A thing that has been bothering me has been the question—which I think is still open at this point, and will be decided at least somewhat by the outcome of the impeachment trial—is whether the bulk of the Other Party will wind up believing that the 2020 election was stolen and, connectedly, that the Previous President did nothing wrong in inciting his followers to seek justice by any means necessary.
Right now, it seems to me that the mainstream stance in the national Republican Party is that the election was rife with fraud on a national level, but that it was inappropriate to do anything in particular about it, and that it’s in poor taste to discuss it after the fact. I don’t think that’s a sustainable position—or at least, I think that it’s fairly easy for a faction within the Party to insist that mainstream of the Party stop dithering and declare that the election was stolen, or else that it wasn’t.
But what’s been bothering me is not so much next year or next cycle, but thirty-odd years from now. Perhaps people who don’t remember the events will learn that the former Republican Party was taken over by delusional fanatics, and that is why the new Conservative Party, whatever it will be called, is only thirty years old. Or perhaps they will learn that the Republican Party was briefly in the thrall of an individually corrupt President, and that they parted ways with him after a failed autogolpe. Or perhaps they will learn that the Democratic Party managed to install a criminal President through rigging the pandemic election with fraudulent ballots.
I’d like to think that the Truth Will Out—but that’s a funky proposition at the best of times, and certainly it would not be the first time the next generation was taught a bunch of lies about the last one.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
The rock on which the Republican ship of lies may founder once again is the courts, which provided the first and most robust bulwark against Trump’s efforts to steal the presidential election. Because Congress isn’t an actual court with rules of evidence and because the Republican Party has become a fascist party, the second impeachment of Trump, while necessary, will be no more successful than the first attempt in holding him accountable or of actually pushing more Republicans to face or acknowledge the truth.
It will be in courts of law, where there are actual penalties for lying, that the Truth will out. The defamation lawsuits and the criminal prosecutions will be the opportunities to enforce the truth. Then the Democratic Congress will need to use every tool available to them to protect the right to vote and free and fair elections. Then we have to go out and win elections against the liars.
The first bulwark was actually state election officials, many of them Republicans, who did an amazing job administering elections during a pandemic while being traduced by the President of the United States. The second was probably the state legislatures, who were… not really heroic but at least didn’t do the awful things that Certain People were pressuring them to do. And then there were the courts.
State legislatures, in many places, seem to be at least dithering about whether to throw in with the fascists (on the election front, I mean); I wouldn’t rely on them to be the core of any newly responsible Conservative movement. I don’t know about the rest. But yeah, the defamation lawsuits and criminal prosecutions seem like a potential bulwark after the almost-inevitable debacle in the Senate.
Thanks,
-V.