I have been trying all week to write a piece warning that something sinister and dangerous slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. That looking into our future is like looking into a glass darkly. That something’s gotta give … blow … break …
But I am just not feeling that pessimistic. Yet.
You might even expect the Right to exalt in their total victory: They have not just the presidency but the very president they wanted — a life-sized firecracker to throw into the chicken coop of politics-as-usual. They also have a Congress controlled by the far-right Freedom Caucus, and most of the governorships, and a 5-4 conservative majority on the Supreme Court (which they got by cheating former president Barack Obama, which should make it all the sweeter.)
You’d expect them to feel like winners. Why don’t they? There is more resentment on the Right, more complaints of persecution, more wild-eyed conspiracy theories now than under Obama. Despite controlling America politically, they still feel like losers, strangers in their own land.
And maybe they should — they have “lost” the culture wars the GOP so cynically fed them for so many years. But what were the culture wars? Gay marriage? “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”? Abortion as murder? Black athletes kneeling in silent protest?
To the Trumpistas, those were supposed to be battles in a larger war to win back their country. But with a slight twist of the head (yes, a bit to the left) what they experience as a defeat was also a victory — a victory for ever-expanding liberty, simple awareness of our post-WASP nation and world, an affirmation that the continued “Emmet Tilling” of unarmed black men was unacceptable all these decades after the civil rights movement.
I believe we, humanity, evolve toward ever greater liberty — in fits and starts, often as a two-steps-forward one-and-three-quarters-steps-back, sure and lots of bodies on the way, too. But still forward. For millennia we have done this, from the Code of Hammurabi 3,700 years ago to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. We might evolve in our consciousness first, and then need decades, centuries, for our practices to catch up. But we creep ever forward toward more liberty.
This evolution is what the GOP, the Tea Party and now the Trumpistas have called the culture war, and they have lost that battle — as would any organism trying to hold itself back from evolving.
And as Darwin admonished: adapt or die. And for that reason, those in Trump World feel like they are dying or being smothered to death by the rest of we tremulous lungfish trying to emerge from the primordial sea to colonize the land on our new feet.
To avoid being smothered by this evolutionary arc, they voted for and got Trump — the most perfect in your face, up yours president they could get, and, yet, they are certain they are still “losing.” And here the tale turns sinister: of their losing through winning they can only cry “Cheater!”
And their resentment is stoked like a fire with ever more resentment and alienation expressed most perfectly (if depressingly) as the grandest of all conspiracies — the “deep state” aligned against them, pressing a pillow over their faces. As their enemies — once limited to the ACLU, LGBTQ and the NAACP — now include the CIA, FBI and the NSA, they have cut themselves loose and are no longer loyal to what the rest of we lungfish call “civil society.”
The simple fact is the country they want to take back no longer exists. The country that does exist is a hateful mutation (“Look! No fins!”). What happens when that truth finally dawns on them — this 40 percent of America that cleaves to Trumpisms if to the last ray of light before the long night?
Or perhaps that realization is at hand. NPR ran an insightful piece recently, one of its famed driveway moments. A conservative representative was decrying how — in the age of Trump mind you — white conservatives still feel that when they turn on TV they find Hollywood “spitting” in their face, or listen to some college professor “spitting” in their face. Those were his actual words.
So it is there on the Trumpian right we find talk of civil war, of the violent resolution of an ideological culture war they have lost, despite running the country politically for years. The tail is learning that even though it has been wagging the dog, it is not the dog. Now that tail might want to what? Bite the dog? Amputate itself from the body and call the stumpy remnant a “dog?”
I don’t fear this apocalyptic talk on the right. Frankly I don’t think they’d be any better at “civil war” than Trump is at governing. But the danger of trouble is real — the outlines of it unfold even now. I don’t believe the Trumpistas have it in them to organize some armed response. But if the mid-terms give us a Democratic House and GOP Senate, and if Robert Mueller’s investigation rips the lid off of the Keystone Cops’ crimes of Trump’s campaign and cronies, and he loses in 2020, we will face a crisis that will test this country to its very core.
Be ready. It won’t play out like you think.
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazette.net.