It's painful to watch: some of my friends and former friends, lifelong Republicans, or conservatives, or l/Libertarians, are starting to wonder if they might have some very unsavory bedfellows, as the Trump administration departs farther and farther from norms of civilized, decent behavior and the rule of law.
They're in an awkward position, among their own friends, many of whom are very much on board with wherever the current version of the GOP is headed; others are suppressing their own doubts, struggling to come up with reasons why the Democrats could only be worse, or why no moderate or even traditional Republican should try sailing into the blowhard winds coming from the White House.
Some of them may bail out, eventually, and at no small short-term personal cost; ask Liz Cheney. Others will ride it all the way down until it augers in, as it inevitably must, "good Germans," patriots who "had no idea what all was going on."
The perpetrators will some day come to justice, or at least flee from it, by death or jet plane, red-handed and reviled, but the people who stood idly by and let it happen, the cheering throngs who never looked too closely, the passive fellow-travelers who figured it would all blow over if they looked the other way, they'll all get a pass, just like always.
We're going to be stuck with the hard work of rebuilding a society that values science and sanity, that believes in the inherent worth of people, that all men -- and all women -- are equal before the law, and many of our fellows will still be drifting along with the current, ignoring that scintilla of guilt sizzling away in the back of their minds: they could have been against the current mess sooner; they could have helped nip it in the bud. They didn't, and the blood is already on everyone's hands.
There will come a day when they shake their heads sadly, and mutter, "We didn't know. We couldn't have stopped it." What they'll mean is, "We didn't want to know. It was too much effort to stop it," but history says we'll let them hang on to their self-protecting illusions, and work to do better next time.
The march of human progress is not a smooth, simple upward curve. It never has been.
Update
1 year ago
4 comments:
"...the hard work of rebuilding a society"
We've seen this movie before. Think Germany, May, 1945. It took misery, countless deaths, and the cataclysmic flattening of the country's infrastructure to make many of them eventually realize their complicity in lethal and genocidal crime.
Short of a similar homeland disaster in America, there will be no overriding reason for a course correction. As long as there are enough red hats to vote for criminals, the criminals will prosper and dictate.
Silence is complicity. To the dictating, controlling elite, every moment of silent public assent merely validates their evil, and emboldens them for more.
I'm a bit more optimistic, and think the USA will muddle through as usual. Trump's movement is too based on Trump to continue without him, and the guy is getting old & flakey. He hit a high point in 2024, but his own kookery is having a bad effect on many of those who gave him a first time go. Even some hard core MAGA types are having buyer's remorse, but are a bit worried about expressing it.
I still hold that he's going to continue to sink himself, and will become fully radioactive to the Republicans after the midterms.
Seeing the shit going on here in the US, in Israel, in Europe with its struggle to confront the threat that Russia is to Western Civ...sometime it feels like we are in some sort of Bataan Death March of democracy, humanity and its ideals....
I fell in love with libertarian ideals back in the mid-90s. But as time passed, and I met more libertarians with some truly awful--and completely sincere--values, I began to waver. Now, between the burn-it-all-down Endarkenment Visigoths on the one side and the near-trillionaire tech bros on the other, I think my political beliefs consist solely of "Make it stop make it stop make it stop..."
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