When Tyrants Are Left Unaccountable
If the GOP doesn't reclaim its soul soon, Act II of the Trump horror show will re-take the stage, bringing the country to ruin.
July 20
On this day seventy-seven years ago, Claus von Stauffenberg and a group of co-plotters attempted to eliminate Adolf Hitler through violent means. They failed and virtually all were rounded up and executed. The aristocratic and decorated Wehrmacht colonel, 36, left behind a wife and five kids. The conspirators were motivated by a variety of reasons to overthrow the Nazi regime, but all were united in one goal: ridding Germany of an evil leader and thereby saving their country from ruination. They are commemorated as heroes today, held up as exemplars of courage and integrity. Their bold, but futile act was hardly for naught, but rather oft cited as what honorable people must do to safeguard or restore freedom.
This week’s almost predictable political drama surrounding the setting up of a congressional select committee to investigate the January 6 assault on the Capitol is the latest sad episode of a GOP complicit with evil. Never in American history have we had a major party turn hell-bent against democracy. Biden’s 2020 electoral win has hardly gotten us out of the danger zone. In fact, the danger is growing.
January 6 merely closed the curtain on Act I of the “Trump Grand Guignol” horror show. Wallowing in a self-made miasma of victimhood and spite, the Hunchback of Mar-a-Logo is feverishly plotting to open Act II wherein the play’s hero rises up from defeat to vanquish those who wrenched from him the power and glory that are rightfully his. And he actually believes these lies. Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, editor of the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, poses the following:
First, delusions are more infectious than strategic lies, and so we see, from their sheer spread, that Trump likely truly believes them. Second, his emotional fragility, manifested in extreme intolerance of realities that do not fit his wishful view of the world, predispose him to psychotic spirals. Third, his public record includes numerous hours of interviews and interactions with other people—such as the hour-long one with the Georgia secretary of state—that very nearly confirm delusion, as my colleague and I discovered in a systematic analysis.
Trump is preceded in history by a multitude of madmen who led their nations on the road to ruination, unchecked by contemporary balance of powers, such as they were, until they themselves fell to a bloody demise.
Roman emperor Caligula, frustrated and stir-crazy from the morass that became his invasion of Britain, declared war on the sea god Neptune and ordered his troops to attack the waves with their swords and gather seashells as booty. Then, in a Trumpian turn, after declaring himself a god, established an absolutist monarchy in Rome.
A successor, Nero, was despised for building his huge, tasteless “golden house” (sound familiar?) complex in central Rome. His infantile insistence on winning the Olympic Games in Greece in face of obvious defeat (also sound familiar?) brought the Roman Empire into disrepute in the ancient world. His army toppled Nero, bringing on a destructive three-way civil war.
Both men met with violent ends.
From Louis XVI to Nicolae Ceausescu, the annals of history are replete with the corpses, physical as well as political, of bird-brained leaders who, unchecked for way too long, led their people to impoverishment and chaos. And in some cases, notably Hitler’s, a deluded public enthralled to the tyrant’s charisma, largely remained ardent supporters to the bitter end.
Bandy Lee explains such fanatical loyalty, even in the face of destruction — say, recalcitrant unvaccinated science-deniers succumbing to disease by the tens of thousands — in terms of “narcissistic symbiosis” and “shared psychosis”:
When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
Again, history shows that such pathology, left unchecked, ultimately leads to conflagration and apocalypse.
But back to Trump’s enablers - Republican members of Congress - What explains their unstinting support for, or cowardly passivity to, a buffoonish, incompetent and abjectly corrupt Donald Trump, who no longer even holds power? The universally held view is fear of “The Base,” largely conservative, less educated white working class people in the hinterland who feel resentment from being “left behind” in an economy that increasingly rewards the rich at the expense of everyone else and who feel the educated “meritocratic” class looks down upon them.
The underlying factors feeding today’s toxic populism need to be addressed, which, with his ambitious legislation, Joe Biden is clearly set on doing.
But members of Congress, with the exception of some cerebrally-challenged individuals, know better. Ninety-five percent are college-educated, with 225 holding law degrees, 99 holding master’s degrees, 24 with Ph.D.’s, and 20 having M.D.’s. Obviously, these folks didn’t just fall off a turnip wagon. And men like senators Ted Cruz (Princeton & Harvard) and Josh Hawley (Stanford & Yale), while clearly in possession of lots of brains, through their Faustian power games, demonstrate to all that they lack a conscience and soul.
Benjamin Franklin warned us that “a man without courage is a knife without an edge” and that “it is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.” Sadly, tragically, such is not the case with today’s Republican Party. At least the politicians. There are flickers of courage and integrity, to be sure among rank and file party members. Many have gravitated to the feisty Lincoln Project.
In the depths of Trump’s misrule, an administration official published a letter anonymously in the New York Times informing the world that there was a secret cabal in the government that sought to thwart Trump’s worst impulses and policies:
Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic... That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office... This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”
The writer subsequently revealed himself to be Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor, who stated, “The number one national security threat I’ve ever seen in my life to this country’s democracy is the party that I’m in — the Republican Party. It is the number one national security threat to the United States of America,” on a par with “ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Russia.” He added that if Kevin McCarthy became House Speaker, it would represent “Trump’s hand on that Speaker’s gavel.”
In The Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt said, “Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.” In other words, one’s actions should not be based on conformance to the norms and behavior of the group to which one belongs at a given time, but rather on whether one will be able to live with oneself when contemplating one’s words and deeds. Can you look at yourself in the mirror without shame?
Want to send a gift to your GOP congressperson or senator? Send them a mirror.