Today, one of my students was doing a paper comparing the US Declaration of Independence with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and I couldn't help thinking about what we are going to lose on January 20th, 2017. A long, long, tradition of political and scientific thought culminated in the creation of the United States government and its representative democracy that we have enjoyed and cherished (well, I have, anyway) for 240+ years.
Benjamin Franklin's remark, "A republic, madame, if you can keep it," is less a joke than a warning that we have not heeded.
For 18 months, we have watched now (*grimace*) President-Elect Trump threaten the pillars of our society, and sweep the Republican primaries like a terrifying wildfire. He and his surrogates have since used the Japanese internment camps as a basis for a Muslim registry; promised to pull out of both the Paris climate accord and the Iran Nuclear Deal, and have also threatened to destabilize NATO. And that its only the beginning. He is also appointing known bigots to important cabinet posts and advisory positions, and his new head of the EPA accelerates climate catastrophe. His Secretary of Education is an advocate for school vouchers, has connections to the Christian right, and her main draw for Trump is that her family donated $9.5 million to his campaign. On top of all of that, it gets worse: The NYTimes has published two days ago a full expose of the enormous web of private ventures that threaten to jeopardize his fealty to the country and citizens he will swear to serve. Oh yeah, and say goodbye to Net Neutrality. (Did I cover everything so far? Deep breath!)
As President-Elect, Donald Trump has recently claimed on Twitter that "millions of people voted illegally." In fact, Trump has gone after the NYTimes, protesters, the ballot, and the cast of Hamilton with his Twitter account. Next year, he will be launching personal attacks from @POTUS, and, if he is so inclined, he will have the full force of the executive branch of the federal government at his disposal. Plus the nuclear codes. What happens,in 2020, if Trump decides, "Hey, I'm President. What do we need another election for?" Who is going to stand up to him?
Foreign Policy had an excellent article that detailed what we should be looking out for to see if our democracy is actually being eroded, and there is one part that I would like to discuss in detail. Donald Trump is likely to run the country "like a business," but few people know what that is going to mean until it is too late. Donald likes to reward his friends and punish his enemies, and with the FBI having inserted itself into the election, it is likely that public institutions that citizens previously expected to behave the same toward everyone regardless of political or economic standing, are going to play favorites in a way that will be devastating to public confidence and the integrity of our institutions. One such example will be CNN.
There is an AT&T-Time Warner merger in the works. Bernie Sanders said "This merger represents a gross concentration of power that runs counter to the public good and should be blocked." Trump, however, hates CNN, but might be willing to trade a green light for the merger in return for positive coverage. As Hamilton Nolan put it in his Deadspin article, "So if you are a CNN journalist, ask yourself: Do you believe that the CEOs of Time Warner and AT&T value your editorial integrity more than they value this $85 billion merger?" This is how democracy withers away and dies.
So, what happened? Trump won with about 27% of the total electorate, with less than the number of voters than Mitt Romney in 2012. The fact that Clinton lost by less than a percentage point in battleground states means that about 50% of the electorate actually turned up to vote. This is not unusual in recent elections, but it should alarm people simply for the fact that a democracy depends on participation, and if the people in whose interests policies are being proposed and decided do not vote, well...Donald Trump happens.
I have a sinking feeling that the demographic that brought us the Tea Party in 2010 gave us Trump in 2016: Undereducated white people living in the south and midwest. He's promising many of the same things. The problem is that this is twice now they've traded medicare and collective bargaining for racial animus. At one point during the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders said something prescient: He explained at one of his rallies how people like Donald Trump use racism to divide and conquer: To simultaneously disenfranchise poor whites and at the same time keep them complacent by comparing them to minorities who are even more oppressed. We can expect racism to be catharsis for accelerated income inequality. As soon as it was announced that Donald Trump won the election, reports of violence toward minority populations skyrocketed. The GOP built a coalition of smoke and mirrors for 40 years, and there is no reason why we should expect any different for the next 40 years. Elections have consequences.
Furthermore, the proliferation of fake news sites and conspiracy theories makes it even harder to inform the public, especially as supposedly progressive Democratic voters switch sides or vote for a third party over false and bizarre stories. In order to maintain a democratic society, we must maintain a shared reality, and as fake news sites and previously pro-democratic organizations such as Wikileaks actively work toward trampling democracy in the United States, we are not going to be able to trust anyone.
In fact, the Internet itself has become an instrument of de-democratization. It isn't just that social media is insulating, but that anyone can write anything and that people will believe it. There are few effective ways for society to counteract the corrosive influence of fake news and conspiracy theories, and even fewer for those who are likely to fall into the trap. Belief in conspiracy theories, I have discovered, are a kind of mental illness in that they are nearly impossible to counteract with reason and logic; "No, Clinton does not have Parkinson's." "Well, you're trusting the mainstream media!" The critical thought process completely breaks down, and very likely the person will move deeper into the rabbit hole, reading Breitbart and watching Alex Jones and Ancient Aliens. I thought the 9/11 Truthers were bad. In the 90s, aliens were a fun diversion. But now there are conspiracy theories about nearly everything, and our ability to communicate with one another as a democratic society is severely compromised, and is likely to get worse. (One silver lining about Trump getting elected is that any world body like the Illuminati or the Bilderberg Group or the John Birch Society or what have you, would have never permitted Trump to get elected because they would value order and stability, so we can safely conclude once and for all that these do not exist.)
Unless a miracle happens, Trump will be the 45th (and very possibly--probably?--last) President of the United States of America. Part of me thinks that this was inevitable, that if Clinton won in 2016, someone worse would have won in 2020. They would investigate her perpetually. Her entire term would be consumed by wasteful and inept congressional hearings, FBI investigations, and then at the end of it all they would still have nothing. In 2020, someone else, maybe Trump, probably someone worse, would be voted in, toss Clinton in prison without actionable evidence, and then our country would surely be dead, more surely than we are right now.
RIP United States of America.
July 4, 1776 - January 20, 2017
July 4, 1776 - January 20, 2017
