This weekend's postcard, and a wake up call from Heather Cox Richardson

November 4, 2023

Upper Palouse Falls in northeast Franklin County

In 1961 we were living in the rain forest town of Gamboa where the Connors had lived for over a decade, doing work for the Panama Canal Company. On a September evening my father took me on a train to Balboa, near Panama City, to watch a football game under the lights at Balboa Stadium. Of this I have a vivid memory. There was an ROTC color guard and a band, and the band played the national anthem.

That was the night it dawned on me that I was an American. I’ve worn that identity ever since, even on days when it’s been hard to wear. But it’s only been in the past week or so where I’ve felt deeply challenged to face up to the fragility of the American project as I’ve understood it—built upon a reliable though imperfect bedrock of human rights and self-governance.

I wonder and worry about what it would be like if “we” devolve any further into a democracy in name only. We are used to the pendulum swing of power shifting between the two major parties in large part because both parties accepted the will of the voters. But this is no longer true. The core of the Republican Party is now defined by its allegiance to Donald Trump and the fiction* that the 2020 Presidential was stolen by voter fraud. It’s an argument both for restoring Trump to the White House and revamping norms and institutions so that minority rule becomes the reliable norm.

*I’m not going to spend much time here. Even William Barr—Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General to bury the Mueller investigation—has vehemently dismissed Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election as “bullshit.”

I have every right to be worried, and you should be too.

For starters, the Trump base is essentially unreachable. Trump was right when he boasted, in early 2016, that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

I’ll admit I don’t completely understand why so many millions of American voters have fallen for Trump’s “I alone can fix it” nonsense when the fluorescent evidence of his life and business career illuminates a demonstrably fraudulent con game. Perhaps the simple answer is Trump loyalists watched The Apprentice while I was watching the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. But the better answer is it just doesn’t matter. The Trump movement is a cult of personality, and the rules of reason and logic simply don’t apply.

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