The American Body Politic 2020: A Year-End Diagnosis of a Spreading Disease
Al Martinich and Tom Palaima
The election in November of Joe Biden as president is but a single medicinal to alleviate some of the symptoms of the illness that has now long beset American politics. In addition to the diminished Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and continuing minority status in the Senate, unless a runoff election in Georgia yields two new Democratic Senators, the persistence of 40–45% support for Trump suggests that the country as a whole is not likely to begin to recover by becoming more respectful of those with opposite political views. While Donald Trump’s attempts to win his election in court have wound down, like a virus probing for weak points in the American body politic, he has had more time to concentrate on undermining American institutions and sabotaging American policy. It is likely that he will pardon at least Eric and Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Jared Kushner, and possibly Rudy Giuliani, and others. Worse, it is likely that he will try to pardon himself for crimes that would include bribery, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to defraud the United States (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/rap-sheet-trump-crimes/2020/10/16/c6a539da-0e61-11eb-8a35-237ef1eb2ef7_story.htm). If he does, then it will be challenged in federal court and probably work its way up to the Supreme Court. If he should prevail, then the American ideal or ideology of no one being above the law will go on life support. Even if Trump does not prevail with the Supreme Court, the process will be extended for at least eight months long and possibly longer if Trump hires savvy lawyers who know how to delay proceedings. Attention that could be devoted to promoting President-elect Biden’s policies would be partially redirected to Trump’s antics. It is also possible that any criminal charges brought by New York State for fraud and income tax evasion would be delayed.
The current problems of the United States mentioned in the preceding paragraph are truly more like symptoms of a disease than the disease itself. Like cancer, the American disease is several diseases with different structures. These include stupidity, willful ignorance, or moral blindness by American citizens, whether voters or the office-holders they elect. It is a hard truth, but it is the truth. It is worth looking at some of the other symptoms of the disease.
When Trump first said that the US has a lot of COVID-19 cases because the US does more testing than any other country, we were willing to accept it as a mental lapse, not a lie. Surely, we thought, what the president meant to say was that the US seems to have more COVID-19 cases because we do more testing than any other country. But when he persisted in repeating his absurd claim that the US has more cases of COVID-19 because the US does more testing, we realized that our charitable interpretation of his comment was naive. We dare say that with Trump’s powers to replace the real world with his own deluded vision of it, he could solve the problem of immigrants on the border simply by not counting them. The conflation of appearance and reality is a symptom of the American political disease. It can be caused either by stupidity or culpable ignorance.
A nurse interviewed on CNN in mid-November said that some of her patients, critically ill or dying from COVD-19, deny that they could have the disease because it is not real. They say they are going to get better, that they have pneumonia, and sometimes that they have lung cancer. (https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/11/16/south-dakota-nurse-intv-newday-vpx.cnn ‘A new disease: SOLC: sudden onset lung cancer’). Many of them die angry; but it is not clear at what or at whom they are directing their anger. In the runup to the election, we heard people say that they were going to vote for Trump’s election because he kept his promises. We wondered, “Like the promise to build a Great Wall of America along the border with Mexico?” In a rally held in Michigan shortly before the election, Trump told the crowd that he had saved the American automobile industry and had convinced Japan to build five plants in the state
(https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/02/politics/fact-check-michigan-auto-jobs-trump-obama/index.html). A woman at the rally told a reporter, “I didn’t realize Trump had done so much for Michigan.” As Kurt Vonnegut said in Cat’s Cradle, “There is no cat; there is no cradle.” And there are no new automobile plants in Michigan.
The success of Trump’s mendacity is another symptom. The Washington Post’s documentation of more than 20,000 lies and misrepresentations since the beginning of his presidency (https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/02/politics/fact-check-michigan-auto-jobs-trump-obama/index.html ) does not weaken their faith that his words are gospel truth. We suspect that many Trumpists know that he lies and do not care. They are indifferent to the pain Trump creates in citizens who value truth; or they take comfort in belonging to a group whose leader — and Fox News and other social media that he controls — tells them that he will make real or already has made real all their wishful beliefs about how the world should or would or could be.
Political speech has become abysmal. Whether Republicans are acting in willful ignorance or with duplicity, they repeatedly confuse an irrelevant reason with a relevant one. One irrelevant reason is that it would be unfair “to use taxpayer dollars to pay people to sit home … [instead of] working….” This was proposed by Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, who, while sitting, made hundreds of millions of dollars from the home foreclosure fiasco of 2007–8 (https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-punish-americans-not-working-no-sense-1521971). People were not being paid to “sit home;” they were being paid to help to slow the spread of the COVID-19. “We should never pay people not to work,” said Senator John Cornyn (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/17/why-republicans-dont-want-to-extend-the-600-unemployment-payments.html). We don’t want to pay people not to work either. Most unemployed people want to work. Almost all were employed until their jobs disappeared because Trump did nothing to control the spread of COVID-19. It is plausible he did nothing because neither he nor his cabinet were competent to devise and implement an effective plan to slow the spread of the virus through our population. It is also possible that they just did not care enough to do so. A key factor in using empathy and sympathy to guide our altruistic social actions is feeling the pain that others would suffer if we do not try to help. The unemployed deserve financial help because they are suffering through no fault of their own and our country has untapped wealth. Not helping them is indecent.
A political commentator explained that one reason few Trump voters of 2016 abandoned him in 2020 was that they did not blame him for the corona virus. Neither do we. He is blameworthy for having no national plan to limit its spread! Likewise, we cannot disagree with Mitch McConnell when he says that Trump was “100% within his rights” to challenge the election. However we agree with what a wise friend says, “Sometimes we should not do things we have a right to do.” One good reason would have been respect for the health of our political system and the weakened state it is in.
Even truth from Trump’s mouth is used to further falsehood. He repeatedly claimed in the early months of the pandemic that the virus would go away. Again no one can deny that Trump’s claim is strictly and literally true. The bubonic plague in the fourteenth century went away but not before it carried millions of people with it. The plague in ancient Athens, the most prosperous and powerful polis in ancient Greece at the time, came once for about two years (430–429 BCE), then went away and later came back with virulence (427–426 BCE). It killed at least a quarter of the Athenian population, 75,000 to 100,000 human beings. Experts estimate that so far one hundred thousand deaths or more could have been prevented if a rational response to the virus had been put in place. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people could have been spared weeks of excruciating pain and permanent damage to their health.
An author on the libertarian website Law & Liberty diminished the severity of the virus by converting loss of life to loss of years: “In terms of the number of years lost, the death of one twenty-year-old equals the death of perhaps fifteen eighty-year-olds” (https://lawliberty.org/where-will-the-coronavirus-lead-us). Eighty-year-old people are terminally weak. In that same spirit, it might be argued that the relatively quick demise of octogenarians saves them some suffering and saved taxpayers Medicare costs. Such hard, economic calculation is a Swiftian way of addressing a public health problem. The Swiftian sarcasm here is built right into the morally myopic calculation. Retrojecting this way of thinking into the not distant past, there should have been no fuss at all over Dr. Kevorkian’s practice of assisted suicide (https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/kevorkian-when-physicians-take-controversial-public-stands/2005-12). What he provided his patients at their explicit requests were not only sympathetic mercy killings, but also effective cost savings. Leaving ethical absurdity, past and present, aside, more attention to these early COVID-19 cases among highly at-risk patients would have caused more Americans to take the virus seriously. (Republican valuing of profits over health inspires Mitch McConnell to try to immunize businesses against damages if their negligence infected their workers with COVID-19. Profits trumped people.)
Another of Trump’s vague truths was that if he was not re-elected, “Bad things are going to happen.” While he implied that Americans would suffer under a Democratic president, the truth was that he would initiate the bad actions. All of the baseless lawsuits filed on Trump’s behalf to recount or to reverse the election results have failed. As we write this, only one remains, the frivolous suit filed with the Supreme Court by the attorney general of Texas against four key states. A symptom of political corruption is the fact that seventeen attorneys general have joined the suit (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/trump-texas-supreme-court-lawsuit.html). Gone with the wind is the former Republican principle that individual states are in the best position to judge what is good for its citizens.
In addition to invincible or resolute ignorance, Republican amorality is rife. We pass over their precept, “Greed and power at any cost to other people,” to comment on the amorality of most self-described evangelical Christians. They excuse their support for Trump, whose policies inflict pain on tens of millions of people, because Israel’s immoral King David was God’s favorite (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/donald-trump-modern-day-king-david/602830/). They ignore St. Paul’s principle, “You may not do evil, that good may come of it.”[1] And they certainly have not internalized Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, a profound statement that what makes us human is the effort we make to care for others in need, whether or not the anointed Jesus was the son of God.
American conservative television host Laura Ingraham described the living conditions of the children of non-legal immigrants separated from their parents and living behind chain link fences as “essentially summer camps” (https://thehill.com/homenews/media/392922-laura-ingraham-describes-child-detention-centers-as-essentially-summer-camps). What American family of any political or religious persuasion who can afford to send their children to summer camps would send them to camps that have no games, no swimming facility, no air-conditioning, no freedom, and no stand-ins for individual paternal or maternal affection? Ingraham is Roman Catholic, yet her lack of moral sensitivity suggests that she has never read or internalized Luke 18:16 or Matthew 7:9.
We have often heard Christian Trumpists say “I don’t necessarily agree with Trump’s morals.” Really? Not necessarily agree with sexual assault, incarceration of children, and other abhorrent actions? What prevents these Trumpists from saying, “I abhor Trump’s behavior and character … and … and I cannot support him for any political office”?
Our guess is that one source of amorality among evangelicals is their embrace of a certain interpretation of the story that God commanded Abraham, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering.” If they think, really think, that they would murder their own children, by any means God prescribed, as in Genesis 22:2 and 9–10, by sacrificial throat-slitting followed by cremation of the body by fire, they are amoral or sociopathic or as collectively deranged as the 10,000 average citizens who watched the mutilation, hanging and barbecuing of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas on May 15, 1916 (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/waco-horror-still-reverberates-100-years-later/).
In real life and not myth, child murderers are imprisoned or sent to institutions for the criminally insane. We believe that Christian evangelists would not murder their children. So they must apply the principle, “Do whatever God commands you to do” selectively. They hear the voice of God telling them to do exactly the things that they want to do but that they know have no moral justification. They worship a God who is a moral monster. As a friend once said to one of us, “Why do Christians hold the omnibenevolent [all kind and well-disposed] God to a lower standard than they hold other human beings?”
For years, political commentators have been saying that the Republican Party will soon become a minority party, unable to win any major election. The results of the 2020 election suggest that this prediction is false, as the success of Republicans down-ballot makes clear. Ethnic communities tend to become conservative after they achieve wealth and acceptance. Many ardent Republicans today are the children and grandchildren of Eastern European unionists, communists, and socialists from the 1930s and 40s. And many of the East European descendants who now resent recent immigrants are Trump’s base.
The Republican Party is now a big tent party because it does not impose any political principles or policies on its members such as promoting small government, balanced budgets, free trade, and even immigration policy. President Reagan opposed erecting a wall on the border with Mexico and offered amnesty to illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. before 1982 https://www.npr.org/2018/01/25/580222116/the-gops-evolution-on-immigration; https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128303672. Robert Bartley, the former editor of the Wall Street Journal promoted open borders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bartley). The policy is part of libertarian capitalism: free markets should not be restricted by national borders; and laborers, which markets need, should be free to go wherever they can earn the most.
Republicans now change beliefs with every change in Trump’s whims. Kim Jung-un and Xi Jin-ping are great friends one day and then not great friends the next. Trump seems ever faithful only to Vlad Putin. The willingness of Republican leaders and political office-holders to do whatever they think will increase the wealth of multimillionaires and the preservation of their own public offices has a cost that is borne by the nation.
Many of these attitudes are centuries old. The robber barons roughly a century and more ago became rich by accumulating the wealth created by laboring Americans. In president Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, three days before the Kennedy inauguration, he warned Americans about the military-industrial complex. He knew what he was talking about because he had presided over the formation of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War from 1952 to 1961. In 1953, Eisenhower nominated the head of General Motors, Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson to become Secretary of the Department of Defense. Wilson famously declared, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.” This Republican-supported conflation of democracy and capitalism is a key cause of the severely weakened state of health of our country.
Democracy is a political system. Capitalism is an economic system. That they are different is obvious from contemporary Russia and the People’s Republic of China, which currently have authoritarian governments and capitalistic economies.
Neither democracy nor capitalism is inherently good. Capitalism is good as a matter of fact when it increases a nation’s wealth. It is bad when that wealth is unjustly distributed; and it is bad when it pollutes air, water, and food, and degrades the ecology. Democracy is neither good nor bad in itself. It is good when educated, principled and socially conscientious people are the electorate. Those people will elect leaders who will prevent capitalism from acting badly. This is simply part of the government’s constitutional role of “establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility,” and promoting “the general welfare” of its citizens.
Some Republicans now deny that the United States is a democracy and are glad that it is not (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/us/elections/mike-lee-democracy.html). It is, says Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a republic. Whether it is one or the other or whether the two words mean the same thing is a semantic issue. The law of the United States is that every citizen over the age of eighteen can vote in federal elections and each vote should count equally. The Republican goal of suppressing the votes of Blacks is particularly reprehensible because of the American tradition of two centuries of enslavement, and another century of social, economic, and political oppression. The current evil of voter suppression is the spawn of those centuries of hatred. The expansion of voting rights for Blacks during the 1960s and 1970 drove the racism of tens of millions of Americans underground where it suppurated until Trump’s campaign in 2016 set it free.
A variation on Trump’s ability to get his followers to mistake belief for reality is the disparity between promise and reality. His promise to create the greatest economy in American history was not kept. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during Trump’s first three years is no better than during Obama’s second term. This is not the promised 4–5% annual GDP growth. The reality is 2.3% actual growth in first three years and 1% since the beginning of his term. He promised a balanced budget and elimination of the national debt. The reality is that in the last quarter the US recorded the largest trade deficit with China ever, and total trade deficits are bigger than during the last years of Obama administration. If we were professional economists, we could continue in this statistical vein, but it is more important to return to how Trump has consistently discouraged large number of Americans from thinking morally and ethically about the needs of their fellow human beings, citizens or citizens-to-be, who are striving to live good lives in our country. His mantra could be reduced to “ask not what you can do for your country, but what you can grab for yourselves as I long have.”
Whoever thinks the American economy is strong should look at the images and interviews in Chris Arnade’s remarkable book Dignity, which documents between 2011 and autumn 2016 in photographs and personal conversations the large forgotten areas in American towns and cities. Trumpists might also watch the documentary American Factory, which won an Oscar in 2019, about how a Chinese billionaire and the People’s Republic of China have profited from our economic decline at the expense of our non-unionized workers. This, too, puts the lie to Trump’s acronymic promise MAGA.
Big cities across our country have extensive poverty zones with abandoned buildings, dilapidated housing, closed business and storefronts, decaying warehouses, reduced social services, and forgotten people, from Hunts Point Market in New York City to Bakersfield, California. These are perpetual zones that are rarely visited or seen by most Americans, certainly not Ivy League graduates with net worths of $40,000,000 like conservative commentator Laura Ingraham. When even middle-class people visit Cleveland, Detroit, Gary, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Lewiston, Cairo, Amarillo, Reno or Mountain Grove, Missouri, and similar cities and towns sprinkled thickly across the country, they are reluctant to stay in or even drive through many such neighborhoods.
Rural poverty is likewise effectively invisible to people who have stable family lives. But by driving along state roads instead of interstates, you will see everywhere the deaths of small towns. Walmarts erected thirty years ago outside of small towns destroyed their local economic and social networks. These stores are now themselves closing because the remaining people cannot support the profit requirements of Walmart. Walmart destroyed the towns in order to profit from them. Now Dollar Stores spring up.
This destruction was not ushered in by Trump or even George W. Bush. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. He signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. And he fed the maw of Wall Street investment firms. Further back, President Ronald Reagan’s strike-breaking dismissal of 11,345 air traffic controllers of the PATCO union was a sign of what was to come, reverse-Robin-Hood actions. These include the S&L plundering in the 1980s; the growth of investment banks and internet entrepreneurs during the 1990s dot.com bubble; the wild profits by banks, hedge funds, and investment houses like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs during the 2000s. The sub-prime collapse; severe cutbacks on public higher education spending; long deferred maintenance of urban and transportation infrastructures; poor public health care; and staggering contractor corruption in the Iraq and Afghanistan non-wars were other instances of taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
If a strong economy exists, it is strong for a small number of people. To believe that Donald Trump, the man who squandered the 400 million dollars he inherited and who filed for bankruptcy six times can be responsible for re-creating and maintaining a strong national economy is literally incredible (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-02/ny-times-trump-got-413m-from-his-dad-much-from-tax-dodges). We can’t believe it. You shouldn’t either.
From the day after the election until November 11, Trump made no public appearances. He spent five wordless minutes on Veteran’s Day at a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was good for Trump and the country that he did not speak his mind about the dead soldier. In his mind he may have formed the words, “What was in it for the soldier? Loser.” A cynic might say that Trump wanted to send the wreath FTD, to avoid going out in the rain and cold.
As we mentioned above, Democrats share the blame for the sorry state of the country. We will not contest that. But many politically engaged Democrats worked hard to get out the vote. During the campaign, Powered by People, a group organized by Beto O’Rourke, had hundreds of volunteers calling likely Democratic voters, sometimes 500,000 of them in one night — yes, in one night. And excellent candidates ran, notably, Wendy Davis, Donna Imam, and Julie Oliver, in liberal central Texas, for the House; and USAF veteran M. J. Hegar for the Senate. All lost, even though they were running against some of the richest and worst Republicans.
The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics found Representative Roger Williams guilty of inserting into a transportation bill a provision that “exempted some car dealerships like his own from a proposal to prevent rental car companies from renting out vehicles that were subject to safety recalls” (Susan Brooks, “OCE Referral Regarding Rep. Roger Williams”; 115th Congress, 1st Session, US House of Representatives Committee on Ethics, August 11, 2016). This self-made man — we are being ironic; he inherited his father’s auto dealership — took millions of dollars of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, but refused to disclose how much or how it was distributed. For all we know, it all went into his deep, deep pockets. In campaign material, he blatantly appealed to Judeo-Christian values. No mention of Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics or — God forbid! — atheists. At best, he is an Old Testament Christian. His political life shows no evidence of having accepted Jesus’ admonitions, “Love thy neighbor, as thyself”; “What you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me”; and “It is easier for camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.” In truth, he is even insensitive to important parts of the Hebrew Bible: “Money is the root of all evil.”
Mostly in hiding since the election, what has Trump been doing? Whatever it is, jokes about him or how he might try to weaken our democratic institutions even further should not be taken lightly. Almost half the nation supports him. His supporters are zealous and in thrall with what he and media like Fox News tell them. He has a majority in the Supreme Court. He has people willing to do his bidding during a recount. He has fired responsible administrators in the government and the military. The replacements he has appointed know that their times in office end when they displease Trump by acting ethically and for the common good. Since the election, Trump has fired or forced to resign twelve key senior public officials (https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-officials-fired-or-resigned-since-election-2020-11). Among them are officials who have protected the integrity of the voting and vote-counting processes like cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs and the Department of Justice’s election-crimes division chief Richard Pilger. Also gone are Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, the Under Secretaries of State for Intelligence and Security and for Policy, and the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense.
The new top policy chief has referred to former President Obama as a Muslim and a “terrorist leader.” The western world has not seen such a collection of high state officials within a western democracy holding views that range from crazy to repugnant to downright scary since the 1930’s in Germany. The single-minded chancellor then was brought into office with the support of “the lower-middle classes, the bourgeoisie, the unorganized workers, the rural masses, and the older traditionalists — Protestants and evangelicals who wanted a moral restoration of the nation.” He then secured a dictatorship through intimidation, bullying and the failure of rival office-holders to see how rapidly the symptoms of such disease could kill a democracy. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-ways-to-destroy-democracy/
To paraphrase Nobel-prize-winning songster Bob Dylan, long a keen observer and critic, akin at times to an Old Testament prophet, of our American lives and the political leaders we elect, our democracy “is not dead yet, but it’s getting there.”
[1] We have heard the objection, “Well, what justifies the means if not the end?” The end justifies itself. The means also need to justify themselves. If the means are evil, then the means are evil. The reason one cannot use evil means for a good end is that it is evil to do evil.
Tom Palaima is Robert M. Armstrong Professor of Classics and founding director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (est. 1986) at the University of Texas at Austin. A MacArthur fellow, he researches, writes and teaches seminars about the creative human response to experiences of war, violence and social injustice, ancient and modern, and on Dylanology. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries London, a Ph.D. honoris causa of the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and has written hundreds of commentaries, reviews, book chapters, poems and feature pieces on what human beings have done, do and will do with their lives.
tpalaima@austin.utexas.edu
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/259/
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/palaimat
https://sites.utexas.edu/tpalaima/writing-on-war/
https://sites.utexas.edu/tpalaima/dylanology/
Al Martinich is Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Before his retirement he was Professor of History and Professor of Government. He is the author of many books on Thomas Hobbes, including The Two Gods of Leviathan and the prize-winning Hobbes: A Biography, both published by Cambridge University Press. In addition to articles in professional journals and books, he has written for such journals as Think and The Philosophers Magazine, each devoted to explaining philosophy for educated readers. With Tom Palaima, he has written essays and commentaries about contemporary events for major newspapers and outlets like Times Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, Athenaeum Review, and commondreams.org.
See, for example: https://athenaeumreview.org/essay/immigration-and-decency/
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-removing-the-jefferson-davis-statue-is-a-big-mistake/
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/destroying-gutenberg-galaxy-books-will-leave-black-hole
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/must-every-student-really-become-entrepreneur
