Commentary: “So long, democracy. It was nice while it lasted.”
Confirming social media's function as the back room porn shop of outrage, Friday was a day of catastrophic tidings on politically oriented Facebook and Twitter as people took to the web to vent dismay (while others gloated) after the U.S. Senate voted against hearing witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.
The republic had fallen, the Constitution had been erased, and martial law beckoned. Here are just a few declarations I witnessed:
“The USA has now declared that laws do not exist.”
“The flawed American experiment is over.”
“Democracy dies in broad daylight.”
Based on an informal survey of what I read, it seemed to me that commenters who were regularly involved in social organizing and issue-based politics tended to be more sanguine in their reactions, even those strongly opposed to Trump.
Fleetingly, I thought of matching up each desperate commenter, reduced to the role of miserable spectator, with a buddy who is actively engaged in community work somewhere.
This is not meant to be condescending to anyone frustrated by the impeachment trial, nor to suggest American democracy is in robust health.
The president’s legal defense team presented an argument that was stunningly autocratic, to wit: Not only is abuse of power unimpeachable, there is arguably no such thing because — absent a statutory crime — scrutinizing a president’s motives is beyond Congressional oversight.
It is a triumph for the centrality of a president's will, but the aggressive (and bipartisan, let us note) expansion of presidential power has been underway since Ronald Reagan took office.
Fending off despair and cynicism requires an ability to envision a world larger than the political figures of the day, a world extending beyond personalities to see the past, with its historical structures and their currents, and a future we propose to build.
Despite the rumored death of American democracy there are elections this year, and numerous reasons not to hide beneath the furniture.This week alone, while impeachment played on every channel, the administration loosened restrictions on land mines, expanded its travel ban to several more countries including Nigeria, unveiled a brutal “peace plan” for the Middle East, and more.
Despair works somewhat like fear in how it inhibits our ability to think.The danger, with voter participation already so low, is that despair and anger will alienate and depoliticize even more. Tens of millions of eligible voters stayed home in 2016, with a thoroughly distorting effect on that election — more so, you can bet, than Russian chicanery.
Disdain for administration policies or Trump himself; the partisan tone of the impeachment and perfunctory Senate trial; the quelling of Republican presidential primaries this year and increasingly rancorous Democratic primary campaigns (with billionaire Republican-independent-Democrat Michael Bloomberg sailing in late under a golden parachute) all make it harder to sell politics as a positive endeavor for interacting with the world and changing it for the better.
So here is some advice for the crestfallen, and it is important.
Find a project if you do not have one. It should require a level of commitment comfortable for you, so give it some thought. It need not involve presidential politics or election campaigns. It need only have a constructive end, require you to put your phone in your pocket and get out and about in your community, interacting with other people.
What matters most is connecting with a sense of agency, purpose and community. It might also require fasting from opinion-oriented television news and the twitterverse. Maybe those things do not help. They will still be there if you decide you need them.
Desert Sage enjoys hearing from readers at adammassa@lcsun-news.com. Find him on Twitter at @AlgernonWrites.