This piece is appearing in newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06). I am always writing with the people in this 70-30 Republican, Trumpy area where I live in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I once had a positive relationship with these people — back in the 90s, when I did hundreds of hours of talk radio conversation with them over the course of a decade. I cannot bear that they have since then moved into such darkness.
So when I came to have a niche in which I could publish an essay every week in two of the main newspapers in the district where I’d run for Congress as the Democratic nominee in 2012. I cannot resign myself to their being out there — these “good people” I knew a quarter century ago — in the grip of such a twisted way to express themselves politically.
So I use my weekly message — almost 500 of them by now — as my effort to reach these people and bring them back to the better angels of their nature. It is very painful to me to see how the worst in them has been brought out and magnified, while their goodness is absent from their political lives.
I have no reason to believe that my efforts accomplish any of that aim, to move these people out of the frame of mind that leads them to support something so ugly. I paint my pictures of the reality and present it to people who have mistaken the Evil for the Good. It’s the best thing I know how to do, as an act of faith— the Truth really does have power, and people can be called back from that dark land where the Lie reigns.
(But in view of their belief in the Big Lie, one cannot feel confident that showing the Truth will have any impact.)
These people are with my constantly, in my consciousness— to a degree that I don’t fully understand. Except that these people that I care about for some personal reasons are also representative of a whole large segment of the American electorate that is threatening — by the support that they give to Trump and the Trump Party — to replace American Democracy with Fascism.
Moving their minds should be part of any comprehensive strategy to save American democracy.
So, I design pieces — based on what I have known about the goodness inside them — that are my best effort to bring them back over the fulcrum of the teeter totter, onto the Good side, thus weakening the ability of that Fascist force to prevail in that battle that is the essential political battle in America today: Democracy vs. Fascism.
This is the latest such piece.
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The problem of how Good People can lend their support to Evil has preoccupied me for some time.
(I define “Evil” as “a coherent force that consistently makes things worse in the human world” -- a definition that works well in both the religious and secular frameworks.)
The problem has arisen because of an extraordinary change in the nature of American politics. Usually, our political parties are mixtures of the constructive and destructive. But the issue of “Evil”-- so defined -- arises when the words and deeds of one of America’s two major parties consistently makes things worse.
Yet it seems clear to me that there are a number of Good People who support such a party: a phenomenon that both defies my comprehension and offers an opportunity.
Here’s what’s incomprehensible:
- How to explain how people who believe in law and order can support a leader whose repeated criminality (and utter contempt for the law) has become so clear and blatant as to make him a one-man crime-wave?
- How to understand the process by which people who revere the Constitution can give their allegiance to a political party waging a multi-pronged attack on the American constitutional order?
- How American patriots can support a political force that’s endangered American national security and openly worked to establish a fascistic regime of the kind American patriots have always opposed.
Yet this same start contradiction between the values of many Good People and the nature of the political party they support suggests an opportunity: -- an opportunity that can be illustrated by using the teeter-totter as a metaphor for this American crisis:
In our still-democratic nation, power is assigned according to the numbers of people who place themselves on the different sides of the seesaw’s fulcrum. The side that “outweighs” the other gets to steer the nation’s course.
In the current political battle – which, at its heart, has devolved to be Democracy vs. Fascism (which, in turn, aligns pretty well with Good vs. Evil) – it is likely only a small percentage of Americans who actually want Fascism. Nonetheless, because so many Good People have given their support to what has become the Party of Fascism (with its criminality, lies, lust for power, insistence on division and conflict), American Democracy is in considerable peril.
But if those Good People were to move across the fulcrum of the teeter-totter, shifting their weight from the side of Fascism to the pro-Democracy side, American Democracy would be saved.
That’s the opportunity.
Both the promise, and the difficulties, of that approach to our dangerous moment come to my mind these days as I interact with one of those Good People who frequently comes forward to engage me where my columns appear online.
I like the man. He expresses goodwill and behaves with civility. He is an intelligent man who has developed his mind. He’s someone I’d be very glad to have on my “team” whether it be a sport we played, or some government agency where we worked together to serve American interests and values.
This gentleman has publicly declared I should use my space here differently, that I should deal with the real issues — meaning those on which voters should make their political choices.
I believe I am addressing the real issue, which is: “Will the United States be able to preserve its basic constitutional order, or will a fascistic political force succeed in overturning that order?”
I believe that is the central choice facing American voters, and that if Good People like him would reject the “Evil” they’ve been supporting, then Goodness – such as they seem to embody -- would prevail in our nation.
He seems to be a man who values integrity. Yet, in his engagement with me, he lends his support to a political party that now quite flagrantly punishes integrity.
How can anyone not see that the exemplar of integrity in today’s Republican Party is Liz Cheney—she who clearly put truth ahead of lies, and honoring her oath of office ahead of protecting her own position? For that integrity, the Republican Party has cast her out.
If Liz Cheney were to engage my columns online, she’d reinforce my message, because her message to Republicans has been basically the same as mine: her Party is endangering the Constitution and the rule of law.
Yet somehow, when this Good Man engages me, it is to blunt and weaken my message.
Somehow, this man of integrity lends his weight to the anti-integrity Party, so well represented by the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, whose willingness to sell his soul for power – his videoed U-turn from speaking truth about the attempted coup to telling lies – has been so embarrassingly displayed.
Not understanding how such a Good Person could support, in his politics, the opposite of his own virtues, I recognize I likewise cannot say how that contradiction can be overcome. I.e. can’t say what it would take to shift his weight – and that of any other Good People who likewise seem to betray, in their politics, the values they express and embody -- across the teeter-totter’s fulcrum onto the side of American Democracy and its Goodness.
But one can only try what one knows how to do. And, as Mother Teresa said, leave the results to God.