I once overheard a conversation between a political science professor and a student and I've thought about it from time to time ever since. He said this is still the American experiment. Two-hundred-some-odd years is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Until that made me think about it, I always just took for granted that the United States, its government and way of life were the gold standard to be emulated to the extent it was possible and envied to the extent it wasn't, and this of course was fixed and permanent The professor made me realize that this is by no means a settled issue.
I grew up in small town America, a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. I was born during the Kennedy years and grew up in the 60's and 70's, raised by parents from the "Greatest Generation" including a father who was a proud World War II veteran. They would be heartbroken to see that we have gone from greatest to worst in only three generations. By the way, I'm well aware that the decades I just cited as my formative years were turbulent to say the least! Nevertheless, one of the hallmarks of American life or the American psyche was optimism. I remember attending a lecture by political pundit Mark Shields in which he emphasized optimism as being fundamental to who we are as a nation. When we studied the rise of fascism in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, we were convinced that it couldn't happen here.
Fast forward to the '80s and I worked for a while at BMW North American headquarters. As you might imagine with a German company, there were a number of Germans there, both those who became American citizens and German nationals who were just working abroad until they returned home. Obviously they weren't monsters; they were as decent as anyone else. If fascism could take hold over these people why would we possibly think ourselves immune? I even remember a conversation about one executive who rode a tank in a Nazi panzer division and one of the (American born) engineers saying, "Hey look, he was just in the army." I see his point.
Tragically, the optimism that was present in conservatives who love this country, or at least their vision of it, is largely gone. I can't shake the memory of a social media post from a friend this summer. He's a bright, thoughtful, successful, very decent man for whom I have great respect but his post shocked me. He pointed out a whole litany of bad things that were happening and concluded that you had to be a special kind of stupid not to see why people want to vote for the current president. Wait...what...you mean vote against him, right?! No, he meant vote for him. He laid out a dystopian nightmare as the status quo, but that still couldn't compete with the horrors he conjured up in the fever dreams of his imagination.
The scariest part of Trump's fascist cult of personality is the successful gaslighting of tens of millions of Americans who now literally can't tell fact from fiction. They will believe whatever he wants them to believe no matter how implausible or how easily disproved. As we descend further and further into the abyss a few break off and rejoin the reality based community, but the bulk of his cult like following remains intact. If Donald Trump got nineteen of his followers to hijack airplanes and fly them into our buildings, even in the face of incontrovertible proof that he was behind it, I doubt he would lose more than 20% of his support. The remaining majority would be divided among those who would claim it's bad but others did bad things too so let's just move on, those who say, "Fake news! He had nothing to do with it", and scariest of all, those who would be fine with it because Donald Trump wants it.
The silver lining is that Donald Trump was impeached again today, and this time with some Republican support. Joe Biden's election was affirmed and he will be inaugurated right on time. Trump's dozens of absurd lawsuits were laughed out of court. In short, the safeguards of our democracy held...this time. However, seeing how easily nearly half the country was seduced by this demagogue is chilling. Trump's claims, advocated by Rudy Giuliani, who at this point probably couldn't win a case of Pepsi in a food court, were so divorced from reality that courts couldn't help, but what if next time we elect someone who is both sociopathic and smart? If you think it can't happen here, you're wrong.
