Rays of Hope

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“Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” — George Orwell, 1984

This spring, the American people looked into the Abyss. They saw the video of a white cop’s knee pressing down on George Floyd’s Black neck for nearly nine minutes, murdering him. The stark spectacle of deliberate, senseless domination was lost on no one. Even those who’d never read Orwell’s dystopian novel knew it. They felt it in their guts.

They rose up in numbers, in every corner of America, white, black, brown, yellow and red. Commentators believe it was the single greatest mass protest in American history. It outranked even the women’s march in early 2017, then the biggest mass protest in our history.

Over three years have passed since that gender-focused beginning, but the tide is finally starting to turn. Trump’s “job approval” numbers are dropping below the survival threshold of forty percent. That’s where once-popular leaders became one-term presidents, like Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush. (The same thing happened to Jerry Ford, who never got elected as president but who had granted an unwarranted pardon.) Even the nation’s pundits, once burned by their unanimous failure to predict Trump’s win in 2016, are starting to let the numbers speak for themselves.

An even bigger force, of course, is the pandemic. You can spin abstractions, lie about the size of your inaugural crowd, and paint a false picture of the extent of and the reasons for our rapidly fading economic recovery. You can delude the public by exploiting the big time lag between economic cause and economic effect—both good and bad—a subject on which I’ve got a blog post pending. But you can’t spin disease, suffering and death. You especially can’t when virtually every nation on the planet is doing a better job of managing the pandemic than we are.

Finally, there’s our professional military. It’s been over a month since then-green SecDef Mark Esper marched with Trump on his protester-bashing photo-op, in which Trump held a Bible in front of a Church whose own pastor later condemned the stunt. If evangelicals needed further evidence that Trump is actually the Antichrist, it was that brutal, un-Christian and wholly unconstitutional show of force. Our would-be tyrant made a show of brusquely dominating his people, in a manner that might have pleased King George III.

Esper had gotten an earful from current and retired military brass. So Friday he announced, in indirect language, that the Confederate flag henceforth will not fly on or over any US military installation.

It was indirect bureaucratic speak, but the message was clear as day. The South will not rise again. The century-plus outrage of glorifying the lost causes of slavery, bossism and human subjugation is over.

Orwell’s dark vision of perpetual oppression will not prevail here, at least not right away. If Trump loses the general election, there will be no coup in America. If he tries to stay despite his loss, armed men loyal to our Constitution will escort him from the White House in handcuffs, if not a straitjacket.

Trump’s rambling rants, attempts to turn the White House into his own campaign center, and the deer-in-the-headlights reaction of his trailer-trash spokeswoman to her boss’ uncensored insanity show just how low Trump has sunk this nation. The public is getting weary of him and his vulgar, untutored, crass, cruel and ignorant minions. So there is hope at last.

Yet this is hardly a time for complacency. It’s a time for redoubling our efforts. It’s a time for doubling down.

We have so many traitors among us. We have Bill Barr—a purported lawyer, no less—who has supported every attempt to undermine our separation of powers and checks and balances and make his boss a king. He torpedoed Mueller’s months and months of diligent, professional legal work with a couple of pages of well-publicized but inaccurate spin.

Barr so richly deserves his own special impeachment, but there just isn’t time. Fortunately, his ship will sink with Trump’s. Good riddance.

We have Lindsey Graham—another so-called lawyer—who came by his military hard line sitting behind a desk. Trump has insulted and marginalized him, so he must secretly hate Trump’s guts. As Trump’s presidency begins to crash and burn, taking Graham’s political career with it, Graham must hate himself, too, if only for failing to summon the cojones to resist the vilest bully in American political history. [Erratum: An earlier version of this post mentioned Ted Cruz in this paragraph. Unfortunately, he’s not up for election this year, having beaten Beto O’Rourke by 2.6 points in 2018. But electoral decimation of Cruz’ Trump-lackey colleagues might make him more circumspect in his voting and his far-right ideology.]

Then there’s Sue Collins, with her empathy-inducing lisp and her school-marmish persona. She’s tried to have it both ways for far too long. Whenever the chips were down, she voted with the would-be tyrant. She, too, has to go. A soft female voice and motherly persona can’t hide feckless failure to protect constituents from Covid-19, or prone acquiescence in crude attempts to grab more power than any president of a democracy ought to have.

Worst of all, there’s Mitch McConnell, the “Grim Reaper” known for reflexive opposition to every good idea for reducing American workers’ pain and suffering. He dupes his own Kentucky well, but it, too, is changing. Maybe the wave of suburban revulsion against Trump can wash him away, too. At least we owe our Founders and our long-suffering workers a forceful, spirited try.

Make no mistake about it. The victory becoming more and more likely will not be complete unless all these base traitors to American principles are gone next January. Every one.

That’s a tall but not impossible order. Those of us who are not facing destitution due to relief granted too little and too late, as withheld by Mitch, have little to do during the pandemic, and not much to spend our money on. Now we must spend our free time and money helping to make the coming election a landslide to dwarf LBJ’s win over Goldwater in 1964. If we fail, we’ll have no reason to complain if a halfway win leaves us still in gridlock, or if the worst happens. We Americans have never needed a clean sweep as much as today.

So for those of us not sick with Covid or facing destitution, let’s get to work. Let’s not let up for a single moment until the results of November 3’s election are in. We’ve got a country to save and a democracy to restore. And now we have hope.

One more thing. Let none of us forget the debt we owe our Black leaders.

As it turns out, Joe Biden is the best candidate to beat Trump. He’s best because he has by far the most political experience of any candidate who ran. He’s best because his working-class roots are long, deep and incontrovertible—so much so that David Brooks believes they’re his secret campaign weapons, which could re-create FDR’s New-Deal coalition.

Biden is best also because he’s a thoughtful, flexible, empathetic, non-ideological, decent man. He knows he doesn’t have all the answers. So he will assemble a “rainbow” team of experts and empaths to guide him. In other words, Biden is the perfect antidote to Donald Trump.

And whom do we have to thank for Biden’s assured nomination? Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House Majority Whip, who almost singlehandedly brought Biden’s campaign for the Democratic nomination back from the dead.

This was no accident. Black people and their ancestors have been living in a Trumpian dystopia for most of this nation’s history, since centuries before Trump was born. Like Covid-19 survivors, they’ve developed antibodies to lies, spin, deception, derogation, and oppression. They’ve lost so often and so badly, even with God and what’s right on their side, that the best of Black leaders have developed a conditioned reflex against overreaching, whatever the temptation.

As we try to dig ourselves out of the deep hole that Trump and his GOP have put us in, we all need some of Blacks’ wisdom borne of hard experience and suffering. Among other things, we need to stop poisoning the best progressive prospects since JFK with off-putting slogans like “defund the police.”

Yet now, more than ever since January 20, 2016, there is hope. Our collective consciousness of the imperative to work with those who have the most at stake, reflected in the George Floyd protests, may yet become the spark that helps light up our collective future.

John Lewis, R.I.P.

Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the venerable civil-rights hero, died Friday, at age 80, of pancreatic cancer. He first gained fame in 1965, in the non-violent civil-rights protest march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. There a police riot beat him senseless and nearly killed him. It was far from the last time that Lewis risked his health and life for the cause of justice for all people in America. For 55 years afterward he fought tirelessly—but never violently—in the streets, in homes of constituents, and in Congress. I can’t do justice to this great man in a small box on this page. He was a giant. Better to read the New York Times’ in-depth obit. It made me hopeful to know that Lewis, before he died, also saw the portent of the massive George Floyd protests, and thus the light at the far end of the tunnel. [Search for “good trouble.”] We owe it to his memory, and to many more like him still living, to drive as hard and as smart as we can toward that light, with more than mere deliberate speed.

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