The Uncomfortable Bits

 There's part of the current situation I've sort of been glossing over, and I want to pull it out and look at it a bit more clearly.

Please talk about 'damage to our democracy', but they don't go into a lot of detail. Partly because, well...

It's like talking about structural damage to a bridge. You can see the cracks, you can see them getting bigger... You know that somebody needs to fix the damage... 

but you don't really know when or how the bridge is going to break. It might last another ten years, or break tomorrow. 

You also don't know what sort of load it will have to bear. It could be all the traffic is fairly light. Moderate. And the bridge can last a while longer.  Or you might get a heavy convoy adding stress after stress.

In one sense, there's always people muttering about 'damage', and nothing seems to happen. Right? The bridge is still standing, cars and trucks are still driving over it. Study after study has shown people distrust government more than ever. I don't know if you can say that it started with Vietnam, but there's a definite downward trend since that time.

It's been there my entire life, tbh. I don't know if the way people stopped caring about character is one of the results of that trend or not, but I've hated that ever since I heard of it. "All politicians lie. Character doesn't matter, I'll just vote for whoever supports the policies I want." (I think I heard this at least once in association with the Clintons, because regardless of whether it was impeachable or not Bill Clinton did lie. Ofc, the Republicans trying to impeach him were rather guilty of the same sins, so in some ways the whole fiasco is an indictment of the entire Washington establishment.)

I'm not writing this to get into why character matters though. I'm writing because surveys show a large portion of our nation has lost faith in the electoral process. They think the votes were rigged. It's a rather large crack, though as with structural damage to a bridge it's hard to say when or how the effects will be felt.

But there's more to it than that. People mutter about 'damage to our system', and complain about all the frivolous lawsuits that keep getting thrown out of court, but the people who have bought into this idea that the election was stolen don't care about that. They want something to restore their trust in the system, they want 'justice'... and even though they are mostly looking for evidence to support the conclusions they've already made (as opposed to honestly and openly evaluating the evidence), it needs to be addressed because that's where the damage was done.

I made the tongue-in-cheek comment about redoing the election because even though Trump and his enablers don't really deserve the chance (and there's always the fear that they'd somehow manage to win, and then what?) because that's the sort of thing that would restore trust and fix the damage. Make it all transparent, obvious. Invite them to be pollwatchers, make them go through the training and learn how elections really work - because a lot of these conspiracies took hold because they just really didn't know. They didn't realize most of the people running elections are volunteers from their own community, and instead imagine some sort of shadowy network of party hacks. 

I don't honestly think we should redo the election, mostly because of the tremendous amount of problems that would create (shouldn't all the elections be affected, in which case we'd have to question who won all the other local, state, and federal elections. Then there's the problem of who would be in charge while we did it, how much time it would take - and oh, btw, there's still this damned pandemic going on and it's escalating fast.)

But we all know that, to be honest. The part that I sort of keep pushing aside because dwelling on it raises uncomfortable questions is this -

The damage we're dealing with now isn't some sort of accident. 

It's not the normal wear and tear on a bridge. It's not even that an unusually heavy convoy came through and put extra stress on the structure (one could argue that this metaphor could be used for something like the pandemic.)

This is the sort of damage most of our politicians have spent a couple of centuries avoiding. Yes, there are liberals who still mutter about the election in 2000. And in 2016. 

But leaders can not say the things the average person can. To go back to my time in the military - if I, as an officer, could not say some of the things my enlisted soldiers said. 

Why? Because it's different when someone in the chain of command says it. Because enlisted soldiers just blowing off steam are rarely in a position to do something about it... but when their commanding officer joins in, then it adds legitimacy to their complaints and raises the spectre of mutiny. 

It sucks, sometimes. Having to be careful of what you say. Having to make it sound like you agree with or support the chain of command even when you don't. (And ultimately if that happens too often you will probably leave... because who wants to work for people like that?) But it's not just something you do because you're a bootlicker, or playing the game, or whatever...

At the most extreme, the end of the road if you go down that path, you can have a military (and nation) fall apart right when they need to work together the most. I don't like you, so I'm going to take my platoon and run off to support the other side. That battalion commander disagrees with your order, so he'll leave the front line open. 

I generally try to encourage people to speak out, and for the system to listen and respond... because most of the time groupthink and obedience are more of a problem than the reverse. That's dependent on the situation, and there are definitely times and situations where coming together and supporting the chain of command is more important than our disagreements. (Judging how important an issue is, how willing the chain of command is to listen and respond, and what the consequences of letting that disagreement break the organization are all part of what you have to consider when trying to decide how to deal with whatever it is.)

There is a reason that we expect duly elected public officials to condemn violence, regardless of whether their politics align with the groups involved. (We expect liberal politicians to condemn antifa violence, and conservative politicians to condemn maga violence. As leaders of their factions, and as public servants, they shouldn't be encouraging people to act in ways that undermine the system.)

And here's the part people shy away from.

Trump - in his entire time in office - has never done that sort of thing. Never condemned the violence done by those he agrees with (those 'very fine people.'). 

People act like it's always some sort of gotcha thing when the mainstream media asks him about it, and there are definitely elements of political theater involved...

But it's extremely problematic that the leader of our nation, the President of the United States - speaking with all the symbols of his office - says these things.

It's one thing for some random person on twitter to complain that the election was stolen.

It's something entirely different for the President of the United States to spend 45 minutes giving the 'most important speech' of his career, in which he alleges (without any real evidence) a massive attempt to steal the election.

This isn't the usual wear and tear on the infrastructure supporting our system. This isn't even an unusually heavy load, like a pandemic.

It's deliberate. It's targeted. It's as though someone took a sledgehammer and slammed it into the bridge supports.

And we all look away. We've learned that it's useless to say anything. His supporters are either cynical and power hungry enough to ignore it, or they honestly believe (despite all the evidence) Trump... and they think Biden is the one taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. 

We have learned over the past four years that every time Trump says some over-the-top, outrageous thing... his supporters don't care. They either don't actually pay attention (possible - many people don't. These days a lot of people get their news from Facebook, after all), or they explain it away as 'just joking'. or they say it was misconstrued or taken out of context and people are unfairly villainizing him...

They sometimes even twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain away the things Trump has said.

But regardless of whether they listen or not, regardless of whether previous examples were exaggerated or unfair...

Right now we have a POTUS who is whacking away with a sledgehammer.