The American Future: A Simulacrum of Normality
Posted on December 20, 2020 by Baron Bodissey
I hate to jump the gun on events, so I prefer not to write about the definitive Death of the Republic until January 20, after Joe Biden has put his hand on The Communist Manifesto, or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or whatever he plans to use in lieu of the Bible, and been sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts as the 46th President of the United States. That’s when we’ll be able to say that the Republic is morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably dead.
In the meantime I’m keeping up with the flow of events in this American Twilight. As is Roger Kimball, who has written a lucid, restrained essay for American Greatness that is worth reading while you’re waiting for the Biden/Harris administration and the Great Reset.
I found the link at Western Rifle Shooters, which also has many other links to much less restrained discussions on the same topic. If you want to get a feeling for what the community of, ahem, friskier and well-armed deplorables — who by now number in the millions, if not tens of millions — are talking about, I recommend following those links at WRSA.
Mr. Kimball opens his essay with these paragraphs:
A Betrayal of American Freedom
At the moment, the world seems to be divided into two camps.
One camp belongs to those who believe that Joe Biden, notwithstanding some possible election “irregularities,” won the 2020 presidential election fair and square. A corollary of this belief is the conviction that Donald Trump, by refusing to concede and go graciously into the good night of political defeat, is behaving badly (one venue even describes his behavior as a “disgrace”).
The second camp, which is where I reside, holds that the 2020 election was inherently fraudulent, that the fraud was perpetrated in ways large and small over many months, and that it appears to have cost Donald Trump the election. I say “appears” because the reality, I believe, is that Donald Trump won by a significant margin but that voter fraud obscures that reality.
The first camp seems to be the larger of the two and its membership is growing quickly as more and more erstwhile supporters of the president fold their tents and make their peace with “President-elect Biden.” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, was a recent high-profile defector from President Trump’s side.
Or maybe he is only a realist who sees the writing on the wall, not to mention the headlines in the papers and on CNN.
This is being too generous to Mitch McConnell. The majority leader has never been in the Trump camp. He may have pretended to be from time to time, when he found it expedient. But he has always been a member of what Sundance at Conservative Tree House calls the “Uniparty”, which includes all Democrats and most Republicans, especially in the Senate.
The Republicans pretend to be an opposition party, but the snouts of their leadership are as thoroughly dipped in the trough of graft and corruption as are those of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Democrat Party.
But that’s a minor point. And Mr. Kimball seems to allude to that reality a couple of paragraphs further along:
President Trump has not fared well with his legal battles, but that has not dimmed his determination to fight on, much to the dismay, indeed, the fury, of his critics in both parties (actually, I think it is basically one big party, but that is an issue for another day).
And where do we go from here?
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Something Ugly This Way Comes.
It’s likely, I suppose, that Congress is just too sclerotic for anything really dramatic to happen. It seems pretty clear that the courts — above all the Supreme Court — remain terrified of being called mean names by reporters at the New York Times.
In this context, it is worth pondering “ The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities,” the thirty-six page report on voter fraud in the election just published by Peter Navarro. Navarro is Director of the president’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, but he oversaw this report in his capacity as a private citizen. I am not sure that there is much that is new in the document, but it stands as a useful, one-stop summary of allegations of voter fraud and manipulation. Navarro and his team looked at the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Georgia. The six dimensions of irregularity they investigated were outright voter fraud (which they found in nearly all of the states), ballot mishandling, contestable process fouls, equal protection clause violations, voting machine irregularities, and significant statistical anomalies.
I apologize if this seems like beating a dead horse. I think the old mare has some life left in her yet, and if I continue to prod her it is because I think the 2020 election brought us to a political crossroads. If I am right and the election, in effect, was stolen, then it is a line in the sand.
On one side of that line is the tradition of the American Republic where elections might be bitterly contested but are in the end fair and are seen by both sides to be fair. On the other side of that line is a country in which elections are not fair, where they are rigged for the benefit of vested interests.
This is an eventuality that the Navarro Report recognizes explicitly. “If these election irregularities are not fully investigated prior to Inauguration Day,” it warns, “and thereby effectively allowed to stand, this nation runs the very real risk of never being able to have a fair presidential election again.”
“Never” is a long time. But I do not think it is necessarily an overstatement. I fear that John Adams was right when, writing to his wife in 1775, he noted that while destroyed cities might be rebuilt and “a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property,” a “Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.”
Many people, including some smart people of good will, are impatient with Donald Trump. They are impatient, above all, with the 2020 election. They want it to be over. They want to get on with “normal life.” They believe that ceding a stolen election to a geriatric talking mannequin represents normality because it wears a familiar face. In fact, it is terra incognita. Or, rather, it is unknown only in an American context. History provides us with many, many examples of what we may expect from acceding to such a betrayal of freedom. It is a mournful, and usually sanguinary, alternative that awaits those who barter freedom for the simulacrum of normality. I think that Donald Trump understands that. I am convinced that many of his 75 million supporters do, too.
In 2021 it won’t be the Ides of March that we should beware. Did the Romans have a catchy Latin phrase for “the last ten days of January”?
This will not end well. |
