AN ABSENCE OF DEMOCRATIC RIGOR

 

Earlier this month, on Veterans Day, while speaking at the opening of the new military museum at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, affirmed the following: "We are unique among armies, we are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, or tyrant or dictator, we do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or a religion. We take an oath to the Constitution, and every soldier that is represented in this museum—every sailor, airman, marine, coastguard—each of us protects and defends that document, regardless of personal price."

General Mark Milley

General Milley, the country’s top general officer, was referring to the same oath that I and many other veterans of my era—and those before and since—have sworn to. It begins like this: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same...”

I still stand by that oath, and so too, apparently, do the Armed Forces...at least for now. But a lot of surprising things have been happening over the course of the past four years, and those who have chosen to understate or ignore them could be in for some very unpleasant surprises in the future, as might we all.

The fact that General Milley felt called upon to reaffirm this oath —especially on Veterans Day, a sacred day for military personnel and veterans alike—is telling within the current unprecedented context. Especially after Milley’s commander in chief saw fit a few days before to carry out a shake-up at the top of the chain of command, starting with the firing of the defense secretary and continuing with the sacking of some high-ranking Pentagon officials. The president made little secret of why he was doing this. He was seeking to entrench “Trump loyalists” in the military two months out from what, considering the November 3 election results, should be his final day in office. He also made it clear that he was rejecting those results and planned to stay put, which rendered the Pentagon shake-up pointed and ominous.

It’s not hard to surmise, then, that General Milley knew precisely whom he was referring to when he said that soldiers “do not take an oath to an individual.” Because ever since Donald Trump took office in January of 2017, he has been demanding loyalty, not to the Constitution or even to the United States, but to him personally, from everyone on the roster of State, and he has deemed anyone who refused to comply a “member of the deep state”—yet another fantasy of his own fevered imagination.

The concern is, however, that such is the power of the image of the presidency—a personal power comparable only to that of the Pope within the Roman Catholic Church in terms of mass belief in the superiority of the personage holding the office—that these paranoid fantasies that flourish in Donald Trump’s mind have a contagious effect on his following. Indeed, nearly every time Trump supporters chide Trump critics for pointing to this particular White House resident’s severely flawed personality, they do so by harping on “lack of respect for the institution of the presidency”, rather than acknowledging that this president’s estranged relationship with truth and reality is like none other in the history of the office he holds.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party leadership’s prioritizing of winning over American democratic ideals is such that the majority-Trumpian GOP is perfectly willing to not only indulge but also to fan the flames of this fever in hopes of being able to cling to power at the expense of the people’s faith in the most noteworthy experiment in democracy in the history of the world. And this is only serving to institutionalize the climate of distrust that Trump and Company are seeking to breed, thus pitting the somewhat less than half of the population that is convinced Trumpian propaganda is true against the more than half the population that realizes that it is a pernicious lie.

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I have engaged repeatedly with Trump-supporters on the social media. Some are too dismissive to develop any rapport with whatsoever. Suffice it to say that on presenting my views on democratic ideals I have no few times been referred to in these post-election days as “a communist”, “an activist”, “an ass”, “a simpleton”, and “an imbecile”—more specifically, “a full-of-shit imbecile”. But those who have maintained sufficient logic and manners to present salient arguments have, to a man and woman, clung to the sole and valid idea of what the president and his campaign apparatus can legally do to challenge the election results.

None of these people, unfortunately, seems to be listening when I repeatedly agree that any candidate has certain legal recourse available when he or she has reason to suspect fraud. They have again and again accused me of wanting to forego certification of the vote and the legal rights of the president and the GOP and simply allow the media to call the election. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth or more ludicrous to anyone at all familiar with my ardently democratic principles for which I have, in another time and place, literally put my life on the line. I fully agree that no vote is final until certified and that, if there is a shadow of a doubt about corruption, it should be investigated. As in any other lawsuit, however, not on the basis of party passion, disappointment over outcome, political ambitions, candidate preference or unmitigated hearsay, but only on the basis of hard evidence and indisputable facts.

The other argument of mine that Trump supporters consistently ignore—because, I suspect, they have absolutely no valid stance with which to rebut it—is that while any and all proper legal recourse in the courts is valid, intervention by the Department of Justice, and more specifically, by the attorney general is not. Period. The only time that the attorney general can legitimately intervene in an election process is when all other legal recourse has been exhausted and election results certified, despite there still existing apparent and compelling evidence of irregularities. Otherwise, there is a hard and fast rule that the attorney general—who represents every citizen of the United States, not the president or a party—cannot intervene to cast doubt on, or to seek to overturn election results, especially when this key public official is doing so in the name of the ruling party and administration to which he or she is beholden. Attorney General William Barr has very apparently run afoul of this rule by announcing that the DOJ would be opening a pre-certification investigation into claims of voter fraud to the detriment of the incumbent.

This is a clear violation of democratic principles. The aim of the rule against the DOJ’s getting involved prior to finalization and certification of the election is self-apparent: It is to ensure that no president can become a dictator by using the machinery of government to neutralize the chances of an opponent’s winning the race. Barr, and by association, Donald Trump, have violated that trust.

The thread-bareness of Trump followers’ affirmation of the legality of the incumbent’s attempts to stall the inevitable and to refuse to concede the other candidate’s election victory lies in a question of legitimacy. The fact is that, to date, after dozens of filings, none of the suits brought by the Trump campaign has managed to make one iota of difference in the overall election results. And the court decisions handed down have mostly been rebuffs so severe that if Trump or his campaign were capable of anything even approaching shame or honor these findings would be a source of profound embarrassment.

For instance:

In a suit in Michigan in which Republican poll-watchers tried to block certification in Detroit alleging fraud and misconduct, Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kenny ruled that, “it would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this court to stop the certification process of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers,” adding that “Plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” The same suit was taken to a federal court under a new title where Trump’s team ended up dropping legal action after a lawyer for the city of Detroit suggested that the president’s campaign was seeking “to try the same case in multiple courtrooms hoping that somebody will provide an endorsement of their baseless conspiracy theories.”

Also in Michigan, four voters sought exclusion of all votes cast in three counties on allegations of fraud and irregularities. They did this with no corroboration, claiming officials had counted the ballots of ineligible voters and citing unverified reports of software glitches and dead people voting that had appeared on Fox News. The suit was later dropped.

A suit regarding the Detroit vote that was only cosmetically different from the one thrown out of court by Judge Kenny and later dropped by a federal court was filed again in yet another court, but was dropped by the plaintiffs themselves only a few days after filing.

When Michigan swung hard toward Biden, a desperate Trump campaign team again tried to halt the count, this time presenting an affidavit from one poll-watcher who said that another poll-watcher (whom she refused to name) told her that she had been told by unnamed poll workers to change the date received on a ballot.

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens interpreted the so-called affidavit as “I heard someone else say something.” Addressing the plaintiff, she said, “Tell me how that is not hearsay. Come on now!”

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign sought to block certification of voting due to minor errors in otherwise properly signed and cast absentee, mail-in and other ballots. Common Pleas Court Judge James Crumlish denied the viability of any of the claims.

Four Pennsylvania voters later sought to block all votes from four counties alleging violation of the right to equal protection due to different absentee balloting practices from one county to the next. Shortly afterward, seeing the hopelessness of the claim, the Trump team decided to request withdrawal of the suit. The court dropped it and three more similar cases from the docket.

In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the Trump team sought to block the counting of six hundred mail-in votes because the Election Board had notified the voters that they had forgotten to fill in missing information on their ballot envelopes. When the attorney for the plaintiff was asked by the judge if any of the errors involved fraud, he admitted that they didn’t. Judge Richard Haaz disallowed the petition to annul the ballots saying, “Voters should not be disenfranchised by reasonably relying upon voting instructions provided by election officials which are consistent with the Election Code.”

These are just a few examples of the similar fates of all of some thirty court filings on behalf of Trump since Election Day. Perhaps the most humiliating was when Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, a supposed legal eagle who hasn’t actually practiced law in decades but is reported to be pulling down twenty thousand dollars a day in Trump-campaign-paid legal fees was chided by a federal judge for the suit he filed last week in Pennsylvania.

District Court Judge Matthew W. Brann, who heard Giuliani’s argument, said that what Trump’s lawyer had presented to the court was “strained legal arguments without merit and (with) speculative accusations.” The judge indicated that what Giuliani filed wasn’t tied to the actual complaint or supported by any evidence.

“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth-most-populated state. Our people, laws and institutions demand more,” the judge concluded.

Suffice this sampling of the Trump campaign’s exercising of its legal right to date to conclude that while legal, what the president is doing is less than legitimate. The pathetic nature of the filings up to now appears to be nothing more than a smokescreen for the election loss and, worse still, a ruse to create “dozens of court cases” questioning the results, even if those cases are quickly and unceremoniously dropped by the Trump team, in order to create a superficial climate of doubt regarding the election results and the clear legitimacy of President-elect Biden’s win. At last count, although many results still require final certification, Biden had a 5.98 million popular vote lead over Trump and is expected to command a more than seventy-vote lead over Trump in the Electoral College. Given the anemic performance of the Trump campaign’s legal team to date—it’s hard to see how they might have some ace up their sleeve when they’ve failed so miserably to produce any compelling evidence in court up to the present—those results are unlikely to change significantly, if at all, in favor of the incumbent.

The only conclusion, then, is that Trump’s entire strategy—such as it is—in refusing to do what every other president in living memory has done for the good of the Union and concede, is to sow discord, to undermine faith in the system, to basically slash and burn democracy so that if it doesn’t conform to his ambitions it will no longer be viable for his successors and will leave them with an ungovernable population.

These are the tenets of fascism. To scratch, claw and bite one’s way like a rat to the top of a personality cult that rewards dictatorial charisma over democratic vigor and that prefers blind loyalty to individuality and the dictates of a populist mob to respect for civil rights.

Already in Georgia this week—where the Republican governor and secretary of state have done the right thing by placing party beneath country and by not only ensuring an absolutely transparent election but also by certifying the results after a machine count and a hand count—pro-Trump protesters took to the streets to object to the clearly fair outcome. They declared themselves “the new Republicans” and dubbed “traitors” the governor, the secretary of state and a handful of other Republicans who have suggested it’s time for the president to concede and open the way to transition.

As the final results are confirmed and certified, it is likely that this kind of unrest could become much wider spread and perhaps more violent, since Trump’s disregard for democracy and his efforts to cast doubt on what one of his own appointed—and subsequently fired—Homeland Security officials called “the most secure election in history”, have “succeeded” in creating the perception among an estimated seventy percent of Republicans that they have been cheated and that the election has been stolen from them. It seems, from my experience, to be futile to ask any of these election deniers why on earth, if the Democrats really did “throw” the election, they would have permitted the GOP to do so incredibly well in the House, where the party gained numerous seats, or in the Senate, where control has come down to the fate of two run-off elections in a single state. They simply glaze over and repeat the litany that Trump was cheated, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Having resisted and survived dictatorial rule elsewhere in the world, I am disheartened and gravely concerned about the trend that Donald Trump’s four years in office have wrought in my native US. Polarization of rival parties, the prioritizing of dogma over truth, the successful impact of institutionalized lies and propaganda on the thinking of an enormous proportion of the population and the elevation of a sociopathic and narcissistic personality to Pope-like levels of popularity based on such critically destructive ideologies as racism, xenophobia, ultra-nationalism and hatred of “the other”.

I return often to the question that I have heard Americans ask time and again: How could a country like Germany ever have fallen under the spell of a dictator like Hitler? All I can do is point to what is happening right now and say that history repeats itself.

The conservatives who helped bring Hitler to power by largely “democratic” means, never believed that he would be able to use the clout that they had bestowed on him as chancellor to later create a single-party dictatorship. But the echoes of the past are there when, going into this election, we heard Trump repeatedly say that the only way he could lose was if there was fraud. Just as German conservatives fancied that they could “control” Hitler and “tame” his Nazi followers, so too the GOP thought that they could control Trump and his followers. Instead, their party has been usurped and is now the party of Trump and they are being held hostage by Trump’s base, which they so fear losing that they are willing to try and help them subvert democracy by continuing to deny the indisputable facts of this month’s election.

German journalist Theodor Wolff wrote in the Frankfurter Zeitung shortly after the Nazis won power in the country’s parliament that there was nothing to fear from Hitler. Although Hitler would surely fight the left tooth and nail and although it was true that he was backed by a virulent and violent base, there was "a barrier, over which violence cannot proceed" in Germany. Germany, he claimed, was a nation that was too “proud of its freedom of speech and thought” to allow itself to live under tyranny.

The right was sure it could control Hitler

In January of 1933, Wolff wrote: “It is a hopeless misjudgment to think that one could force a dictatorial regime upon the German nation. [...] The diversity of the German people calls for democracy.”

It is truly hard to watch what is happening in the US right now and not be reminded of this. Although democracy has apparently willed out, make no mistake that if Trump and many of his followers could overturn this free and fair election by whatever means necessary and with total disregard for democracy, they almost undoubtedly would.

What happens over the next four years after the worrying events of the last four will be of capital importance in determining the survival of American democracy. To paraphrase Theodor Wolff, will “the diversity of the American people (continue to) call for democracy?”

We shall see.