America as Monty Python: "And Now for Something Completely Different"

In the fog of our second civil war, the time was about 1 a.m. when, haggard and stuporous, I saw on the screen that Trump had won Pennsylvania. The chyron was mistaken. America had lost its soul.

I don't know my country any longer; my fellow citizens even less. If this alienation of national affection were actionable I'd take it to court for having also murdered my once-serviceable political intuition; it lies riddled by a collective absurdity so irrational it renders instinct braced by analysis nothing more than a conceit.  

My final, gasping hunch last night: In the next few days we'll see this wisdom of Abraham Lincoln oft-quoted. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," he wrote in the 1850s as the abomination of slavery was compounded by the ignorance, xenophobia and white nationalism of the Know-Nothings, Trumpism's forerunner.

Thus, continued Lincoln, "When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Some historians argue the 16th president triumphed over the South's despotism of enslavement and the more sprawling plague of rank nescience. Other historians (myself included) argue that defeat was obscured by an evanescent victory. The South's authentic reconstruction was fleeting, the tyranny of bondage persisted, and the nation's benighted indifference marched on.       

America, then, lost its first civil war. And though privileged with a century and a half to wise up, America promptly blew its second chance last night. The national character is now easily defined. Despotism is a concept to be denounced yet chosen; white nationalism and patriarchal oppression are also conceptually forbidden yet embraced; and sprawling ignorance is denied yet dominant and preferred. The American tyranny that Lincoln feared is Russo-pure but with the base alloy of hypocrisy.

We must rethink what is surely a common belief: that the U.S. enjoyed a long, democratic respite from self-unawareness — that temporal expanse between its first and second freely chosen implosions. One rethinking aid is the piercing, bullseye cynicism of H.L. Mencken's writings about the worship of our political religion. What he recognized as its heresies and failures were comparatively mild stuff at the time — indeed, the lapses of republican sobriety in his day are now nearly nostalgic.      

We can say, however, that Mencken established a kind of baseline when it comes to assessing our national religion. His philosophic iconoclasm wasn't for show or to sell his books; it was an authentic intellectual brand. And last night, Menckenism mirrored what it now axiomatic Americanism. "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance"; "the worship of jackals by jackasses"; "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard," he wrote on various occasions of impeccable clarity.  

Perhaps his best-known insight — if not best-known, then most accurate of all American prophecies — was that "some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Many saw President Warren Harding as the very ideal of such in Mencken's time; four score later, George W. Bush grabbed the relay baton. Yet Harding was at least affable and, amusingly, most interested in tactile closet pursuits, while Bush, a moron for sure, was alternatively interested in the pursuit of a war presidency, almost an American ideal in itself.

Downright moron applies singularly to Donald J. Trump. If his deficiencies stopped there, there'd be reason to celebrate. The U.S. would suffer no more than an oddly skin-colored Harding, and for no more than four years. His cretinous afflictions would pass and then the business of governance could resume.

But Trump's four years will be devoted to unraveling governance and instituting authoritarianism in its place. I found The New York Times' top-of the-fold headline this morning to be consummate only in its delusional denial of that truism: "Trump Returns to Power, Ushering in a New Era of Uncertainty."

Never has the future of a president-elect been so nakedly stripped of uncertainty. The Times' subhead tried to regain some of its footing, noting that "his victory signaled the advent of isolationism, sweeping tariffs and score settling." Wrong again. His victory ensured — not signaled — that disastrous trio.

I understand straight-news' professional need to soften some of the grounding realties we have faced and now face again. In that, I expect no change. I would suggest as a sort of reroute that it's up to Americans to comprehend the catastrophic implications of such softening.

Rather, I once would have made the suggestion. I won't now, for I'm dismissing Americans as a species, by and large, that is capable of comprehension. One example of The Times' softening: "Trump has vowed...." The subject and predicate imply mere speculation, which is to say, what follows is to be classified as the headline's "uncertainty."

Yet there's no avowal behind his "radical reshaping of American government." It's a certainty. And he's far beyond promises "of 'retribution' and of rooting out domestic opponents he casts as the enemy within." 

The same goes for Trump's pledge to engage "the biggest wave of deportations in U.S. History" — a pledge realizable only via unimaginable human suffering and family devastations, all of which will end with millions of "illegals," as he calls them, remaining in the U.S. but under conditions so squalid even Tsarist Russia would have been appalled.

I read on. Trump has suggested "deploying troops domestically" and proposed "sweeping tariffs." And the blue-ribbon winner of surreal softness, he has largely advocated "the greatest consolidation of power in the history of the American presidency." (All italics mine, words, the Times'.) 

There is, "on-the-record," and "recorded," as the same newspaper reported on 22 October of this year, a much more precise and realistic way of saying that Trump has "advocated" unprecedented power in the presidency. And the person who said it is a retired four-star general who worked as Trump's chief of staff. No one, absolutely no one, could know this better than John Kelly:

"Looking at the definition of fascism," he said, "it’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that [Trump] thinks would work better in terms of running America."

That is what America elected last night — a "far-right authoritarian," a "dictatorial leader," a "centralized autocracy." It was all out there, on the record, said by Kelly and repeated by dozens of similarly knowledgeable individuals. It was reported in print and on the air, it was everywhere known to every U.S. citizen. Voters of America, if you choose to put Donald Trump back in the White House, then you are choosing a veritable fascist to run your country.    

And that's what they chose.

There are dates in U.S. history that once identified the truest of what President Franklin Roosevelt called "infamy": 12 April 1861, 7 December 1941, 22 November 1963, 4 April and 6 June 1968, 2o March 2003. Each was as infamous as every rational American believed infamy could be.

Yesterday, they all took a distant back seat to 5 November 2024. So distant, we can no longer recognize them for what they once were. America survived each of those dates, each infamy. But yesterday, America committed suicide.  

I'm hesitant to let Liz Cheney in on the fact that from suicide there is no recovery. Earlier today I read her words, that "as citizens of the greatest nation on earth" — led by a fascist? — "we" must do "everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and" ... and ... and, every word was void of any attainability. 

Cheney's post ended with we citizens "must now be the guardrails of democracy." Would that be in the way that fervid anti-Hitlerites acted as Germany's guardrails of democracy in January 1933?  

Before I began writing this perhaps too-lengthy post, I received a note from a friend who wrote in "astonishment" and, put ladylike as she is, "disappointment." She knew I had writing to do, that I'd be a bit "busy," so with the fewest of words she begged off saying more. I replied my writing would come with two self-imposed stipulations. The first would be my "greatest difficulty" — restraining my language. In that, I somehow succeeded. Second, as I related, I wanted "to get it all out, get it done and [expletive deleted] over with."

By that I meant more than writing this post. I meant I'm "done and [expletive deleted] over with" this country. I no longer know it, nor do I know my fellow citizens. I began with those words, and with them I shall finish. For when my former compatriots can so blithely waltz to the polls and voluntarily vote to elect a fascist to run my country too, when instead they could have packed up and emigrated to "where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy," then I know of nothing else to do.