We Took the Bullet

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as we drove back to our Goose Hollow neighborhood, my daughter, her then boyfriend (now husband), and I attempted to come to a coherent understanding of where the candidates stood. We had just eaten supper at a Caribbean bistro across town in North Portland, and were now scanning the horizon for rays of hope that might help calm our worries. Before dropping me off at my apartment, I tried to offer them some small comfort, saying “it looks like we’ll probably dodge a bullet this time” adding “but the Trumpism already unleashed may yet come back to bite us.” A few weeks later, as the results of the election sank in, that little cautionary aside — which seemed somewhat dour when voiced in the moment — looked optimistic in retrospect.

Eight years on, Trumpism has not only persisted, it has relentlessly metastasized. After losing the 2020 U.S. presidential contest, America’s Trumpist-in-Chief ceaselessly promoted big lie claims that the election was stolen, even as he tried to cling to power in a coup attempt. Immediately after the attempted insurrection, his abettors in Congress voted to overturn the election’s results, and thus the will of the electorate. During the four-year interregnum, plagued by the big lie crew’s ceaseless mendacity, the Dear Leader managed to evade its most serious legal challenges, and to even persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to grant it the impunity typically reserved only for holders of a get-out-of-jail-free card that never expires. In 2024, in an act of unfathomable stupidity, the Trumpist cult wing of the American electorate led the charge in returning their Dear Leader to power.

The Fascists Within

On an early December Sunday morning, I sat at the edge of a large room, chewing my way through a plate of home-cooked preparations originating from the kitchens of many fellow congregants who (unlike me) had faithfully contributed dishes to our church’s annual holiday potluck, which got underway immediately after the morning service. Not long after I started eating, one of the church’s two pastors came over to where I sat to check in on me. I had only begun attending the church a few months earlier, after my daughter suggested I make an effort to get more involved in the community. I noted that there was a church just a couple of blocks from my apartment building, and suggested that perhaps I could fulfill my community involvement obligations to her satisfaction by attending Sunday morning services there. Although not particularly religious, she approved immediately.

Pastor Mike had checked in to ask how I was recuperating from a recent cancer surgery. He was the first person to welcome me to the church on my first day there (pastor Ben extended his warm welcome a short while later), and had made a point of exchanging a few words with me each Sunday I showed up for morning service. I thanked him for his concern and complemented him on his thoughtful sermon before asking if I could voice a concern that weighed on me. Mike agreed to hear me out, and I asked him if he was aware of any local, regional or national discussions taking place among faith congregations over concerns about the fascism asserting itself throughout our society with evermore vigor.

Fascism in America, of course, is nothing new. The willingness of individuals or groups of people to exercise domination, control and violence over other humans appears as old as the species. At the founding of our republic in the late eighteenth century — and in the decades that immediately followed — justifications for systems of chattel slavery, as well as campaigns of extermination of whole groups of people living on the North American continent well before the arrival of the European newcomers, were part of a continuum already long established. America’s slave system was eventually abolished as a result of the outcome of the American Civil War. Extermination campaigns against the “first nations” inhabitants of the North American continent eventually wound down. Rights were slowly and haltingly extended to women, people of non-European ethnic origin, former slaves and their descendants, non-heterosexuals and non-binary folks, etc. With each extension of rights came serious backlash, and the potential for wholesale backsliding.

A Point of No Return?

In recent decades the sustained backlash to expanding rights in the United States has grown more focused and fervent. It has become increasingly apparent that one of the United States’ two political parties leads the way in the march towards illiberal democracy,¹ although Americans from the other major party also fail to demonstrate consistent fidelity to core democratic norms. The good news is that “the portion of the public who are consistently authoritarian” is relatively small.² When focusing on the American electorate’s reactionary extreme, however, antidemocratic tendencies are noticeably more pronounced among reactionary leadership.³ On the other hand, the electorate’s rank-and-file across the political spectrum appears less prone to reflexive and performative hypocrisy.⁴

I witnessed a gallows humor example of common-folk frankness shortly after an assassination attempt at an open-air campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania last summer. Liberal elites in news media and political offices across the land fell all over themselves to ostentatiously express their profound relief that the object of the assassin’s murderous desires emerged from the drama without much more than a nick on his ear and (ultimately) the election in the bag. A security guard outside my building, however, expressed a more honest sentiment by complaining about the shooter’s faulty aim. Instead, the shooter’s errant bullet tragically slaughtered an innocent rally participant, and culminated in the would-be assassin’s apparent desire to go out in a glorified suicide by cop. True to form, leading reactionaries quickly accused leading Democrats of ordering the assassination. The assassin himself, however, was a registered Republican who expressed apparent “antisemitic and anti-immigrant themes” and “political violence” on his social media accounts.

Just so there is no misunderstanding, this blog’s unequivocal stance is an absolutist commitment to the Ten Commandments’ “thou shalt not kill” clause.

As an empire fades, or a democracy backslides, or a nation begins sliding into fascism, there inevitably comes a point from which the possibility of turning back is foreclosed. A former U.S. president who lost his first bid for reelection — then refused to accept the result, even to the point of fomenting an insurrection — was recently reelected to the presidency. But before he got that third chance, he was impeached twice, criminally indicted four times, criminally convicted once (so far), was found liable for sexual abuse, and was held liable in a major business fraud lawsuit. He used language against his perceived enemies that echoed language used by the 20th Century’s worst monsters.

By contrast, his opponent was the first-generation daughter of talented and hard-working immigrants who channeled her ambition with focused determination to achieve notable career successes in her own right, including posts as an Attorney General of California, a U.S. Senator from California, and Vice President of the United States. And yet, we the electorate, thrashing madly in the middle of our boundless ocean of stupidity, found a way to make exactly the wrong choice.

What explains an electorate that brandishes such catastrophically bad judgement? There are an almost infinite number of directions we can point to in our search for someone or something to blame. But for starters, modern humans are under tremendous pressure. Those of us who live in rich countries and have relatively stable incomes may have the ability to pay for food and shelter, but we also face an ever-present torrent of assaults on our capacity for getting through each day without having to slog through a blizzard of lies, distortions, distractions, fraudulent sales pitches, and an almost limitless array of additional potential harms to our person — physical, spiritual, psychic, and otherwise. And God help us if we have to withstand all this punishment while scrambling to fund our basic requirements for daily living.