Like millions of other Americans, I cannot get Donald Trump out of my brain. Not this weekend, at any rate. I sit down with family. We chat. We watch a show. As soon as it is paused, my look glazes over. My consciousness is instantly invaded once more by the man in the White House. I am wracked over again with loathing. Every second I do not keep up the stream of intentional distraction—the instant I turn off the spigot—the orange goblin comes stomping back in. What's going to happen on Tuesday? I think. What tricks is he going to pull? I am like Brecht in his incongruous California exile, wishing he could write of trees, but finding instead that his mind is full at every turn of "horror at the housepainter's speeches." (Kuhn/Constantine trans.)
All of this is made much worse, of course, by the fact that I know I ought to be thinking about nothing else. A society with two hundred plus years of democratic elections and peaceful transfers of power experiencing one of its most perilous, hair-raising moments—what exactly should a citizen be thinking about every second of the day, a few days before an election, apart from this? Thus, this particular obsession and rumination is harder to dismiss than the average debilitating panic. One cannot so easily write it off as unhealthy. It might very well be unhealthy: indeed, I'm sure it is. But it seems nonetheless obligatory.
How many of us, when we were growing up, played the "what would would I do if it happened here?" game? What would we do if confronted with political evil? And here we are, faced with it. All our training told us what we are supposed to do, as good citizens and moral people: Confront it! Don't turn away! Stay informed! Speak out! Don't fall silent! Don't be complicit! These injunctions rained upon us as children, reinforced by a thousand stories of political virtue drawn from the lives of the great advocates and freedom fighters.
So, when a demagogue surges to power through a U.S. election, we think we know what to do in order to wage spiritual warfare. We are prepared. We follow the news. We march in the streets. We get arrested in nonviolent direct action. We write op-eds. We raise our voice. We contact our members of Congress. We march again. We rally in front of the White House. We protest and protest and protest.
And it feels, once we have done all these things, that nothing has changed. We did as we were told. And it is not clear it made the least difference. This perhaps is the worst thing about corruption and autocracy in the twenty-first century. It may be less bloody than it was in the twentieth. It may not suppress and repress opposition so directly. But perhaps it has learned an in some ways even more devastating lesson: that the voices of dissent can simply be ignored. In an op-ed from this summer by one of the founders of Pussy Riot, this vocal critic of Vladimir Putin writes that his regime did not grow in power because no one condemned it. People did. And do. It just wasn't enough.
Reckoning with this mood I turned to one of the few books that could capture it fully—Nicholson Baker's 2004 squib, Checkpoint, which has sat upon my shelf for a while as if waiting for this moment. Baker's short novel (novella? closet drama?) promised to serve for me two seemingly contradictory purposes—on the one hand, drawing me deeper into our historical moment, while also providing some perspective upon it, from a distance. It was, after all, written in another election year. One that occurred sixteen years ago, of course, but that bears some eery similarities to our own: a Republican incumbent is up for re-election, after losing the popular vote the first time around, and seems to be unravelling the rule of law in unprecedented ways.
Baker's book is a novel of deeply unhealthy political obsession and of the feeling of raw impotence. Like all of us, one of the two characters in the dialogue Baker constructs has in fact done his duty as a citizen. He has marched, he has spoken out, he has kept himself informed; and it has only deepened his despair. He has a beautiful and uplifting experience marching on the White House, he tells us, to protest the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and subsequent mass bombing. But then he wakes up the next morning and the bombs are still falling. People are still dying. What, he asks, was the point? How many of us could say something similar of a late-night sprint we made to an airport to protest Trump's Muslim Ban, a time we joined the local Women's March, or a rally we attended to protest family separation?
To the Baker character's despair and rage, his more reasonable friend counterposes some eternally valid arguments against fighting evil with evil. The attempt to justify harmful measures as somehow ultimately necessary for the "greater good" implies a perfect knowledge of consequences that none of us can ever truly possess. The use of violent means only sets in motion a cycle of retaliation and reprisals. People, even odious people in power, are still human beings with rights. Two wrongs don't cancel each other out. You don't want to create a martyr. And so on.
This second, more reasonable friend, is obviously correct. He wins the moral argument in the end, as he should. But we can't help but put ourselves in the place of his raging and anguished companion. Even the imagined 2004 conversations about Bush are so reminiscent of our own:
Of course he's not as bad as Hitler, says this character, But we've reached a point beyond the normal—We've reached a point of intolerability. And he's escalating. And we've got these new scandals just popping up like daisies. What year was this written? Which president are we talking about? I haven't felt this way about any of the other ones. Not Nixon, not Bonzo even, he says earlier on. Yes, we think! Yes, that's exactly how it is.
We can eminently relate to this character—so long as we imagine, that is, for an instant, that he is talking about us. That he is speaking of our era, and our current problem in the White House. As soon as we remember that he is actually talking about George W. Bush, the feeling evaporates. All at once, Baker's case seems a bit overblown. I recall having the same sensation when I read Joyce Carol Oates' 1992 book Black Water. "Wow..." I remember thinking, "she really felt this strongly about the election of George H.W. Bush?" The sentiment is hard to recapture. Both Bushes seem anodyne compared to what he have to contend with now—with the first one especially seeming so far from heinous as to be forgettable.
Of course, we are aware of the moral facts. We know that George W. Bush bequeathed to us atrocious wars in the Middle East that have had devastating consequences for human societies there up until today; that he filled Guantanamo Bay with people who have still not been released two decades later; that he signed off on torture and extraordinary rendition and created instruments of quasi-legal repression and detention the full scope of which is still becoming clear only today. Baker was right to be aghast; just as Oates was no less justified in feeling horror at Republicans' use of racist scaremongering and dog whistles in the 1988 election.
And yet, righteous as both authors' rage was, justified as their fear might have seemed at the time, we cannot quite relate to it now... because we know how it all turned out. We recognize that yes, both these prior presidents did awful things, but their time in office eventually passed nonetheless. There were other elections to come. There was a peaceful transfer of power. This is what the reasonable friend in Baker's novel says to reassure our troubled ranter and raver: he urges him to remember that Bush too will eventually be replaced. If not in the 2004 election (in which, of course, he wasn't), then four years after that. "He will have a successor," he tells his friend.
Perhaps, therefore, we can learn from these characters' example. We can allow ourselves some slackening of the guard, some respite from the constant inner vigil, knowing that whatever happens on November 3, Trump will eventually be out of the White House.
But here is precisely where we are convinced that we have it worse than they did; that the writers of previous presidential election seasons were alarmist chicken littles who had experienced nothing compared to the dangers we face.
The two Bushes, after all, for all their faults, did not do what Trump does seemingly every other day: they did not float delaying an election; they did not propagate Putin-backed disinformation impugning the integrity of the vote and depicting absentee ballots as a tactic to rig the election; they did not openly indicate that they would try to punt the election to a conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court. The knowledge of the eventual peaceful change of power, the fact that one day there would indeed be a "successor"—this comforting mantra that Baker's character tells himself and his friend—is precisely what is denied to us by our current president.
Surely, then, there is no comparison! We are in new and treacherous waters, and the past can be no guide to us. We are adrift on the dark sea of an unknowable future! And therefore, no, we cannot let up with our inner obsession! We cannot relax the discipline of thought! We must continue to ruminate over Trump!
But, then, none of those people back in the Bush I or Bush II presidencies knew what the future would hold either. They could have told themselves stories about future presidencies, but the actions of the Ashcroft Justice Department and the passage of the Patriot Act could surely have been used to stir no less genuine and justified fears about the future of liberal democracy in this country. It wouldn't have been so clear to people at the time that our institutions would survive, that we were perhaps not yet quite in the teeth of an existential threat to our Constitutional order.
It only seems so obvious to us now that they were not in such a position because the facts of history are always inevitable—once they have happened, that is. Then, they can no longer be otherwise. But to the people going through them, they are still fully contingent.
And so we can assert this at least with certainty: whatever happens on November 3, it will seem to future generations just as inevitable as the events of past presidencies now seem to us. It was thus and could not have been otherwise.
And it is possible—though only still just possible—that it will seem to people in the future that things turned out far better than we expected; just as democracy survived somewhat more intact than Baker seemed to think it would as of his writing in 2004. And maybe too, blog posts like this one will seem sixteen years from now just as alarmist, obsessed, and overstated as Baker's and Oates' books seem to us in 2020. Although I sincerely hope that this reaction will not be accompanied by the thought—on the part of the people of 2036—"boy, those 2020 folks thought their Republicans were bad? They hadn't seen anything yet!"
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