December 7, 1941. September 11, 2001. January 6, 2021. While all of these days live in infamy, only the most recent terrorist attack was incited by a president against his own country. Let us not greet the failed insurrection at the Capitol with smugness. There were those on the left who believed we could compromise with conspiracy theorists and appease a leader with authoritarian tendencies, but every rational thinker with a knowledge of history knows exactly where the appeasement of those who are hungry for power will lead. Apparently, his higher calling is to fan the flames of white supremacy and nativism with angry tweets. Even formerly moderate conservatives have become radicalized, with Politico reporting that 70% of Republican voters believe the November 2020 election was fraudulent, despite a mountain of proof that it was free and fair. “Damn the evidence,” they say, “We feel this way and we believe these things. We read a Facebook post and saw it on OANN. Google it. Don’t trust the Fake News!” But, the diminution of our nation started decades before Trump ascended to the presidency.
The unskeptical credulity that makes Trumpism possible extended its tentacle into my own family in October 1980; and, even though my current creative practice has come to center on mediated dialogues to foster mutual respect across ideological divides, sadly I long ago lost the will to engage meaningfully with some of my siblings. In this post, I’m weaving together memories of experiences with right-wing relatives and an analysis of our current political crisis. I’m the youngest of seven, the first to go to college, and I may be one of the few queer people my stepbrothers actually know, casual acquaintances notwithstanding. It’s not a coincidence that they nicknamed me Darlene when our parents married. I was 7 years old then, and I was not self-aware enough to understand things that my new stepbrothers seemed to intuit.
I remember one of the last times I had dinner with my stepbrother, Steve. We were in our late 20s, visiting for the holidays. He kept trying to draw me out with questions like, “Do you really think we evolved from monkeys, or can you admit we are made in the image of God?” to which I would claim an acute buildup of earwax, or any other excuse to ignore his gaslighting. But he was persistent. Kids who grow up together know how to push each other’s buttons, or at least he knew how to push mine, and after an hour of listening to him repeat the talking points of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Sean Hannity, I told him I’d had enough. Enough disrespect. Enough of being drawn out to express my values and beliefs, only to have everything I said litigated and rebutted with dizzying subject changes and false equivalencies. Our family is not particularly religious, but the cynical politics of the past half century have succeeded in making faith an article of politics, at least for those on the right. “The earth is basically round, regardless of what Fox News tells you to think,” I snapped.
Steve once asked me which profession I thought was most important. Without hesitation I replied, “Teachers, professors, instructors.” He remarked on how self-serving my answer was, and that was probably true, but who among us doesn’t hope that what they do for a living is meaningful? I wanted (I still want) to believe I’m making a difference, working for the greater good. “Don’t you think doctors and firemen are more important?” he asked. “How do doctors learn to practice medicine, and how do firefighters learn to put out fires?” I asked in return. He was surprised when I became a volunteer firefighter. “I didn’t think that was the kind of thing people like you believed in.” I had no idea what kind of people or belief systems he was talking about. I was living in a tiny hamlet in upstate New York. I had lived in Manhattan the previous year, and when a siren wailed past my house in Blue Mountain Lake one cold, autumn night it did not occur to me to go into the town center to see what was happening. As a lakeshore building burned — threatening the Arts Center where I worked, along with the rest of downtown — I was the only person who wasn’t involved in the effort to prevent the blaze from spreading. The next morning, with the smell of damp creosote and ashes hanging in the snowy air, a town elder stood in my office doorway with a cup of coffee, leaned against the doorframe and asked, “So, where were you last night?” I joined the fire department that day, not because I particularly enjoyed the idea of rescuing treed kittens and dowsing smoldering chimneys, but because I was one of the few able-bodied town residents over 18 and under 60. Our town needed me, and I did not want to be a free rider. I learned a lot from my years of service, including how to calculate the diminution of water pressure in various lengths and diameters of hose, and how to compensate for different rates of flow when drawing from a lake versus hooking up to a municipal hydrant.
Steve and his brother, Doug, both enlisted in the US Army after high school. They anthropomorphized the USA with she/her pronouns, calling to mind a damsel in distress. Doesn’t a gentleman lay his coat over a puddle so that a lady may safely step over it? They lamented the way men in Muslim-majority countries “treated their women.” In their own narratives my stepbrothers are heroes, just as I suppose in my own head I am Jaime Escalante, standing and delivering. Doug was stationed in Germany during reunification, and Steve was sent to fight with the infantry in Basra during the first Gulf War. It was 1990, my senior year of high school. “That’s what Saddam gets for fucking with the interests of American oil companies,” Doug told me. I didn’t think Steve’s life should be put in danger to secure a cheap tank of gas, and I began participating in demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns against the war. My stepdad, Doug and Steve’s dad, took me aside one day after school to deliver an ultimatum: either I protest, or live in his house. I would not be permitted to do both. “You need to fear God and me, because I’m the man of this house. If you want to keep this up, go live with your own dad and Chinese-Esther. See if they’ll put up with you.” (My stepfather always appended “Chinese” to my stepmom’s name. When she asked him to stop, saying it was racist, he responded, “You’re too sensitive. I’d be proud if anyone called me, ‘American-Will.’ Aren’t you proud to be Chinese?” She was ethnically Chinese, but her family had lived for generations in Malaysia before she immigrated to the USA.) When I told him I was not afraid of him, and that I thought god, if it existed, was a force of love instead of fear, he raised his hand in the air. I closed my eyes, anticipating a blow that never came. As Will walked away he said, “Your mother and I should get you enlisted and have you sent over there to make a man of you.” It was not the first time he suggested military service as a cure for everything about me that made him uncomfortable. Four years later I visited Doug while traveling through Europe on a student exchange. A number of the US soldiers in Augsburg spoke with the honeyed lilt of the deep south. I asked why so many soldiers seemed to hail from the former confederacy. “They’re more patriotic,” he replied. More patriotic than who? And what, exactly, is patriotism, I wondered silently.
I’ve spent my life practicing what it means to be a good citizen. In hindsight, sometimes I’ve gotten it right, other times not so much. It’s a process. I’ve decided the best leaders are those who appeal to the better angels of our nature and find ways to unify us for the common good. Fred Rogers was one such person, as was Nelson Mandela. I think of Michelle Obama, Muhammad Yunus, Stacey Abrams, Malala Yousafzai, some of my teachers and professors, and many others. That some of the people who come to my mind are not American does not mean that I don’t love my own country. Instead, I recognize my responsibility to a global community. We are in this together. As transportation networks and interconnected economies figuratively shrink the planet, the Covid-19 pandemic reveals just how fragile and unfortunately, complicit, these systems are in exacerbating global warming, pandemics, and staggering levels of both wealth and poverty. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have declared climate change and white nationalism to be among the top threats to our national security. Describing problems honestly is not a question of patriotism, but of morality. The questions I ask myself are, What do human beings owe one another? And how can I live a life with meaning and purpose, a life that positively impacts the communities of which I am a part? I believe it is proper to acknowledge America’s shortcomings, to face its racist and classist past and present, and then to do the collaborative work of making positive change. I do not believe it is patriotic to deny those realities, or to assign them to history, but many on the right proclaim that I hate my country. I don’t. The best word to describe a person with such blind adoration for their homeland is, “nationalistic,” which to me is the antithesis of patriotic.
I’m no longer a volunteer firefighter, and my CPR certification has lapsed, but I do practice a life of service work. I volunteer at Columbus Humane, photographing dogs on the adoption floor for their online profiles, washing dog bowls, folding laundered pet bedding, and scrubbing crates and litter boxes. I distribute boxes of vegetables, bread, and milk at the All People’s Fresh Market. I sing and participate in community beautification with the Harmony Project. I teach undergraduate and graduate students at the Columbus College of Art & Design. I’m not telling you this to receive a pat on the back. I serve others — and educate them so that they may find their own meaningful, creative pathways of work and service — to open my spirit and add joy to my life. It’s not altruism. I teach and do other service work because it’s what I need to do to make a difference and be part of something larger than myself. I serve others to practice becoming the person I need to be. I do it because I need to participate in building a better community from within. Serving others is not just how I respect my neighbors, it is how I love myself.
So, what should we make of our elected officials? What kinds of communities are they helping to build? How are they showing their respect to all of us? Who among them is serving something higher than their own self-interest? If it wasn’t clear before Trump’s supporters staged their coup attempt, it is now plain to see that the outgoing President is addicted to stoking division. The US Capitol, an international symbol of democratic self-governance, was invaded by a mob incited by the president and his enablers. I remember a professor of mine saying, “Words are our primary signifiers. We begin and end wars with declarations and treaties.” So words, even when they are untrue, have consequences. Senator Jeff Hawley greeted rioters with a raised fist of solidarity before they stormed the building. And even after five people died in that riot, he continued to grandstand and object to electoral votes certified for Biden. The way Hawley (and 5 other Senators along with over 120 Representatives) contextualizes his objections is by saying, “there are claims of fraud (note the passive tense) so we need to do something for Trump supporters.” Since the untrue allegations of fraud are not coming from any credible source, but instead are being amplified by the propagandists of an enraged loser, it leads to a downward spiral. The President and his backers tell lies. Partisan constituents believe the lies and demand action. Then, if you’re a Republican elected official with a Trumpist base, even if you don’t believe the lies, your political future depends on acting like you do. To which of our natures does this kind of leadership appeal? In her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt reminds us, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . and the distinction between true and false . . . no longer exist.” Lies have consequences.
Proclaiming what "many people believe" is not the same as providing evidence. And the only reason a plurality of Republican voters now believe the election was stolen is because the President and his allies kept repeating that lie, without evidence, until it felt to some like the truth. The reason no proof has been delivered is because there was no fraud. There were no irregularities in the process, though I understand why some would want so badly to believe that there were, especially when the people they trust continue to lie to them. Sometimes the candidate we hope will win an election does not win. Such is the nature of our current epistemological crisis that we cannot even agree water is wet, but this detachment from facts is not symmetrical. What I mean is that while there are certainly fringe actors on both the left and the right, it is only the Republican party that has built a constituency by explicitly practicing obfuscation, promoting disinformation, and disseminating falsehoods, all while suppressing the vote. There are many people who believe 5G networks cause Covid-19. There are many people who believe climate change is not real. Many people believe Hillary Clinton and George Soros lead a secret, international cabal of satan-worshipping pedophiles from a pizzeria basement, and only Donald Trump can defeat their evil scheme. When my grandfather was captured and held as a POW in a Nazi concentration camp, many Europeans believed it was reasonable to imprison, sterilize, and eventually exterminate Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and other internal “enemies of the state” in order to unify and secure a homeland for the Aryan race. My grandfather, as part of the US Army, was a soldier against fascism in Europe, so I wonder what he would think of the resurgence of that ugly ideology inside America’s government, in the Oval Office. “Antifa” is short for “anti-fascist.” It’s a counter-ideology and a kind of unaffiliated network, not a group. They weren’t part of the mostly maskless mob spreading both Covid and violence at the Capitol, regardless of what some people seem to want to believe.
My grandfather, Angelo, with his daughter, my mom, after WWII ended in Europe
I wear a face covering in public, wash my hands thoroughly and often, and limit my activities to reduce opportunities for coronavirus exposure. Taking common sense precautions like these to slow the spread of a global pandemic should be a baseline of human decency; but instead, the right wing has politicized public health so that the behavior of too many people no longer comports with reality. There are many Americans who believe the coronavirus is nothing worse than a common cold. My stepbrother, Doug, told my mom he believed the pandemic would end just as soon as Trump was reelected. “It’s a hoax, a political thing,” he said, even though he tested positive (asymptomatic), and his wife suffered acute illness and appears to be sustaining long-haul effects of the infection. So far, nearly 370,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, and by the time you read this the total will be higher. Doug is a police officer in Georgia. I wonder what else he “believes,” and how much of it squares with evidence. Some differences are irreconcilable, but that doesn’t excuse us from accountability. I believe that everyone in uniform, from US armed forces to state and municipal police, should be required to make a public statement denouncing the January 6 insurrection or forfeit their uniform and position. So too, every judge and elected official. I’m not suggesting we tell people what to think and say, but instead that authoritarians and their supporters are unfit to serve or protect. They are a threat to national security and self-governance. Democracy cannot withstand having them in positions of power and influence.
In the March 23, 2016 issue of The Guardian, Eve Ensler asked, “What will we do and what lengths will go to, what collective imagination will we employ, what mighty love will we summon to ensure the ending of this violence, this hate, this destruction of the earth, this grotesque inequality of wealth, this mad and ferocious drive to our end?” Can we imagine a collective future where we elect only those who are qualified, compassionate, trained in critically evaluating peer-reviewed research, and have a well developed capacity for evidence-based decision making? At the very least, we must demand the President’s removal by his cabinet under the 25th amendment because it is what our country needs us to do. It is our duty to protect democracy, not just with our votes, but with the power of phone calls and emails and letters to our elected officials. Trump received 74 million votes, and although not all of those people are fascists, they are comfortable voting for a fascist. History has shown that we can neither compromise with nor placate fascists, but I hope the Republican electorate will become less radicalized and more open to reason once Trump leaves office. We can do our best to love our right-wing brothers and neighbors, even in spite of the violence and damage they’ve created in the wake of their evidence-free approach to reality; and maybe the best way to show our love would be to keep them from getting behind the wheel of local, state, and/or federal governance while they are drunk on conspiracies and falsehoods. If our democracy is to survive we will need a truth and reconciliation commission, and a latter day version of the Nuremberg trial process. As for the man who sought to undermine his own nation’s constitution and usurp an election that he lost by rallying terrorists and telling them to march on the Capitol, what do we believe should become of him?
