The now infamous Nunes memo that sought to smother “Russiagate” by waterboarding the FBI for pursuing its investigation into the Russian collusion scandal has been called a “nothing burger,” or making an ant hill out of mole hill. It is said there is no there, there.
But what it was, was nothing more nor less than a declaration of war.
Having failed to stop the Russia investigation by firing FBI director James Comey, they have now declared war on the FBI — this nation’s premier criminal investigation organization. They have declared war on Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department. They have declared war on that Justice Department as well.
They have declared war on facts, they have declared war on knowledge. They have declared war on democracy itself.
Because democracies do not die, as has been pointed out elsewhere, because of sudden disasters. They perish due to the slow undermining of democratic institutions. And as the GOP Congress has clearly surrendered its check on executive power function, those now crucial institutions are a free press and an independent judiciary.
And who is this “they”? The Tea Partiers, the Freedom Caucusers, the die-hard Trumpistas, and yes, most of the formerly “mainstream” GOP elected representatives who have drunk their own Kool-Aid over the past 30 years and so cannot now stop the Donald Monster from destroying it all. To these extremist elements, the Russia probe is an existential battle between good and evil.
They are good, and everything and everyone else are evil.
This has been the GOP’s approach to politics since Newt Gingrich declared the 1992 election of Bill Clinton an existential threat to the nation, and thus began the take-no-prisoners politics that has undermined us for years now. That election was the beginning of the GOP’s alchemizing bipartisanship into treason.
Twenty-five years later and Trump now brands as traitors all those who do not support him, who did not applaud sufficiently at the State of the Union Address, who do not believe, with the faith of little children, that there “was no collusion.”
The only difference now is that in the past the institutions that opposed them were the usual liberal suspects: the Democratic party, federal judges, the ACLU and the like. Now, however, the clownish incompetence of Trump and his kitchen cabinet has involved the most bedrock institutions of our country in the GOP’s coming war on everybody-who-is-not-us.
Where once liberals were the enemy, now, too, it is the FBI, Justice Department, and the separation of powers (as Congressman Devin Nunes certainly coordinated writing and releasing the memo with the White House.)
This is why facts don’t matter, this is why an attack by a hostile foreign power on our electoral process does not matter. This is why the norms of a working democracy do not matter.
Because we are at war.
It is time the rest of us accept that these are the terms. War on our democracy has been waged for years by the mainstream GOP before Trump came along. The race-based gerrymandering projects that have been rejected by the courts; the stripping of voting rights from ex-felons (almost exclusively in red states, and a practice that goes back to Jim Crow days); the subverting of former President Obama’s legitimacy through the “birther” scandal, which led directly to the most prominent pre-Trump attack on democracy — the “mainstream” GOP leadership refusing to allow a sitting president to make a nomination to the Supreme Court.
So obvious is this clarion call to war that even conservatives are sounding the alarm. The conservative author David Frum, in his new book “Trumpocracy: The corruption of the American Republic,” points out that the GOP has been moving away from democratic norms for some time, and that the GOP “will reject democracy” when it does not produce the outcomes they want. (Frum’s book is far more important than Michael Wolff’s gossipy “Fire and Fury.”)
I don’t sound the alarm as some weepy, Colin Kaepernick-cursing, sunshine patriot. If there is anything more infuriating than watching Trump apply white-supremacist litmus tests to immigration, for example, it is listening to liberals wail that he has broken some great American tradition. We have always loathed immigrants in this country, always looked down on the “shole” countries — the original ones being Ireland and Italy — that undesirables came from. We have always wanted to restrict religious “others” — they just used to be Jews and are now Muslims.
We passed the first such “Trumpian” ban in 1798 — when the ink on the Bill of Rights was barely dry. The Alien and Sedition Acts sought to restrict free speech from the 18th-century version of “fake news” — that is, anything that criticized then-President John Adams or his right-hand man, the recently rehabilitated Alexander Hamilton, who authored the act, which also restricted the rights of foreigners traveling in the U.S., and made the path to citizenship far more difficult.
That is who we have always been — suspicious and stingy.
Nor, now that it is in the crosshairs, should we rehabilitate too quickly the FBI and its long history. We know how the FBI surveilled and harassed Martin Luther King Jr., we know what it did to distort and destroy the Black Panther Party and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
During the nearly half-century rule by original FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, anyone who was foreign, not white, or a dissident could count on persecution by the bureau. How many untold thousands of activists or just plain citizens had their conversations recorded, their houses broken into and searched, their careers, names and reputations ruined?
What is so surreal now, is that the FBI — that bedrock of fighting foreign enemies and domestic dissidents — seems about to be added to its own Ten Most Wanted list!
But what they fear is not merely the disgracing or loss of Trump. Devin Nunes and 90 percent of Republicans, and some 40 percent of this county’s (white) voters fear that the disgracing or loss of Trump means the loss of the country — the entire country. They long ago rejected the give and take of democracy — the winning and losing — as an existential threat to their United States. And they are prepared to see the county burn, rather than go to hell in a multicultural, rainbow-colored basket.
Hence, this declaration of war. Back in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan declared war on the idea of government. In 2017 Trump and his minions, and they are millions, have declared war on the institutions of government — on democracy itself.
I do not wish it to be so, but this is the crossroads we find ourselves at — and these are the stakes of the battle to come.
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.