be right, and there are certainly lots of people who don’t care, haven’t for a long time, and/or never did.
For at least some of us who do care, what’s demoralizing is the failure of Democratic politicians to do their jobs. It’s absolutely infuriating that House Select Committee members like Jamie Raskin are giving interviews and dropping teasers about all the good information they’ve collected.
So what! They’re not lawyers prosecuting a case. They’re politicians failing to use their power to hold public hearings to tell and advance a political story. Nobody else can do that for them. And we badly need them to do it.
Something I’ve never personally understood is folks who don’t vote at all. According to wikipedia since 1980 ~50-~70% (2020 is the 70%) of the voting eligible population voted. What would it take to get the other 30% who didn’t to vote? Why don’t they vote? I really want to know more about this group… they’d swing EVERY election if they voted in a block… I’m sure a chunk of these folks are folks who are disenfranchised through things like work. I’m sure another chuck are the “a pox on both your houses” crew which I assume exists. But why don’t the participate? And let’s not even get into why a first past the post voting system is a problem. Or really any kind of discussion about election/voting reform in the US. I guess things will have to get significantly worse, without us tipping over into full dictatorship, before we’ll deal with it. And by then the world will be on fire due to global warming, right? Happy days ahead! 🙂 (Laughing or I’d be curled up in the fetal position.)
Thanks for your response. If you talk with people who regularly don’t vote, you’ll hear lots of different reasons—ranging from “it only encourages them” cynicism to refusing to vote for the “lesser of two evils” to not being allowed to vote by law to other obstacles to voting being insurmountable given everything else going on in their lives.
I think a lot of people care about this. But it also seems as though no one with any power to act is doing anything about it. The system just doesn’t work any more, at least, not for ordinary people, and that is what I find most disturbing about this.
My concern is that we essentially allowed lawlessness to go unpunished for so long (Nixon, Regan, Bush I, Bush II) that the government basically has no credibility about enforcing the law for those in power at this point because there were never any real consequences for the folks involved. And at the same time we allowed one party to continue performing increasingly lawless actions, the other party bas blocked at every turn from doing anything by the law-ignoring party. We should have been running a relevant Benghazi like committee continually since the 70s. But that might have been viewed as “unfair and partisan” so we didn’t. I voted for Democractic Party members (where possible) to fight for my beliefs, but they never fight so things just get worse and worse. But I’ve been demoralized since before I could vote… when the SCOTUS decided Bush v Gore is the end point of US democracy as far as I’m concerned (despite some apparently “fair” elections since…).
You can’t get people to care if your leaders don’t care either. No, self-impeachment isn’t a real thing, Nancy Pelosi. Go off into the sunset and have fun with your grandchildren. You’re all too old and doddering to deal with the crisis at hand. I ended up supporting Warren in ‘20 and with hindsight that was not sufficient to win. But the day I backed her was when she said “impeach this motherfucker tomorrow”. It’s the passive leaders that refuse to step aside or step up because “no one cares, they only want bread-butter issues.” As someone whose political world was somewhat shattered by 2016 (although Bernie would have won), it is absolutely not clear what it will take to make it work. But just because I don’t know, it doesn’t mean our leaders know either! And they don’t do anything to change the conversation or posture. They’re weak! We know it, our enemies know it, the media knows it, and The Universe acts accordingly.
The depressing thing to me isn’t that Republicans had no bottom, nor even that the media was willing to both sides their way into execution camps. It was our weak Democratic leaders who did nothing and tried nothing to try and defend us from the coming onslaught, preferring instead to placate Manchin’s nonsense and Sinema’s mental illness. We needed the party to repeat over and over again, no matter what the topic, or what they wanted to talk about:
Turncoat, killer, liar, thief
Criminal with protection of the law
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa5KJ5C-QP8
Warren is 72, Bernie is 80, Biden is 79 and Pelosi is 82. If you insist on ageism, at least try for some consistency. Josh Hawley is 42, is he better? How about 47 year-old Marjorie Taylor Greene? Capability not age is the relevant metric here.
The reason we are not winning (setting aside structural issues) is because most voters simply do not support the progressive policy agenda. Moderate that agenda, tone down the scornful rhetoric, make an effort to understand the needs of non-college working people, and stop scoring own goals with idiocy like Defund. Voters see Democrats as the people who are much better at finding tendentious excuses for renaming schools than we are at dealing with actual problems like homelessness.
How do you deal with homelessness? You build housing. There is a direct correlation with vacancy and homelessness. Who opposes building more housing? Moderates, rich liberals, and conservatives who want to direct what you put in their neighborhood. In addition to these structural problems, interest rates are up so it’s more expensive to build. And because there are so many millennials who want to buy houses it’s a free for all hungry hungry hippos with limited supply. And if there’s no supply there, why would you sell/leave? So now rent is also going to go up. But we need more workers to build houses so it’s cheaper. But they don’t want immigrants. You see, this is the problem.
How do you want to deal with them? Crush their faces, clear their tent camps, make them move? Doesn’t sound like you have solutions, you want demagoguery. You won’t win by moderating (not to be taken literally, depends on the context, but national environment rules everything).
Also, GMAFB about ageism. Dianne Feinstein probably can’t even remember her own name at times. It’s a huge issue. It’s a disgrace and a disservice to the state of California. I get it, you’re older and you get snippy at the young whipper snappers telling you to get out of the way. But it’s what happens in an ageing electorate with the median voter being 58 in a popular culture at complete odds with those voters, meaning there is no real solution here. They see minorities on CSPAN and it freaks them out.
Lest you think I am exaggerating, this happened two days ago. You can’t negotiate with this bullshit. The very existence of “the left” is the problem. I mean, many centrist dodos want to purge the party of The Squad. That’s what would be truly required to win these voters (and I doubt you’d get the winning side of that bet as your depress the 18-45’s). It’s a shit situation. Requires radical action. Sometimes the fascists win. If you’d prefer we make nice on our way down, you do you. I won’t be part of it.
https://twitter.com/benpu_nbc/status/1518765213293686784
Democracy in this country is sitting on death row right now. The sand is running out of the hour glass and the only people who stand a chance of stopping the final execution are too busy playing some sort of multi-dimensional chess where all they are doing is moving pawns around the board, with no regard for the fact the King is one or two moves from being in checkmate. They are so enthralled with the actions within the game that they fail to see how close it is to ending.
A fellow Dem friend talked for thirty minutes this week to their Senator about all this stuff, and what they told me about the conversation left me deflated and even more depressed. I just think they have missed the boat on this, and the clock is going to run out. I’m afraid the people with the power, who we have been depending on to fight tooth and nail to save our democracy, don’t have the sense of urgency necessary to succeed. I am as demoralized as you.