BEAR WITH ME AS I BARE A PERSONAL CONFLICT, NOW RESOLVED

APRIL 26, 2024 – We live in the Age of Opinion, or more precisely, the Age of Cacophonous Opinion—informed, uninformed and misinformed; often in one-off unorganized bursts, sometimes in regular outrages devoured by legions of subscribers gathered by a common algorithm; scattered to the crosswinds of social media yet occasionally framed according to logic and accepted rules of usage. To this bazaar of righteous and not so righteous indignation, I join the mob—still, again—tossing my two shiny cents’ worth into the hot air rising above the public square.

For some weeks, nay months . . . can it really be years?! . . . I’ve tried not to follow all the prosecutorial investigations and judicial proceedings focused on the former president who would be the future potentate. Throughout this episode of American life, I’ve felt constantly conflicted. This internal strife doesn’t pertain to my assessment of the person in question. For him I possess a deep-seated disdain. I’d formed negative impressions of him as far back as the early 1990s when my daily job involved real estate “workouts,” and I heard from industry colleagues firsthand accounts of the man’s unsavory tactics and blatant dishonesty. His “birther” campaign against President Obama a decade later confirmed my dim view of the birther-barker preoccupied with inarticulate but effective self-aggrandizement—never legitimate business of a form that generated true wealth.

Given his four-year reign in a position for which he was bereft of requisite qualifications, I observed no hint of redemptive quality in the guy—with one small but perhaps symbolic exception: his choice of blue as the hue of his suits.

So just to be clear, my “conflict” hasn’t arisen from indecision about the man or his candidacy for president.

My “conflict” was in reaction to the (redux) Bleak House litigation[1] that has sucked the oxygen from so much reportage on fronts that “really matter” to the life of our nation. More to the point, I vacillated continually between the conclusion (a) that the litigation really does matter, and (b) that in the final chapter of our current era, the legal proceedings matter far less than any of us would now perceive, irrespective of our political views and despite our embrace or dislike for the defendant in question.

What disturbed me was the conflict within the conflict; that is, I worried that if I choose not to worry, I’d be joining a dangerous trend of acceptance of new norms; a perilous tolerance of attacks on the essential framework of principled self-governance. Yet even within this worry, I felt conflicted: My sense of history—limited though it is—generated mix signals.

On the one hand, I was aware of dire episodes in the American story that we survived. See, for example, the anti-Semitism and pro-fascism of the isolationist American Bund and the America First Committee (formed after the outbreak of WW II); Father Coughlin’s ragingly anti-Semitic radio broadcasts—and the staggering size of his following (one out of four Americans); the seditionist activities of the Christian Front in the late 1930s; the efforts of American Nazi sympathizers to sabotage the American war effort and their chaotic trial (known as the Sedition Trial of 1944). Who today remembers—or ever even heard of—any of these chapters that could have upended American democracy? Would the current threat to our democracy likewise dissipate?

On the other hand, with equal ease I looked to the example of Germany in 1933 onward to the most cataclysmic results civilization has ever experienced.

In short, my personal conflict arose from the intersection of today’s principal political crossroads. Both throughways appear as unmarked super-highways running into the future. Each meets a fog-bound rise in terrain a short distance away; a blurred horizon that produces wild and vociferous speculation: which route leads over a cliff? Across a vast plain? Which is the smoothest and straightest, and is that the road to perdition?

Because of this ongoing conflict, I’d tuned in and out of reportage on Bleak House in all its complexity and speculation.

Until yesterday. By chance I tuned in to oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the presidential immunity case. Soon I broke out in a cold sweat. I realized that of all the litigation involving the presumptive Republican candidate for president; of all that his supporters relish and his detractors disdain; of all the threats—real and imagined—posed by his continued presence on the political stage . . . it all pales next to the immunity case.

The future of our democracy turns on the outcome of that one case. Simply by accepting an appeal premised on unbounded presidential prerogative, the Supreme Court blasted a hole through the cornerstone of our Constitutional foundation: THE RULE OF LAW, and its supporting stone blocks, NO PERSON IS ABOVE THE LAW, and THE ESSENCE OF THE CONSTITUTION IS A BALANCE OF POWER AMONG EXECUTIVE, LEGISLATIVE, AND JUDICIAL BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT.

The Master of Hyperbole and his advocates argue the exact antithesis of each of these operating principles: when expediency requires (as deemed by the president), the law can be ignored; to exercise power effectively, the president must have broad immunity from prosecution for unlawful acts; the danger of absolute power held by the executive is outweighed by the risk of diminished presidential power based on the fear of prosecution for legal infractions.

To advocates of these immunity arguments and to the Supreme Court “conservatives”—a misnomer, given the “radical” departure from the foundational principles laid down by the Framers—I say this: Every piece of the immunity case offends everything we were ever supposed to learn about the precepts on which our nation was founded and by which it was to be governed.

Many millions of Americans don’t, can’t, won’t see the threat posed by the immunity case now before the Supremes. I myself didn’t fully appreciate its import until just now. But however much Americans might shrug their shoulders at the appeal, let alone support it, I believe the appeal is a case of dynamite with fuses twisted together and now lit by the Supreme Court. If at least five justices don’t pinch the fuse and disarm the dynamite, we as a self-governing nation will have but one last chance to save the Republic. If . . . for whatever pet peeve, single-issue obsession, strident view, political philosophy, idealized conception of how things should work vs. how things actually work, etc. . . . we cast our votes against a democratic future, we will have only ourselves to castigate for the demise of the Great American Experiment.

And when the “biggest” carnival barker “in our entire history” is self-coronated at the funeral of the Republic, none of us will be able to blame the barker for lack of transparency.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson

[1] See Charles Dickens.