trump

We need to prepare for what comes next, which is the shame.

We can learn from the hard lessons of post World War 2 Germany, post Apartheid South Africa, and other nations that have faced their shame.

But the odds are we won’t. Much of our country still hasn’t faced the shame of the Confederacy, more than a century and a half after it was defeated — militarily, but not culturally. Instead of acknowledging slavery and Jim Crow, many Americans still live within the romantic fantasy of the Lost Cause, like post World War 1 Germans lived within the fantasy of having been “stabbed in the back” by Jews and socialists.

Many of the Capitol Hill rioters carried Confederate flags, still bearing the shame their culture has never faced.

Much of Trump’s appeal is that he promises relief from shame for people who see themselves as losers in a game they believe (with some justification) is rigged. Part of it is also solidarity: he himself is clearly afflicted with shame, apparently passed down to him by his father.

Shame is one of the most painful emotions we have, and we instinctively deny it — or try to put it on someone else. That’s the service Trump has offered by making scapegoats of minorities, foreigners, “elites,” and others — potentially all “others.” And he’ll offer it again as, inevitably, many of his followers turn on him and make him the scapegoat.

Remember, in its original meaning a “scapegoat” was a goat into which the sins of the people had been cast, like demons, to be sent then into the wilderness.

But with shame the only way forward is right here, through the pain — for the person feeling it. It won’t work for others to cast it, strong as the urge to do that will be. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be clear that great wrongs have been done, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold to account those who could and should have known better. Shame must be faced and accepted all around.

The way to defeat the demons is to see, name and overcome them, not to help them hide by shrinking them down to the size of individual scapegoats.

Otherwise the demons just keep coming back, like they did at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Those rioters with Confederate flags and MAGA hats were idiots and thugs, but they weren’t demons. The demons were, and are, the fear, ignorance, bigotry, and hatred exploited by Trump and his enablers in politics and media.

I’ve studied conservatism for years and I think I understand it better than many of my fellow liberals do, and certainly a lot better than I used to. So I know just how wrong it is for “conservatives” to defend the use of violence against a democratically elected government by claiming to be patriots acting in the spirit of the American Revolution. They show that they understand neither conservatism, patriotism, nor the Revolution.

The justification for the Revolution was that there was no democracy. The point of democracy was to make political violence unnecessary — and therefore, political violence became unjustified.

That’s the difference between the American Revolution and Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Confederate rebellion that started the Civil War. Those who took up arms in the latter three were not fighting for freedom, they were fighting against democracy.

That’s why the Revolutionary firebrand Samuel Adams, who might have been expected to sympathize with the Shays rebels, instead said they should be executed: because they had used weapons instead of the readily available democratic tools of peaceful organizing and the vote.

George Washington was more temperate, but also saw Shays’ rebellion as a serious threat to democracy. He wrote this in a letter to Henry Lee (a Revolutionary War veteran and the father of Robert E. Lee):

“You talk, my good sir, of employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or, if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is not government. Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.”

As President, Washington led troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

And Abraham Lincoln, of course, knew he had no choice but to stop the Confederate rebellion. His view of “mob law” was clear more than 30 years before. In his 1728 Lyceum address, Lincoln said this:

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide… There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.

Democracy made all of those uprisings not just unpatriotic, but anti-patriotic.

The Trumpist rebellion is in the same disgraceful tradition.

This is why despite all the political arguments that can readily be raised against it, Trump should be impeached, or otherwise removed from office. And his fellow seditionists like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and the rest, should face proceedings for censure, expulsion, disbarment, or whatever other remedies apply.

Even if all such efforts fail, if we believe in democracy, we’re called to defend it when that matters, not just when it’s easy.