The headline for a New York Times op-ed piece: “There is No Happy Ending to America’s Trump Problem.” Stop the presses! Fixing the biggest mistake in U.S. history will not be easy or painless! Who’d’a thunk?
The task at hand is equally obvious: find the right bad ending, which will be anything that keeps Trump away from the Oval Office. (What makes it “bad” in the hand-wringers’ minds is the “damage” it will do to our longstanding political “traditions”—the unwritten rules that the Grifter in Chief has shredded and flushed already.) Yes, there is a chance the “bad choice” chosen will actually enhance the MAGA brand rather than damage it in the glazed eyes of Trump’s most addled followers. But it may also isolate them to irrelevance. It may give more ammo to his morally debased GOP acolytes in elected office and in the media. But it may also be the jab that bursts the Trumpian boil.
In any case, it’s Pick Your Poison time, America.
Jamelle Bouie, who persistently brings history to bear on the present in the most enlightening ways, points out another time the risk-averse counseled inaction so as not to fan the flames of discord.
National politics in the 1870s was consumed with the question of how much to respond to vigilante lawlessness, discrimination and political violence in the postwar South. Northern opponents of federal and congressional intervention made familiar arguments.
If Republicans, The New York Times argued in 1874, “set aside the necessity of direct authority from the Constitution” to pursue their aims in the South and elsewhere, could they then “expect the Democrats, if they should gain the power, to let the Constitution prevent them from helping their ancient and present friends?”
Depiction of Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina in 1870, based on a photograph taken under the supervision of a federal officer who seized Klan costumes. (Wikipedia)
The better approach, The Times said in an earlier editorial, was to let time do its work. “The law has clothed the colored man with all the attributes of citizenship. It has secured him equality before the law, and invested him with the ballot.” But here, wrote the editors, “the province of law will end. All else must be left to the operation of causes more potent than law, and wholly beyond its reach.” His old oppressors in the South, they added, “rest their only hope of party success upon their ability to obtain his goodwill.”
To act affirmatively would create unrest. Instead, the country should let politics and time do their work. The problems would resolve themselves, and Americans would enjoy a measure of social peace as a result.
Of course, that is not what happened. In the face of lawlessness, inaction led to impunity, and impunity led to a successful movement to turn back the clock on progress as far as possible, by any means possible.
Our experience, as Americans, tells us that there is a clear point at which we must act in the face of corruption, lawlessness and contempt for the very foundations of democratic society. The only way out is through. Fear of what Trump and his supports might do cannot and should not stand in the way of what we must do to secure the Constitution from all its enemies, foreign and domestic.
