The Seven Deadly Sins on legs
by Tom Sullivan
The Salt Lake Tribune’s Christmas gift to Republican Senator Orrin Hatch was a lump of coal brightly gift-wrapped as their Utahn of the Year Award. It wasn’t for any glowing achievement, but for being the Utahn who had made the most news and had the greatest impact. “For good or for ill,” the paper pointedly added.
Hatch earned the recognition for helping dismantle the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, for his role as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in overhauling the tax code, and for his “utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power.”
Hatch, who has been in the Senate since 1977, is moving to run for an eighth term after promising the 2012 campaign would be his last. It is time “to call it a career,” the paper states bluntly, throwing in his face the advice he once given his own interns: “Elected politicians shouldn’t stay here too long.”
Experience is a good thing in an official elected to high office. But too much experience can be stultifying. None at all — throw the bums out on steroids — gave us Donald Trump.
Paul Krugman and Eugene Robinson in their respective papers agree this morning. Those who expected awfulness from Trump got an administration as bad or worse than we’d imagined. Yet each sees reason to believe we may yet rescue the country from an authoritarian movement that elected as America’s savior the Seven Deadly Sins on legs.
Krugman writes in the New York Times that a host of people who might have retreated (as some have) into their private lives did not:
What we’ve seen instead is the emergence of a highly energized resistance. That resistance made itself visible literally the day after Trump took office, with the huge women’s marches that took place on Jan. 21, dwarfing the thin crowds at the inauguration. If American democracy survives this terrible episode, I vote that we make pink pussy hats the symbol of our delivery from evil.
For his part, the Washington Post’s Robinson adds that besides the women’s marches and a persistent resistance there were some wins to savor:
In November, Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race in Virginia, a purple state, by a surprisingly big nine-point margin. His coattails were long enough to elect so many Democrats to the state House of Delegates that control of the chamber is still undecided pending recounts. And then on Dec. 12, Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore in a special election for a U.S. Senate seat — in Alabama, of all places, one of the most Republican states in the nation.
These races were not about D’s vs. R’s. They were about sanity vs. insanity, reason vs. chaos. They were about Trump, and he lost.
We have entered a period of propaganda spread from within and without, a period of alternative facts and the dissolving of external reality. We witness in control of government not leaders but “obsequious toadies” (Krugman) who reject Enlightenment reason and science and call forth their supporters’ basest instincts.
Robinson asks, “Can a democracy function without a commonly accepted chronicle of events and encyclopedia of knowledge? We are conducting a dangerous experiment to find out.” What damage has been done may not be on par with the burning of the Library at Alexandria, but don’t tempt them. The Library of Congress is just down the street.
As it says in Ephesians 4 (not four Ephesians), Hatch and his party, “having the understanding darkened,” and “being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” We “can’t count on the consciences of Republicans to protect us,” writes Krugman. Nor can we count on Robert Mueller’s investigation to stop a descent into authoritarianism, as Robinson cautions.
So long as we have the strength and stamina to remain in the fight, “America is not yet lost,” a hopeful Kugman writes. See you there.
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