It is 2:28 am on election night 2024. I very rarely write about historical events in real time, but my essay penned the night of September 11, 2001 stands out in memory. It was entitled "A Hard Rain". I quoted Dylan in it: "I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,/And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,/ And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall". It concludes: "What happens next I don't really know, but I know what I fear: that we will embark ....on a mindless spasm of killing and counter-killing; that civil liberties and freedom of speech will be curtailed; that the president,"-- Bush Jr.--"with his powerful backers, his deer-in-the-headlights look and his primitive philosophy, will not see the line before crossing it, or won't care....I tried to read the morning newspaper this afternoon, but the pre-bombing news seemed irrelevant, like news from twenty years ago".
I sensed but did not clearly see that the denouement might be very far out in the dim future-- and it is, as the events of tonight are the culmination: just more than twenty-three years later. One of the many linkages has been the fad for material support prosecutions, which started right after and are again gaining momentum today. I frequently (Bragging Alert) read old phrases of mine and find them prescient*; Trump is the powerful, mean iteration of bewildered George W. Bush; Bush was in fact a prototype of the Trumpoid Object, the stupid, manipulable President-- this one without a Dick Cheney to govern him (yes, he is "Dick-less"). Trump's standard glower-- which I assume is practiced, not simply the way his face looks in repose-- is actually a variation of "deer in the headlights". Trump too has a primitive philosophy and a complete inability to see moral lines. Trump is in fact the Super-Bush.
I just threw out yesterday's untouched New York Times.
The most important thing that I want to tell you, what I have in the title called "the take away", is, however, that American democracy-- which I believe is done, chingada, completely hosed-- did not end because Donald Trump surged up. It ended because more than half of the voting population was unable to detect that Trump is crazy, violent, stupid and a liar. That was not an accident or a Glitch, but the result of two hundred and twenty-four years of a party system, in which, in order to win votes, it was easier and more convenient to create a Stupid Voter than to trust an educated one. We all, in different ways, share complete agency and responsibility for this. Democracy wasn't hijacked or stolen; it has failed for lack of maintenance. A few times in every century, people vote their freedom away; Weimar Germany is a prominent example, but there have been many others. Here is one of those random phrases which jump off the page and hang in my brain for years, from a nineteenth century introduction to Milton's free speech essay, "Areopagitica": “[E]ven democracies are a great while in finding out that everything may be left to the instincts of a free people except those instincts themselves".
* For an even better example, see "Democracy and Stupidity", the August 2000 essay linked in the "Blast From the Past" section on the top page.