The Fight of Our Lives: Thoughts on the Existential Crisis of our Moment
Coverage of politics is frustratingly myopic and obscures the larger questions we must answer
Every time I have to write or talk about Donald Trump, I feel nauseous. It isn’t so much that he is repellent - and he most certainly is - but that what he represents, as a human being, as a political figure, as a threat to democracy and decency, is a continual reminder of where we are and where we are presently heading.
On The Muckrake Podcast this week we covered Bob Woodward’s revelations that, in addition to providing Russia with COVID testing machines while he maintained the pandemic was “a hoax,” Trump has kept in continual contact with dictator Vladimir Putin. And, as I was detailing the parallel and intersecting ideologies of the Russian and American Right, I was stunned by a cold feeling that had settled in. It didn’t matter. At all. It wouldn’t change the 2024 Presidential Election. It would be a small blip in the news cycle and, by the evening, it would be replaced by whatever absolutely vile thing Trump would say at a rally or in an interview.
Like so much of what Trump has done and said, it should have been disqualifying. It should have been a moment of self-reflection within the electorate and the Republican Party as a whole. And it wasn’t. At all.
My work, for the past nine years, has been focused on America’s slide into authoritarianism. To effectively cover and explain this, I have highlighted captured moments to illustrate how Trump and Republican’s rhetoric, posturing, and usage of oligarchically-designed conspiracy theories has changed our politics and culture. In doing so, I have tried to present narratives incorporating history to show not just how this works, but how it is part of a long, long cycle that predated Trump and even the GOP. To this end, I traced the usage of conspiracy theories and religious ideology in protecting and expanding the power of the wealthy, winding through history from the Fall of Rome through the Feudal Era, and mapped how the construction of liberalism and capitalism brought us here.
It is expansive and exhausting work, but something that often gets lost in that work is a much more pressing matter.
Authoritarianism is a disease of the human heart.