Burke: If slide toward authoritarian rule disturbs you, good
Published 1:30 am Monday, December 20, 2021
By Tom Burke / Herald coumnist
The Big Lie — that the election was “rigged” and Donald Trump won — is just that: A Big Lie.
A falsehood. A fabrication. Untrue. Demonstrably untrue. Proved untrue (in more than 60 courtrooms). An invention. A fiction. The ego-salving fantasy of a narcissistic sociopath. The key element of the biggest grift in American history. A Big Lie.
And it is as dangerous to American democracy today as Hitler’s Big Lie — that the Jews were responsible for all Germany’s woes — was in the 1920s and ‘30s.
So, are the 35 percent of Americans (68 percent of Republicans) who believe the Big Lie, one of more of the following: hoodwinked, stupid, ignorant, gullible, venal, white supremacists, fascist, power hungry, shameless, manipulative, in on the grift and dangerous.
Yes.
There. I’m on the record. (Again.) I can’t say it any plainer than that: Trump lied before, during, and after the election as part of his attempted coup to retain power and a whole bunch of people believe Trump won. They actually believe it!
(Which at first I couldn’t believe; that they could be so gullible. Then I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t accept the obvious facts and the countless audits, recounts, and court cases. And now, finally, I accept they believe it; as many of them believe Trump is still president; JFK Jr. will come back from the dead as Trump’s VP; and that there is really a “Q.”)
But their actions, based on wholeheartedly buying into and promulgating Trump’s lie, have put our democracy in as real a danger as when MAGAs stormed the U.S. Capitol last year to “Stop the Steal.” This year Republicans in state legislatures have introduced more than 217 bills to create a framework to invalidate the next two elections via restricting voting and/or simply rejecting the actual vote and declaring their own winner through a coup.
This is serious, people. This is more than media clickbait. This is the real thing. And it should frighten the hell out of you; and make you ask, “What can I do about it?”
Well, here’s what you can do today, tomorrow, next week, next year. Now.
• Make your views known. Write your members of Congress with your support for the Voting Rights and For the People acts and do away with the filibuster.
• Support those opposing Republican Trumpism and the totalitarian world they aspire to.
• Run for an office or help someone else run or donate to someone’s run for office.
• Get involved in local elections. And not just by voting, but maybe as a volunteer poll worker, or a GOTV (Get Out The Vote) volunteer, or help register new voters.
• Find out who is being attacked and then support them. (Like when Washinton state’s (Republican) Secretary of State was attacked by Republican candidate for governor Loren Culp when he — baselessly — claimed fraud in his 545,000 vote loss to Jay Inslee. The corollary to that: Do your own investigation on issues and people, which means actually reading stuff, especially long-form journalism and books ala “Peril” by Bib Woodward and Robert Costa or “I Alone Can Fix It” by Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.)
• Be an institutionalist; stand up and defend the traditional American institutions that make democracy work, such as a Congress that can investigate and legislate, the courts, a labor union, the free press.
• Subscribe to local papers and national journals that tell the truth (the media is not the enemy of the people). If you read nothing else, read: Bob Gelman’s article in The Atlantic on the future of democracy and “On Tyranny,” by Yale’s Timothy Snyder. (I drew on both for this piece.)
• Take a break. Calm down. Then, be as courageous as you can to stand up for what you believe.
Let’s be clear — to abandon facts is to abandon freedom — and Trump and his Republican supporters have spent the last five years trying to destroy freedom, by rejecting objective facts, embracing “alternative facts,” and incessantly lying and stonewalling.
So, as an added bonus, here are four of the ways Trump and his MAGAs are trying to kill truth. Watch for them; call them out; don’t be duped. Watch for when they:
• Are openly hostile to verifiable facts. (Like Trump didn’t actually lose by 8 million votes.)
• Use “shamanistic incantations,” that is, endlessly repeat statements to make the fictional plausible. (The election was “rigged.”)
• Indulge in “magical thinking.” (Claim a disease that’s killed 800,000 will “vanish.”)
• Promote misplaced faith via self-deifying claims. (“I alone can fix it.”)
That old saw says, “People get the government they deserve.” But America is on a path toward totalitarianism and one man rule (the Republican party is already there) and I don’t think we “deserve” that.
So the question, gentle reader, is: What’s your breaking point? When will you realize that that the current fight for democracy is the “moral test of our times,” to quote Liz Cheney. When will you stand up and say, “NO!” to Trump and his cabal?
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
