Farce, force and folly in the post-election

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. With America burning white hot with Covid-19, racial tensions, political warfare, an economic depression, and vast wildfires Donald Trump has played golf and added fuel to the raging conflagration.

Since the election, Trump has stoked the fire not merely with wood, as before, but with accelerants. Unable to accept the results of an election, unwilling to wrap his mind around the unthinkable, being the loser and by no less than eight million popular votes, he wants to incinerate the very foundations of the U.S. political system, democracy itself, the legitimacy of elections, the integrity of state governors, secretaries of state—including Republicans—and regular folks who risked their lives to count ballots and tabulate the results.

“Après moi, le deluge”, said Louis XV, a French king who may have seen the Revolution coming. After me, the deluge. Trump’s desire is more savage. There is a Spanish-language bolero that captures it even more aptly: “Solo cenizas hallarás.” Only ashes will you find.

Ashes only: the ashes of the 400,000 people who will die of Covid-19 before he leaves his fortified bunker for good, people who he said would be fine because Covid-19 is a Democratic-media hoax and about which no one would talk after the election; the ashes of trees, homes and people burned by fires that were not supposed to happen because global warming is a socialist invention; and, if we are unlucky, the ashes of the truth-telling public officials who as I write this are receiving a tsunami of death threats from Trump zealots. The ashes, too, of whole departments of government, of decency, and of our own credibility in the world.

“Is Paris burning?” Hitler asked the Nazi military commander who controlled that city before the uprising of the Resistance and the arrival of the Allies routed the Germans. Apparently, even a Nazi could not follow the order to burn down the glory that is Paris. But now an incendiary U.S. president is trying to light a gigantic ball of fire in the wake of his own rout. Many in his own government are declining to light the flame.

Trump’s malice persists. He is burying mines set to explode every time his successor takes a step. And he is not doing it all by himself. Like the French after World War II who believed the myth they wanted to believe, that almost all the people were patriots who sided with the Resistance and only a small minority were collaborators, many American moderates, liberals, and reformed Republicans believe that Trump’s MAGA maniacs are a lunatic fringe.

Lunatics they are, but they are no fringe. Deluded or complicit, collaborators abounded in occupied France, and they abound here and now among those who are trying to enable a coup in the name of democratic restoration, stealing an election while holding that they are preventing “the steal.”

According to polls and media inquiries with members of the U.S. Congress, a substantial majority of Republicans believe in the MAGA mirage, both rank and file voters and members of Congress. Lacking any evidence for the belief, with massive evidence against that belief, they believe still. How come?

The sociologist in me thinks of the end-of-the-world cults I studied in graduate school whose members’ beliefs are stronger after the apocalypse fails to occur on the date predicted by the cult leader. The cult members said the world did not end because they exposed it. Trump cultists proclaimed that their man would be or, if not, the election would be fraudulent. They crafted a mental map within which either way their belief would be confirmed.

But we are talking about something larger here, denial of reality by a whole political party composed of tens of millions of people representing the sentiments of almost half of the population of one of the most advanced nations in the world. This is a collective delusion on a vaster scale than the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose members committed suicide while waiting to be picked up by aliens that would save them from the end of the world.

For Maga Maniacs, a smackdown of Trump and a victory by Biden and Harris would be the end of the world, theirs.

I think for the Maga election results deniers, the story goes like this. Trump won. He had to. Everybody I know, everybody I talk to, almost all my friends, voted for him. He was very popular. How could he lose?

He didn’t. This election was stolen: by the deep state, by the ghost of Hugo Chavez, by the pedophile-cannibal Democrats. By a vast conspiracy among all of them. By someone. By anyone.

This election must have been stolen. There is no way a presidential election in this country could be decided by the “others,” not by the citizens of the real America. No, the election was decided by the votes of the invisible, the dead, the aliens. Or, what amounts to the same thing, by the non-white people, the black and brown people, who to them are not real as they have always been invisible in the history textbooks taught in grade school that imprinted in all those non-college future white voters with the image of who we are, the picture of the real Americans: white, native-born and English-speaking.

The real America is not the brown and black people who voted in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Tucson and won Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin for Biden. Who are these people and what are they doing here anyway?

They are not, in any case, the real America. America never looked like that before when it was great. Any election decided by people who are not real Americans is, by definition, illegitimate: a steal. These people are stealing our country, changing our complexion, traducing our culture, polluting our monolinguistic purity. We are not going to let them get away with it.

The failure of a big sector of the American people to embrace, or even accept as real, the transformation of the country is at the core of the problem of electoral denialism. In 2016, Trump sold them the fantasy that he could reverse all that. The Wall was the symbol of that fantasy and they ate it up. Now they are mad because it could not be done. The Wall was not built. The Mexicans didn’t pay for anything. There is no turning back to a lily-white, Anglo America.

The mixture of zealotry, racism, ethnocentrism, ignorance, credulity and anger that comes together as electoral denial is highly combustible. There is an excellent chance that the next few weeks will be the most horrible period in our lifetime, with Covid-19 and political strife, death and destruction, peaking simultaneously.

The most thuggish of his supporters—and they are more than a few—are almost guaranteed to try to stop a transition or, at least, make it as violent and difficult as possible, with the enthusiastic or, at a minimum, the tacit approval of the president. Every day, there is a new harbinger—the siege of the home of the Secretary of State of Michigan, a flurry of death threats to electoral officials in swing states won by Biden—of what might be coming.

Reagan had envisioned morning in America. Trump, with his stoking of Covid-19 in myriad ways, including the unmasked rally he recently held in Georgia, and his inciting of deadly violence, has brought us mourning in America. We are on the cusp of 300,000 dead and counting.

We cannot allow the Maga maniacs to supersede the will of the people. Coups happen, even in countries with long histories of democracy like Chile. Since the election, we have been witnessing a dress rehearsal for a coup. Most of it has been rhetoric and farce, but there has been terroristic intimidation too. We cannot afford to underestimate the frenzy of people who believe that Trump was anointed by God.

This is the time to think of what we will do if Trump refuses to go and instead calls up on the real America to rise and take over the street.

We must react intelligently, strategically, forcefully, fearlessly, and proactively. And, never, ever pusillanimously.