Today begins the end of an epoch in America—it's the final month to brag that, in the long and often tenuous history of the United States, we have never entrusted our country to a convicted criminal. And I say "our country" because "we" elected him. This was not some fluke where we were misled, deceived, or somehow duped by an intelligence far superior to ours. We're a pretty intelligent nation, but we did an almost unbelievably stupid thing, and now we have fifty days left to brag about living (or maybe having lived) in the greatest democracy in history.
It has been a pretty good run.
After all, got past that initial war with that British superpower, then a war within our boundaries, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, two world wars, McCarthy, Watergate, COVID, and too many other crises to list. But this time—when instead of rising upagainst anarchy and criminality, we welcomed them, we may need to start a new list—one no longer associated with our democratic glory but with some other form of government. We have traded a democracy for a kakistocracy. If you are unfamiliar with that term, it's an old one that predates Donald Trump, though I had never heard it used until 2016. As with democracy, it has Greek origins, from Greek kakistos—'worst.' Instead of government by the people (demos), it is government by the most unsuitable or least competent citizens of a state.
The new kakistocracy will be moving in fifty days from now...in case you want to make a welcome poster.
For me, it all seems particularly bleak today because I finally finished Liz Cheney's book about January 6 and the subsequent committee work. When I say "finally," I don't mean Oath and Honor was a slog—it was wonderful reading, but it was frustrating also because I knew the ending—that the committee would do their work and present a picture of a man so psychologically misshapen and grotesque that he would allow and even encourage the deaths of innocents to preserve his own illegal and illicit hold on an elected position from which he had been soundly unelected. And none of it would matter.
Trump didn't do it alone: The conspiracy of the gutless from Mitch McConnell to Mark Meadows to Lindsey Graham to the insufferably treacherous Kevin McCarthy—they were his confederates. And the hangers-on like Giuliani and Bannon and Lindell—they were the cheerleaders; And Pirro, Carlson, and the late Rush Limbaugh—Presidential Medal of Freedom winner...hah!—they were the promoters.
No, he didn't do it alone. It took a conspiracy of the gutless.
Unfortunately, there was us—the apathetic, the ignorant, the ill-informed, the lazy, the misogynistic, and the bigoted. If you know the story of Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman and still voted for Trump, if you have heard the January 6 recollections of Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards and still voted for Trump, if you're familiar with what befell Tricia Raffensberger in the weeks and months following January 6 and still voted for Trump, then you chose the right person to represent you. Cheers.
An empathetic populace, one even slightly attuned to the suffering of others, would have listened to the Trump campaign and said simply, this is not a good man. But now, when RFK Jr. foments an epidemic because he's talked enough fools out of vaccines or decided that research is dumb, or when Linda McMahon decides that public schools no longer fit into her educational vision, try to remember what you knew was the truth but ignored. That confederacy is widespread.
There are no guarantees in life, but living in a country built on a history of progress and optimism, we all have expectations. It's a disgrace that we elected a president interested only in his own.
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