Pandemic and Truth

COVID-19 is here.  There is much, and there will be much more, suffering — physically, emotionally and economically.  This will be the worst global peacetime crisis since, at least, the Great Depression,  It will have a profound impact upon our democratic process.  Whether that impact will be destructive or constructive depends in large part on whether this pandemic helps us re-learn to trust one another and that will depend on our capacity to trust.

Trust — in government, in science, in the media and in Truth itself — is a prerequisite to a functioning democracy.  While the Constitution and subsequent laws are essential, they are not enough.  Rather, a democracy requires norms, unwritten rules broadly accepted by politicians, political parties and ourselves in order to bridge the gaps in legal formalities.  Much of the crisis in our democracy today comes from the crumbling of these norms

In these first weeks of the pandemic, we have become profoundly aware of the danger of this mistrust.  We are on shifting sands, incapable of mobilizing our power. 

• We must be able to trust that the government will do everything in its power to collect and present to us accurate information.  We must be able to trust the government experts to tell us, what we must do in order to confront what we face.  We must trust that the government has our best interests at heart.  This is not to say that government is 100% trustworthy, that our trust will not sometimes be violated; it is to say that government will discover these violations and repair them.  In these times we must start out in a position of trust and move away from it only with reliable evidence to the contrary.
• We must trust science: that it is doing everything possible to find a reliable understanding of the virus and its treatment.  There are facts.  We must understand that the opinions of experts are more reliable than our hunches.  We must trust that our scientists will be allowed to communicate with our leaders without fear of recrimination.
• We must trust the mainstream media§ to pass on to us accurate information.  We must trust that they will not downplay or exaggerate it.  All media know that violence and sex sell; catastrophe sells.  This is a time, however, when we must be not only completely informed but also not coddled or panicked, especially in this day of the 24-hour news cycle.  We must trust that the media can confine themselves not only to the accurate but also to the wise.  And those who work in the media must trust us to be able to deal with the truth.
• We must trust that there is a Truth, that not everything is a matter of opinion.  Facts are not debatable or up for grabs.  “We may have our own opinions but not our own facts.”  And we must trust that we can discover that Truth, even if our inevitable guesses are sometimes inaccurate. 

Ultimately, the most important is trust in one another.  Without it, there is no beginning point.  I’ll examine that in our next post.  But trusting in government, science, media and Truth, we must be able to dispense with our paranoia and recognize that we are all doing the best we can under these unique circumstances.  We need, especially when we find it difficult, to double-down on our trust.  We must begin from the place of Trust.

**These days, one frequently finds quotation marks around "the truth," as if its very existence was questionable.  This is understandable in the light of "alternative facts."

§Until recently, the term "mainstream media" was used primarily by radical institutions to assert a propagandistic nature of the press.  This usage has now become widely accepted, indicating that for many people, nothing in the press can be trusted.  As above, the widespread belief is that truth, in any objective sense, is unavailable. 

What Shall We Do with The Republican Party?

We must begin to ask the question: Does the Republican Party any longer have a place in a liberal democracy?**  Bipartisanship has always been central to good government in the United States.  But, at some point, we must take a longer view and ask whether the modern Republican Party can be an acceptable option for a free country.  And if not, what is the option? 

We must ask this question with utmost seriousness and care.  We must ask it with the expectation that some Republican leaders will reach the same conclusion and temporarily join with the Democrats to remove Trump from office in the coming election.

Since beginning this blog in September 2017, I have believed that bipartisanship was the only way to prevent President Trump’s damage to American democracy.  Especially after the 2018 Democratic take-over of the House of Representatives, it seemed to me likely that the Republican Party would see the handwriting on the wall and realize they would have to dissociate themselves from the President in order to remain politically viable.  Instead, the Senate vote to exonerate him makes Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party complete. 

The core of the problem, however, is not Donald Trump.  Rather, the cultural and political system, especially the Republican Party, had already prepared the way for a demagogue like Trump and his illiberal brand of democracy.  His election was not a fluke but the culmination of the 25-year devolution of Republican politics.

Well before Trump’s takeover, the Republican Party began sliding into anti-democratic behavior.  While the steps it took were almost always legal, the party, nevertheless, obliterated many of the political norms necessary to a democracy. 

We might mark the beginning of the Republican slide in 1994 when Newt Gingrich guided the party toward a new depth of partisanship.  He led his fellow representatives to vote increasingly as a monolithic block according to the dictates of party leaders rather than according to their own beliefs and their constituents’ needs.  The Democrats eventually followed suit but, in their diversity, were never as effective.

Another marker occurred after the 2008 presidential election, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that the primary goal of the Republican Party over next four years was to prevent the reelection of President Obama.  This was an acknowledgment by McConnell that the political interests of the Republican Party were more important than the overall interests of the United States.  For the next eight years, the party dedicated itself, more than anything, to obstructionism.

The most shocking Republican destruction of a political norm occurred in 2016.  In an unprecedented move, McConnell declared that he would not even allow the Senate to vote on Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland—widely considered a political moderate—to the Supreme Court.  As were so many other Republican moves at this time, McConnell’s action was technically constitutional. The Constitution is explicit, however, that the president shall appoint Supreme Court justices and the role of the Senate is “advice and consent.”  Nevertheless, McConnell explicitly denied a President his privilege for the first time in the history of the country.  It was hardball politics taken to the extreme.  The democracy cannot survive such destruction of norms.

It should be noted that McConnell’s action was actually only symbolic, almost certainly meant purely to demonstrate his power over (and contempt for) President Obama.  The Republicans controlled the Senate, and McConnell could easily have allowed a vote and then required his party to withhold “consent” and thus defeated Garland’s nomination without such a power-play.  There was no real reason to refuse consideration of Obama’s nominee except to demonstrate his power. 

In a speech later that year, McConnell declared that “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye, and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'” 

There are many other examples compiled by the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu.

• The Republican National Committee’s endorsement of credibly-accused child molester Roy Moore for an Alabama U.S. Senate seat in 2017.
• Despite overwhelming evidence that voter fraud is minuscule, 30 Republican-controlled states have been passed laws — ostensibly to prevent voter fraud — that, in fact, suppress voting, largely in communities of color:

• closing polling places
• purging eligible voters from the rolls without their knowledge
• barring felons from voting
• voter registration voter ID laws
• eliminating early voting
• By their acquiescence, the Republican Party has assisted Donald Trump in promulgating the detention of children along the Mexican border.
• Between the election and the governor’s inauguration, Wisconsin Republicans passed a wide-ranging bill that stripped power from the state’s elected Democratic governor and attorney general.
• When North Carolina Republicans lost their veto-proof majority in 2018, they resorted to a critical budget measure on a day in which they had informed Democratic lawmakers specifically that no votes would be scheduled.

The refusal of the Republican Party to remove Trump from office in his impeachment trial is not an extreme exception.  It is but the latest Republican transgression.

Osita Nwanevu writes:

Donald Trump is not a departure from the values defining the Republican Party, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power in this country. The question before us is not how much more the Republican Party might be willing to tolerate from the president but how much more we are willing to tolerate from the Republican Party.

Since voting (unanimously-minus-one) for Trumps’ exoneration, the individual members of the party are now responsible for Trump’s worst excesses.  Their refusal to confront the President gives them no excuse.

It is no longer a partisan issue when   

•  the President threatens to jail his opponents;
•  he attacks the judiciary,
•  he tolerates violence on his behalf,
•  he offers a bribe to a foreign country to support his election,
•  he declares the need to change or violate the Constitution,
•  he threatens civil liberties,
•  he threatens the free press with libel suits and calls it the “enemy of the people.”

The Republican legislature could prevent all this.  This is no longer a “political situation.”  It is in a fight for the soul of our democracy. 

To be clear, ultimately the United States must return to a bipartisan (or, preferably, a multi-party) liberal democracy.  But that seems impossible with the current Republican leadership.  It is time to move actively to dismantle the Republican Party.  It no longer has a place in a liberal democracy.


** I am using the term “liberal” here in its classical sense: a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.  An illiberal democracy refers to a country in which there may be elections but other civil rights (for instance, a freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and so on) are limited.  For instance, Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela are illiberal democracies.  You can have also liberal autocracies, meaning that there are no free elections, but civil rights are basically maintained.  Most liberal autocracies, however, generally devolve into complete autocracies.