Daring to Be Hopeful: (Or Maybe the Center Can Hold)

 

What a perilous moment. However, as dark as it is (trust me, I can normally find a raincloud on the sunniest of days) I want to suggest that there may, just possibly, be daylight ahead. Not because Joseph Biden will be the next president—although that is most certainly a good thing—but because what took place on Wednesday on Capitol Hill this past week is forcing a reckoning within the Republican Party, and because the very darkness and peril of the moment is going to force a movement back toward the center.

I’m not kidding.

I am not unaware of the dangers, especially in the very short term: some number of the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill were apparently deadly serious and there may be similar uprisings up to and on the day of the inauguration here in D.C. and in other state capitols. And to be sure, the Republican party leadership at the national and state level is hopelessly corrupted by the Cult; this is the team that held a “convention” on the White House grounds (with no less than six Trump family members as speakers) and passed no platform at all—behold, a new thing in American politics: a political party that did not even pretend to have a set of policy ideas, and dedicated only to the personality at the center of its cult. As an institution, the Republican Party is now an authoritarian threat to the American project.

But individual Republicans are now having to choose, and some are abandoning the ship. Back in November, on that Saturday that it became clear Biden had won, fully ten weeks before the catastrophe this past week, I sensed that this was an emerging possibility: with Trump finally out of the picture there had to be Republicans with a very uneasy conscience (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse) who would be willing to work with Biden, do a little damage control to their reputations, lend their names to some real accomplishments. Not to mention Mitt Romney, the one Republican who can emerge from four years of Trump with a relatively free conscience. Even without Democratic control of the Senate, I think this was a possibility.

Now, Jan. 6 has given everyone a glimpse into the abyss and, however belatedly, for many Trump has crossed a line. Murkowski has demanded the President resign and has intimated she will leave the Republican Party. These developments, in tandem with the Democratic victories in Georgia, mean something extremely important beyond partisan celebration: Joe Biden can have, at the very least, a successful first six or eight months.  

Principally this means getting the vaccine rollout up to speed and getting relief out to families and businesses. I’m in favor especially of a huge, targeted bailout of restaurants, the entities most dependent on a business model—lots of people crowded inside, close together—that has been made impossible in the pandemic. Deficit anxiety is a thing of the past—we long ago mortgaged our children’s future and the Republicans have never honestly cared about it except as a cudgel to wield when they were out of power (they’ll do it again; look for plenty of editorials by Karl “Deficits Don’t Matter” Rove in the Wall Street Journal.) Hopefully, there can be a return to something like “normal” by the fall.

This is so absolutely essential—not just for all the obvious reasons, but because it is the surest thing to bank down the fires that are raging. Joe Biden needs to have a successful first six or eight months in office, regardless of where things go after that. And I do not believe they will go anywhere uncharted: Biden is at heart an institutionalist, he’s put together a centrist, sane and talented cabinet, and he is going to prove the Trump-world fantasies of a radical socialist agenda just that, a fever dream.  The centripetal forces of this perilous movement are moving, I am convinced, to the center, away from the extremes. That’s what I believe; I hope I’m not wrong.

Which leads me to my other point, something I have long believed. Once we finally have this man—this bitter, twisted, vindictive sociopath—in the rearview mirror, the process of normalization will accelerate; a great many cowards and apologists and rationalizers and excuse-makers are suddenly going to have an enormous case of collective amnesia. He’s going to start to appear as the tiny, little man-behind-the curtain he has always been.

In the near term his “movement” remains a grave threat, I know that. Democrats in the House have prepared articles of impeachment, again, that they will introduce on Monday if the Vice President does not invoke the 25^th amendment, and the debate now is whether it will further stoke the flames. Ten days from the end of the man’s term, I don’t see how this can be true and it is simply unacceptable that he should escape consequences for what has happened. If he stays in office (he’s not going to resign), he’ll pardon himself and his children; however legally questionable that may be, it can’t be allowed. There should be consequences as well for Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy, and a host of others.

Donald Trump should, at least, spend the rest of days for quite some time in court—federal court for charges related to his incitement to sedition; in state and federal court for obstruction and possible suborning of justice with related to his forced resignation of the Georgia attorney general and for his hour-long phone call pleading with the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” the votes necessary to claim he won the state, just the week prior to the insurrection. I am one of those who believe that his financial entanglements in the Manhattan real estate industry—he is millions of dollars in debt to Deutsche Bank—are central to a vast, deep and wide corruption, and to his possible ownership by Russian mafia and/or other bad actors. Those debts are going to come due and I thought it mighty interesting that the bank officer who handled Trump’s loans resigned after the election.

As to what happened on Wednesday, it is clear—as is always the case with crowd hysteria—that a great many people were swept up (and swept into the Capitol) by the force of events that overtook them. But watch this searing and heartbreaking video before you are tempted to make any excuses; as a warning, it is nearly 40 minutes long, it is extraordinarily frightening, and it ends with the shooting of a Trump supporter by late-arriving military police; at points during the riot, the crowd was shouting to “Hang Pence.”  (Someone erected a noose outside the Capitol. ) It is also clear from reports that some of these people meant serious business, bringing plastic handcuffs to take members hostage. Offices were ransacked and it is reasonable to surmise that some were savvy enough to be looking for the actual electoral college votes themselves (it was apparently two young Hill staffers who went into hiding with the votes; yes, the votes actually physically exist in some form on paper. Who knew?) Pipe bombs were found at both party headquarters.

Nine months ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, I started writing a portrait of my father which I entitled, “American Normal.” It was, I hoped, a small piece of social history as lived by one man in mid-20^th century America, the America I and my generation inherited. The title, and the piece itself, were at least in a part a response to what I saw as the disappearance of an American normal, the iterative destruction one by one of norms and protocols under the administration of Donald Trump, and of the America I thought I knew.  

I had no idea what was coming, but I think we should have. In what I think will be considered a classic of political literature, Andrew Sullivan compared Trump to the Richard III of Shakespeare’s play, and located the hold he has taken of American life in “the darker folds of the human soul, individual and collective.”

Unless he is somehow removed, he is with us for ten more days and for those ten more days he is dangerous. I’m not unaware of the vast problems—political and cultural—that lay beneath or behind the Trump phenomenon, and that will be with us for years, including the contributions of the Democratic Party, the media and the far-left. There is an enormous amount of blame to go around.

But if you have ever woken in a sweat from a nightmare, you know the relief that comes from seeing, even in the dark, your familiar, normal surroundings; you are suddenly grateful for the mundane facts of the room you know. That, I hope, is where we are—awakening with a renewed gratitude for the mundane normal—and where the politics of the moment, fraught as they are, are leading us, back to the center.