“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.
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