As we still appear to be like deer in the headlights, frozen by all things Trump, I almost missed that the most disturbing — the most illuminating — news lately came from Mitt Romney.
Remember the one stalwart, you-can-still-be-a-conservative-and-a-patriot good guy? The type we have been using for the last four years to convince ourselves that it is only Donald J. Trump who threatens our democracy. Romney’s instant salute of joy and support for Trump’s third Supreme Court pick ripped away the (hopefully) last fig leaf Americans were using to convince themselves it was not the GOP that has gone mad, but only the interloper.
And if we didn’t know, now we know. We know what was always obvious! Trump is the id that speaks out loud the truths the GOP ego has been taught to hide.
Trump’s goals are their goals right down the line, and there is not a whiff of diff — except Trump refuses to obscure with words the vindictiveness and heartlessness of core conservative beliefs. But Trump is so all-in that we — good liberals and progressives — have foolishly convinced ourselves that the bull in the china shop was the danger. And we fell for it, didn’t we? When the whole time the rampaging bull was meant to distract from the rumbling, rolling tectonic plate shift beneath our feet.
Romney’s rush to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett made it clear: There is no non-Trump GOP. You cannot be a decent, moderate conservative from Utah without supporting the packing of the Supreme Court in order to continue to rule as the minority party.
There is no other explanation: The Trump SCOTUS will make a Green New Deal impossible, as the GOP will litigate every detail of it and tie the entire thing in a Gordian Knot that will kill it — and maybe us. Our country’s democratic infrastructure is not decaying so much as it is collapsing, and we see it failing everywhere. The desperate need for Electoral College reform, for an end to partisan gerrymandering and to voter roll purges — that is, the need to expand the franchise to all who qualify — will fail in the face of the permanent Trump SCOTUS.
There is no honest argument that can be made for Trump’s third SCOTUS pick other than to create an anti-democratic balance to the progressive turn the country is taking. That is the agenda of the Mitch McConnells and Mitt Romneys. The lessons learned from the pandemic — what we must change in our labor, unemployment, wages, health insurance, elevating of essential workers with the pay and benefits to match — all of that will die in the Supreme Court, no matter who controls Congress.
Do we really want to go back to a time when right-wing politics condemned white supremacy on a near daily basis — all with their fingers crossed behind their backs as they securely plotted election after election to strip African Americans and others of their voting rights?
Is there really that soulless a nostalgia for the days when white liberals and moderates could cluck their tongues at another black man murdered on TV, another racist attack, another club full of dead dancers? Cluck our tongues and then get back to our comfortable lives, secure in the knowledge that we just really wish those things would not happen?
Because that is the stark choice to be made: We go back to sleep, or we stay in the streets once President Joe Biden has secured the office.
We would rather watch the country die in the comfort of our moral certainty than to surrender that comfort for the unknown.
What has Trump done? Demolishing the little good Obama did through executive action, yes. But he tells the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand ready,” and we lose our minds! We accept the flimsiest rebukes from the Mitt Romneys and Mitch McConnells and think, “Why can’t Trump just say white supremacy is bad?!” Because Trump does not believe it is, and neither does McConnell nor the rest! If you villainize Black Lives Matter — and not even as terrorists, but merely violent anarchists — then you, too, are a white supremacist.
And once Trump is gone — if he will be gone — we will still live in the same country as we do right now, we will just go back to simpering public apologies, “thoughts and prayers,” making dog whistles in public and hatching back-room conspiracies to further purge voters.
The hand-wringing over Trump’s endorsement of the Proud Boys is a dog whistle so loud it can be heard 40 years back when the Ku Klux Klan endorsed Ronald Reagan for president, saying at the time that “the Republican platform reads as if it were written by a Klansman.”
Reagan had the sense to refuse the endorsement, publicly, and folks now herald it as “brave” and get misty with nostalgia for the bygone eras of Republicans who never told you OUT LOUD what they think. Trump does that endlessly.
The old GOP quietly pursued the same agenda, just in a way that did not make it so utterly intolerable for the rest of (white, liberal) America.
Joe Gannon, teacher and writer, lives in Easthampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazette.net.