Groundhog day for authoritarians
What if the coup isn’t the worst of it?
After the wreckage of Watergate, the conventional wisdom embraced the cliché that the coverup was worse than the crime. Actually, that’s still true. But we need to upgrade our hierarchy of horribles.
Politicians will always commit crimes, and some will try to engineer elaborate schemes of concealment. The sins of the powerful are with us always; their essential untrustworthiness was baked into our system of checks and balances.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison would have tweeted. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
This, of course, is the tricky part, because it assumes that the institutional and political restraints would hold, and that the American people would want them to.
But what if they didn’t?
What if we had a coup and a coverup, and nobody (by which I mean the GOP) cared?
In 2022, the real danger isn’t just the crime or the coverup, it’s the acceptance.
We know that the nation can survive insurrections and even attempts at obstruction of justice. But can it survive a shrug?
Polls continue to show that the majority of Republican voters still believe the Big Lie, and support Trump.
So what happens if one of the nation’s two dominant political parties decides that it doesn’t care? And is rewarded by the voters for its cynicism and moral nihilism?
This seems like a good time to point out something else: The real threat to democracy is not the Big Lie. It’s something worse.
This is not to suggest that election denialism or conspiracy theories are not dangerous; they are, of course. But the House January 6th Committee has reminded us of something important: The whole Big Lie thing is ludicrous, risible, inane bullshit. It is an entire political belief system based on demented theories about Italian satellites, Venezuelan voting machines, and the hallucinations of Mike Lindell.
But that’s not the point.
You may have noticed how the various claims from Rudy/Dinesh/[Insert name of insane Republican] are ever-shifting. A bogus charge is made, it is debunked, and it is quickly replaced with the next fabrication, and so on. It’s an endless morphing chain of guano-soaked nonsense. But despite the parade of absurdities, no factual refutation ever seems to stick.
Why? Because the lies don’t matter. Only the outcome counts.
In other words, millions of Americans don’t necessarily believe something crazy and bogus. They believe something much worse.
The Big Lie is the pretext for the refusal to accept the peaceful transfer of power to political opponents who are seen as evil and dangerous.
Forget about the dropboxes, mules, and rigged voting machines; nobody really cares about the votes or the counting of votes. It’s not about that; it’s about winning — or to be more precise, defeating the enemy.
A subtext of right-wing politics now is that the other side simply cannot be allowed to win. They hate America, they hate God, and they will destroy everything you hold dear.
It’s the Flight 93 election forever. It’s Jan. 6th . . . forever.
That’s from Never Trumper Charlie Sykes. He’s right, of course. What are we going to do about it?