I know how Angela Merkel feels:
Ms. Merkel, who is balancing the imperatives of preserving the alliance with the United States and sustaining her re-election effort, took stock at a beer tent stop in Munich on Sunday.
“The times in which we could rely fully on others, they are somewhat over,” she said, according to German news media. “This is what I experienced in the last few days.”
Perhaps she is talking about the American elites who wield power in Washington DC and set policies and coordinate efforts with Europe. I’m talking about my fellow American citizens and the American system for establishing how power will be shared.
I’m willing to continue fighting in the political trenches according to whatever rules exist rather that the rules that used to exist or that I might wish to exist. But I’m getting to the point where I can’t make a very good case for others to do the same based on faith that they can rely on this to yield results.
Some things are still working. The Courts have been sending brushback pitches at both the Trump administration and the Republican Party (see North Carolina, for example). But the primary battle going on right now is between an intelligence/defense establishment and the sitting administration where it’s clear that the results of the election are in the process of being overturned (if they can be). This may be an easy battle in which to chose sides in one sense. The Trump administration is lawless, corrupt, unreliable, and incompetent enough to pose a threat to humanity, and that’s not hyperbole. But the system isn’t working when we have to rely on undemocratic forces to defend democracy from the consequences of elections.
People are going to lose faith in our system on all sides. On the Trump-supporting right, they’re going to see his removal from office as essentially a coup engineered by the Deep State, media, globalists, Obama stay-behinds, and weak Republicans who won’t fight. On the left, the continuing inability to win political power commensurate with their numbers will eventually cause more and more to seek remedies outside of any kind of civil process based on law and precedent.
This is all a recipe for a breakdown in order and for our systems for political accountability and the peaceful transfer of power. We’re already far enough along this road that a lot of people are beginning to conclude that the system is broken not only beyond repair but beyond having any moral claim to deserve repair. Maybe it’s better to work to accelerate its demise than to try to shore up an edifice that is beyond hope. Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of this is when it is applied not to the media or our elites but to the people themselves. Once you lose faith in the quality of our people, pretty much everything else collapses. We can perhaps devise new systems, but any system that isn’t premised on the will of the people won’t be a system worth having.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll keep fighting but I can’t say it’s going to work. I know some things that will make it less likely to work, and one of them is for left to respond to the dehumanizing language from the right with dehumanizing language of our own. We have enough problems and obstacles without adding to the sentiment that our people aren’t worth a damn and that their political opinions are so illegitimate that we can’t engage with them.
The last faith we can afford to lose is our faith in our people.
