Calling All Angels

Acting in this fascist time

As another presidential election looms – Is there a better word for it than looms? – we have not recovered from the last one. Those who led the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, attempting to overturn the 2020 results, are being tried and, when convicted, sentenced. But their drive to empower Trump, which is fueled by delusions he foments, has not lost any energy. And it looks like things will get worse before they get better.

Pessimism doesn’t suit me.  In fact, before Trump, I was an optimist who believed that our problems and disagreements were challenges we would overcome together. This began to change as Trump brought rage, division, and calls to violence to our politics. After January 6, when I became one of just two Republicans willing to investigate what happened, pessimism overtook me. I also realized that in this state of emergency, no one will be helped by false comfort.

The committee’s investigation documented the former president’s months-long campaign of lies intended to incite his tens of millions of followers. This process peaked with loud calls for the vice president to somehow overturn Joe Biden’s election.  Meanwhile, political thugs in groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers organized to serve as the so-called tip-of-the-spear during the attack. They were inspired by Trump and, more directly, by agitators like Trump’s longtime advisor Roger Stone. In the end, Trump stood by, for a tragic 187 minutes, as the mob ransacked Capitol offices, wounded more than 100 police officers, and inflicted lethal physical and psychological wounds on others.

As we on the committee worked, GOP leaders who once condemned the acts of January 6, and the president in his role, backtracked. By the time we issued our report virtually every one of the party’s local, state, and national leaders, including those challenging Trump for the presidential nomination, had lined up behind him. Trump is now more popular and powerful than he was prior to the 2016 primaries. Though facing multiple indictments he leads every voter poll, by double digits. And just two candidates, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, with 3 percent and less than 0 percent support respectively, dare speak ill of the man who could campaign from prison in 2024.

Christie and Hutchinson are proving that Trump has once again devised a strategy that boxes in anyone who dares speak against him and will also deny the nomination to those who, like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy grovel before him. These two men are pathetic in their efforts to out-Trump the original, but look beyond their humiliation and add up the polling totals for all three. The result approaches 80 percent. This means that eight out of ten GOPers embrace not just Trump but Trumpism, which is likely to persist even if he loses in 2024.

A reflection of Trump’s personality, not policy, Trumpism is a historically perverse, fascist belief system. Believers consider opponents to be traitorous enemies. They support Christian nationalism and would dismantle much of the government based on conspiracy theories about so-called “Deep State” actors who supposedly wield the true power in Washington and around the world.

Trumpism has so overwhelmed the genial, Reagan conservatism that once prevailed in my party that the name of the president who defeated Soviet communism and revived the economy is not much mentioned anymore.  Instead, the formerly pro-Reagan Heritage Foundation has gathered 45 activist groups behind a hysterical campaign to attack every part of the government in order to, “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left.”  The key targets, according to the Heritage plan, are agencies like the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA, all of which resisted Trump’s election lies. (Not to be outdone, GOP presidential candidate Ramaswamy proposes to fire 75 percent of the federal workforce, shuttering, among others, the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)   

Today’s Trump-style chaos ranges from a House GOP drive to impeach Biden, though no evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors exists, to activist campaigns against librarians and teachers who offer books and classroom lessons that contain ideas outside the Trumpist realm. Public meetings where these complaints have been aired have devolved into shouting matches. In one instance, in Oklahoma, an extremist was charged with physically assaulting a teacher.    

With neighbor-to-neighbor conflicts multiplying and Congress subject to the whims of extreme Trumpists  -- one suggests states consider secession – it’s fair to say that we’ve reached a point of crisis exceeded, historically, only by the Civil War.  Institutional push-back from the courts, the press, and even moderate religious organizations seem to be failing and the only possible solutions lie in long-term struggles to reshape our democracy’s systems, beginning with an election process in which the Electoral College enables minority rule of the White House, the Senate, and the courts.

With hard work by each one of us, and perhaps some luck, the fascist fire will be extinguished and we will someday form a more perfect union. Until then, one source of comfort comes from the very first, and greatest Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who, in his first inaugural address insisted:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln knew the struggle, like ours, would be long and uncertain but he never wavered in his faith. Neither should we.

To quote singer/songwriter Jane Siberrry, “Calling all angels.”