“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
I’ve always preached to my students that every American generation bears the solemn responsibility to pass along to its children the democratic republic it inherited. My sermon text is the charge to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” that you’ll find in the preamble to the Constitution.
Every year I’ve confessed my fear that my keenly self-absorbed generation has done a poor job safeguarding those blessings. I’ve concluded by beseeching my students to do better.
I was always in earnest, but as sincere as I was, and as much as I recognized the threat posed by Americans’ mounting complacency and narcissism, I regarded the rise and triumph of tyranny here in the “last best hope of earth” as hypothetical, and my words more an academic caution than a dire warning.
I was wrong.
I never imagined, either growing up or teaching history, that I’d live to see Hitler’s “big lie” become a regular feature of American governance. Hitler told his supporters big lies because he recognized that most decent, ordinary people are easy prey to “colossal untruths” — like the lie that the election was stolen — because they simply can’t “believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
In short, Hitler’s Mein Kampf secret to successful, persuasive lying is to tell outrageous lies simply, shamelessly, often, and first.
Similarly, I’d read in Orwell’s “1984” that the injunction to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” is an autocrat’s “most essential command.” But I never expected to hear our 45th president echo Orwell’s fictional tyrant and tell the American people, “Just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
It’s not my intent here to litigate Donald Trump’s guilt, or the active aid and comfort provided by his sycophants and Republican cronies, or the complicit cowardice of silent Republicans. If you don’t see that guilt by now, either you haven’t seen and examined the evidence, or you’ve chosen not to believe your own eyes and ears.
The election wasn’t stolen. That’s not the testimony of Democrats alone, but also of Republican witnesses; not just of Never-Trumper Republicans, but also of Trump supporters and even Trump appointees, including judges, cabinet officers, and White House staffers. Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, testified that he told colleagues, investigators, and Trump himself that any claim the election was stolen is “bullshit.”
If you watched the Jan. 6 hearings on television, you heard him say it yourself.
We’ve always fallen short when it comes to our founding promise of equality, but we’ve never so precipitously regressed in our commitment to equal rights and equal justice. My mother and father’s “Greatest Generation,” the men and women who defeated Hitler, are passing into eternity as we, their descendants, embrace ever-bolder, increasingly violent public displays of white supremacy, including antisemitism. Armed militias, hostile to the Constitution, plot and parade while politicians raise clenched fists in sympathy.
In 1973, I heard John Dean’s warning that the Watergate corruption was a “cancer growing on the presidency” that would “kill” the president if it wasn’t “removed.” I watched for months as Nixon resigned and members of his administration, including his chief of staff, attorney general, numerous senior advisers, and Dean himself were sentenced to prison. Through all that, I never feared we’d lose our republic.
Now that fear weighs on me daily.
Alluding to John Dean’s Watergate warning, Rep. Adam Schiff characterized Donald Trump’s election lies as a “cancer on the body politic.” Our body politic is “we the people” and our constitutional government. That government, being an elected, representative self-government, relies for its life on its people’s confidence that elections are conducted honestly. Fraudulently discrediting those elections fatally undermines that necessary confidence. We can survive losing a president, but kill the body politic, and our republic is undone.
Some seditionists, including those in government, liken Jan. 6, 2021, to July 4, 1776. They contend that both days’ events constituted legitimate responses to “tyranny.” Except there’s a difference between rebelling against an unelected king and attacking a legislature that you helped elect.
To be clear, it isn’t tyranny just because your candidate loses.
Over the next two years we’ll face the usual menu of local and congressional elections, as well as a presidential election in 2024. Ordinarily, many of us base our votes on our political philosophy, party affiliation, or broad concerns like economics and foreign policy. Some of us instead are single-issue gun or climate voters. Others would use the next election, rightly or wrongly, to punish President Biden for the price of gasoline.
There will be nothing usual or ordinary about the next few election cycles. That’s why I’m setting aside my own causes and preferences, however dear they may be, and voting only for candidates, regardless of party, who publicly and explicitly concede that the 2020 election was free, fair and legitimate, that Joe Biden won, and that Donald Trump lost.
I encourage you to do the same.
No issue, cause, or political comfort matters more than the preservation of the republic.
In the closing months of the Revolution, while the treaty was negotiated, George Washington and the army were encamped north of New York City. The army hadn’t been paid, and Washington’s officers threatened to march on Philadelphia and overthrow Congress, with many intending to install Washington as their king.
Washington turned his back on their offer of royal power. He pleaded with them to oppose any man who urged the overthrow of the civil government, that “humanity revolts at the idea” that they would turn and take up arms against their country.
That is what happened on Jan. 6.
It is happening still. The demagogue the founders feared still plies his dark arts. He waits for the next election even as he plots to ignore the results if he loses again.
I was a boy when I first saw a newspaper photograph known as “The Weeping Frenchman.” Having been routed by the Nazi Wehrmacht in six weeks, France had surrendered. A battered remnant of the French army marched through Marseilles into exile. The weeping man is watching from the curbside.
He has lost his republic.
His grief is riveting.
It could soon be our grief, too.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: No issue matters more than the preservation of the republic.