Talking Our Extinction to Death

 Over at my other blog—which tends to be more professionally geared—I published a piece a week ago about how Trump's recent rhetoric has gotten even more overtly authoritarian than it was before. I compared his words against the rhetoric of fictional dictators from literature, to argue that Trump's speeches read like someone's parody of the "bad guy" from some hypothetical dystopian future. 

I don't claim the point was original. But it was impassioned. It was witty. At some level, I feel it was the best thing I ever wrote on that blog. 

And yet, it was greeted by... crickets. It got no engagement at all—even by my limited standards. Even my parents skipped it. What gives? How is it that the best thing I ever wrote—on a topic of such immediate and desperate relevance to our times—sparked no one's interest whatsoever? 

Of course, I know the reason. We're sick of words. We're tired of this whole topic. As Robert Lowell put it, in a poem about nuclear war from the 1960s, "we have talked our extinction to death." People know, at this point, that Trump is a fascist. They know the danger he poses to our democracy and our way of life. So people say: "what else is new? We know all this already!" 

I whined to a friend, shortly after publishing the piece, that no one was opening it. He dutifully agreed to at least glance at it. But when he did so, he got no further than the headline. "Trump has gotten even more authoritarian... blah blah blah," he said. "There's your answer right there," he said. "This is boring. Tell me something I don't know!" 

For weeks, liberal commentators have been wondering—when are people going to wake up? When are they going to start talking about this election with the urgency it deserves? When is someone going to point out that we are now just days away from potentially electing a would-be autocrat, whose own former high-level officials have described as a "fascist" who has nothing but contempt for our constitutional order?

Jamelle Bouie, in a powerful recent column, criticized the media for defaulting to its usual script for an election year (talking about "closing arguments from the candidates," etc.), and thereby failing to acknowledge that we are living through something unprecedented. 

Michael Tomasky similarly argued that the media in the last few days before the election needs to finally figure out how to name the fact that Trump's words and plans are a moral abomination—far outside of the norms and guardrails of a conventional American election. 

Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, chronicles his own efforts to somehow find the words to capture the sheer madness of our political moment. "We are running out of days," he says, "to write the headlines and clang the pots and pans about the biggest story of our time — a 50-50 dice roll on the end of true democracy — and we may spend decades asking ourselves why we didn’t."

All of these commentators are getting at the same feeling. Something bizarre and horrifying is happening to us. And yet, it seems like our public discourse has not caught up to the magnitude of the situation. Our language is lagging behind the severity of the problem. We need to find new ways to say it, before it is too late. 

But it's possible that the opposite is the case. It may not be the case, that is, that the media needs to find the right words for this moment. It may be that we've already said all the words that could possibly be said about this. We've exhausted the words. We've "talked our extinction to death." 

This is how I feel about it. I feel, at some level, that I already shot my bolt eight years ago on the rhetoric of dire warning. The last time Trump was running for election, after all, I had already quoted Robert Lowell—from a different part of the same poem. After Trump won the primaries for the 2016 election, I had a sudden realization that he could actually make it to the White House. 

In the desperate vulnerability and fear of that moment, Lowell's words came back to me (as I remembered them): "A father is no shelter for his child. We are like two wild spiders crying together/ But without tears." 

Now, here we are again, eight years later. Trump is once again within a coin-toss's chance of becoming president. And this time, he poses an even greater danger to our institutions—for all the reasons that other writers have already detailed at length (yet another way in which we've already been over all this). But this time, I'm all out of poems. I've run out of rhetoric. We've talked our extinction to death. 

And so, all I can do is repeat myself. All I can do is say: "don't do it, America. Do not go gently into that bad night. Don't sleepwalk into catastrophe. Pay attention! Wake up! Save your democracy before it's too late!"

But I've already said this before—time and again. And even if it felt very much like people were still sleepwalking into catastrophe in the spring—people were still refusing to take seriously the possibility that Trump could win this election—it may be that this is no longer the case. It may be that Tomasky, Bunch, and Bouie are all wrong. It's not that people don't realize what's happening. They may realize it all too well. It's just—they have nothing else to say about it. 

We all know now that Trump is a fascist. Even John Kelly—Trump's own former chief of staff and head of Trump's Department of Homeland Security—says he is a fascist who does not believe in the Constitution. We know all of this! As my friend said: "Tell me something I don't know." 

We have talked our extinction to death.