FEBRUARY 14, 2021 – During a break in the impeachment trial, I received a call from Jeff Klenk, a close college friend of mine. We’d both been observing the proceedings closely and talked earnestly about them. As a government major during our undergraduate days, and ever since, as a serious student of political science, Jeff is one of the most well-informed people I know.
During our conversation, he asked repeatedly, “What can I do?” What, he wondered, could anyone do to counteract the anti-democratic forces that have consumed our republic? Neither of us had an answer.
That was before yesterday’s vote, for which we’d harbored no realistic hope. Nevertheless, by the end of the roll call I was more devastated than ever—too distraught, frankly, even to commiserate again with Jeff.
I thought back to our undergraduate days and the rigorous education we’d received in history and government—of America and of other nations. I reflected on the eras and epochs we’d studied; the causes leading to conflict, crisis, and resolution—by reform, evolution, revolution; the historical actors—heroes, villains, and people of all stripes in between. If scholarship affords us a wealth of comparisons, it also leads us to conclude that our country is in its greatest danger.
If Trump was named in the Article of Impeachment, something far more important than that vacant soul was on trial. Dishonesty was the accused. In awful abundance it confessed, admitted, and testified against itself throughout the managers’ presentations, Trump’s ragged defense, and McConnell’s bizarre speech following the trial. Moreover, dishonesty ran rampant among 30% to 40% of Americans and threatened, harangued, and tampered with cowering jurors.
What can we do about the grip of dishonesty on 75 million voters? What can we do about the dissemination of brazen falsehoods—not conflicting interests, not differences of perspective or opinion, not variations in political persuasion, but outright fibs and fabrications?
Opposing viewpoints bring health to a democracy, but dishonesty will destroy it. The Big Lie was bigger than any lie that preceded it in the compendium of American political lies. It was aimed and fired not at the façade of democracy, nor was it was it a force deployed in the cause of secession or to curtail our power abroad. It was aimed and fired at and struck directly the very foundation of our democracy—the electoral process. Moreover, the Big Lie was laser-focused not on some middle foundational stone but a cornerstone—the vote certifying the result of the Electoral College, the peaceful transition of executive power. Worst: the loading, aiming, firing of the Big Lie was all-American.
However Trump’s enablers wish to spin or deny the facts doesn’t alter this one: the Big Lie was the biggest direct hit—ever—on American democracy. Bigger than the War of 1812, the Civil War, the torpedo that sank the Lusitania (leading eventually to America’s entry into WW I), Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, and 9-11.
Dishonesty was on trial last week and won acquittal, free to strike again. And it will.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
