Do not underestimate the corrupting power of power.
Trumpism and the Republicans’ embrace of it runs deeper than greed or racism. Those are mere surrogates for a more animalistic drive: dominance. The politics of Trumpism is about power: who has it and who is unwilling to share it. The United States’ founders took care to craft a republic in which political power is shared among three branches of government, each holding a check on the other. The very structure tacitly acknowledges Man’s thirst for power and propensity for misusing it.
The Civil War was about the South holding onto its power to enslave. Decades of lynchings after Reconstruction, the KKK, Jim Crow, monuments to the Lost Cause, and the Wilmington and Tulsa riots were about white people threatened with sharing power maintaining their historic dominance. So are movement conservatism, the militia movement, and Christian Dominionism. The Civil Rights and gay rights movements sought for the historically disempowered a share of the power this republic’s founding documents promised but never delivered.
People addicted to power will do almost anything to maintain theirs, including murder.
The mistake Liberty University makes, Kaitlyn Schiess learned in her years there, lies in assuming “that if we know the right information, we will act rightly.” And “in underestimating the power of the loves in our lives — in this case, political power — to shape our actions and alter our moral commitments.”
She writes in the New York Times:
At Liberty, our minds may have been receiving correct content, but our hearts were being trained to love wrongly: to love political power, physical security and economic prosperity as higher goods than they are. The leaders of the university may have believed that we could be immersed in the stories and values of the Republican Party while maintaining any theological truths incompatible with them, but the power of our affective education was stronger.
Strong enough to pervert the Gospel. Strong enough to corrupt Jerry Falwell Jr. who resigned Tuesday as university president.
“Proximity to power is its own kind of education,” Schiess writes. “It shapes who you are and what you desire in life. A thirst for political power — and sometimes, obtaining that power — begets more than corruption: It often involves sexual immorality, degraded moral judgment and financial malpractice.” In its dalliances with cultural and political power, Liberty has lost its way.
The love of money is not the root of all evil. Money is a surrogate for power. What we are witnessing this week are the lengths to which members of the Party of Trump will go to to maintain theirs. Democratic and ethical principles they claim, like those of Liberty’s believers, they will sacrifice for dominance.
Truth died decades ago, long before “truthiness” became a punch line. The Republican convention this week is a carnival of “depraved” and “scurrilous” lies, the Washington Post’s Editorial Board writes.
Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, leveled a string of corruption charges on Tuesday against former Vice President Joe Biden and his family. That her allegations have been repeatedly proven false was no impediment to Republicans flinging them again. They assume there is a sucker born every minute. They assume their supporters are just as willing to do anything and believe anything to keep from sharing power. Including sacrificing the republic itself.
Unthinkable? The Civil War proves otherwise. Joshua Geltzer considered over a year ago what might happen if Donald Trump loses reelection but refuses to leave office, Dahlia Lithwick recalls:
“One big reaction to my article was the same one that’s come to define the Trump era: ‘He wouldn’t really do that, would he?’ ” Geltzer said. “But then I’d start ticking off all of the times many of us had said that about Trump before, only to see him do the unthinkable.”
The press finds itself paralyzed, Lithwick writes, over how to raise that question without making his refusal to leave more likely. Failure to treat a Trump presidency as an “existential threat to democratic norms and protections” helped lead us here:
The media cannot avoid frightening, unconstitutional, or disempowering ideas this election cycle. It is our job to do quite the opposite: to help clarify what may come, even if it strikes us as unlikely or disturbing, and even if it’s later dismissed as a “joke.” Just as we have explored Trump’s worst fanciful suggestions—about physically abusing criminal defendants, changing the legal protections for journalists, or doing away with birthright citizenship—we should also explore the dark and scary ones, about refusing to accept defeat or encouraging supporters to reject the election results. Does it make us all complicit in the daily mayhem of Schrödinger’s chaos election? Of course it does. But is it smarter than covering our eyes and ears and hoping none of it is coming, as too many of us did in covering the 2016 contest? Um, yes. Because wishing that away didn’t keep it from coming true.
Republicans unbounded by any other principle than the will to power are filling voters’ ears with lies, false history, and spurious Lincoln quotations. Some in their ignorance they likely believe themselves. Others they expect born-again Tories among their base to lap up without question.
The Post’s Editorial Board concludes:
The Republican case against Mr. Biden assumes both ignorance and gross credulity by voters. Let’s hope this cynical and insulting estimation of the American electorate turns out to be wrong.
Hope is not enough. Plan for the worst and work to prevent it.
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