“American democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.” Vice-President Kamala Harris after certification of Trump’s election.
A willingness to fight for democracy includes many things, certainly not attacking the Capitol and trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power as Trump’s followers did in 2020, more holding tight to those things we know make us who we are as a nation.
That we are now having this fight is what makes us so angry and frustrated with Trump voters. It was all so unnecessary until they chose to put the nation through another term of chaos, divisiveness, and moral depravity.
But here we are, and the dangers could not be more striking, mainly because the basic message of Trump’s re-election is that telling the truth doesn’t matter anymore to everyone who voted for him. (Along with, we have just learned, billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Patrick Soon Shiong, owner of the LA Times).
When you vote for (or bow down) to someone who doesn’t tell the truth, you are saying with that you don’t care about telling the truth. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t thinking about that when you voted. The effect is the same.
The re-election of Trump opened the way for his continued assault on the truth that began the moment he entered into politics. His complete disregard for telling the truth is so commonplace that it has become unexceptional, “normal” for him, what people expect, and that is the danger.
His assault on telling the truth led the Oxford Dictionaries to name “post-truth politics” its Word of the Year in 2016. That will forever be his legacy, his relentless effort to create a “post-truth politics” in America.
And everyone, absolutely everyone, who played a role in his re-election made an unequivocal statement that they’re okay with that.
That is the most important problem our nation faces right now. The primary source of the divisions that exists in America at the moment is the line between Americans who believe telling the truth is still a virtue worth preserving and those who don’t.
Think about what that means for a minute.
It means there are 77,303,573 citizens of our country (49.9% of all those who voted) to whom telling the truth no longer matters, that they don’t care if the President of the United States chooses to lie every time he speaks, something that is not a matter of dispute any more.
Trumpers can refuse to believe it, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.
It doesn’t change the fact that their support of him means telling the truth doesn’t matter to them either.
It doesn’t change the fact that parents who voted for Trump gave up their moral right to expect their children to tell them the truth.
It doesn’t change the fact that every grandparent, teacher, police officer, business owner, next door neighbor, doctor, lawyer, or minister who voted for Trump has lost the right to be upset when someone lies to them.
Put simply, whether or not Trumpers believe Trump lies doesn’t change the fact that by voting for him last November they gave away the moral right to tell anyone else they should tell the truth.
And that is a big deal.
Indeed, it is a dangerous omen of where our country is headed. At the founding of the nation, James Madison warned that the future of the new nation depended on the virtue of the American people.
“Is there no virtue among us?” he asked. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks-no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical [imaginary] idea.”
Of all human virtues, telling the truth is the cornerstone for all the rest, but because of Trump’s re-election, we must now wonder if our nation is becoming a people without virtue, edging us closer to being in the wretched situation about which Madison warned.
In the coming months we will find out.
Will sufficient numbers of Americans demand that Trump and the Republican Party embrace the virtue of telling the truth so that we can preserve our freedoms and our happiness?
As I said, we will see, but the one thing we cannot do is to let Trump and Trumpism beat us down. We may not be a virtuous people, but we can affirm the role of virtue in our collective life, first among them the centrality of telling the truth.
Trump will continue to tell lies, and his voters will continue to believe, but most of us don’t have to.
That is the least we can do, and, if Madison was right, it will ultimately be enough to save us from the wretched situation those who elected Trump want all of us to be in.
linnposts.com 
See my comment
a
Wasn’t being truthful one of those “family values” that the Republican Party espoused at one point? One more example of how Trump has taken over and corrupted the party.
They have forgotten every good thing they once believed in, Wilbur.
Jan,
Thanks for your excellent, on-the-mark thoughts, so needed once again.
It is sad for me to think this, but here is my most disturbing feeling about the Trump “movement, which I’ve felt almost from the beginning: Trump, himself, is not the problem (as silly as that may sound), rather it is the number of people who seemingly blandly support him, mainly, as you have pointed out, by his mendacious prevaricating as some kind of “normal.”
I just finished watching President Carter’s funeral and was pointedly struck by the stark contrast between his presidency and life and Trump’s.
May we see better days; we will, if we firmly and consistently put forth the eternal value of truth.
Gene
Joy and I also watched the Carter funeral, Gene, and, just as you said, the contrast between Jimmy Carter’s life and presidency of Trump’s could not be more stark. I wonder what Trump was thinking while people spoke about the self-less life President Carter lived. Or was he listening at all? It’s for sure he will not be remembered in the same way.
Bill Maher, an old school liberal and a person who detests Trump had these interesting comments in the WSJ:
“The left has this need for virtue signaling, and to have their friends-and I guess everybody on social media- think of them as the good people. We know who’s good and it is us”.
“They often say, when they lose elections, we didn’t get our message out. Yes you did. They just didn’t like it. You got it out loud & clear.”
Interesting take
Never been a Maher fan. He’s as full of himself as anyone can be. That aside, it’s become common for people to accuse anyone who dares to speak of virtues and rightness as being self-righteous, but it is another assault on there actually being moral standards. Telling the truth is as basic as it gets. Doesn’t mean anyone does it all the time or perfectly, but it does mean we still believe in it. That’s not being self-righteous. It’s simply believing there are standards worth preserving. Biden often says we don’t always live up to our ideals, but we haven’t walked away from them either. Trumpers have walked away from them. And that has nothing to do with not getting our message out. Not sure why you thought that was relevant to my blog.