![]() This is why we must continue to demand that Trump and his enablers face the consequences of their actions: To cave in the face of threats means the end of democracy. When enough Americans decide that a cult of personality matters more than a commitment to democracy, we risk becoming a lawless autocracy. They will gladly risk the occasional explosion here and there if it means living the good life off of donations and purchases from their marks. A Navy veteran in Ohio was killed in a standoff last week after he attacked the Cincinnati FBI office a man in Pennsylvania was arrested and charged today for threatening to “slaughter” federal agents, whom he called “police state scum.” But that doesn’t stop charlatans and con artists from throwing matches at the fuses every day, because those hucksters, too, have decided that living a normal life and working a straight job is for saps. Some of these people are ready to snap and to resort to violence. I have heard similar sentiments among people I know. They see Trump and his crusade- their crusade against evil, the drama that gives their lives meaning-as more important than the law. I spoke with one of the original Never Trumpers over the weekend, a man who has lost friends and family because of his opposition to Trump, and he told me that one of the most unsettling things to him is that these same pro-Trump family and friends now say that they believe that Trump broke the law-but that they don’t care. Trump, to his supporters, is the avenging angel who is going to lay waste to the “elites,” the smarty-pantses and do-gooders, the godless and the smug, the satisfied and the comfortable. He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.ĭonald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do: He has made their lives interesting. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. ![]() What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021. These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio-or from behind the shield of elected office. ![]() Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes. ![]() We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions. The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing-or at least, in nothing real. Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government. But at least the Civil War, as I said Friday on Morning Joe during a panel on political violence in America, was about something. The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery. The odds of getting COVID from your housemate are “about a coin flip.”Ĭivil war is among the many terms we now use too easily.The country that suffers whenever Russia schemes. ![]()
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