Credit...Illustration by Nicholas Konrad
The Red Line
The red line that “decent” people won’t cross keeps getting narrower.
Donald Trump, our disgraced former president, crossed it on an hourly basis and every single time it was dismissed or normalized.
The GOP is consistently excused for every red line they cross including their part in an insurrection and terrorist attack on the Capitol.
As a result, they have become full-on authoritarians that will engage in various illegal acts with reckless abandon.
They do this because as a society and culture we have enabled it.
There is a study of recent dictatorial regimes titled the “balloon test.” Autocrats send trial balloons to find our tipping point. They will encourage conspiracies and play on fears to forward their agenda.
If we don’t push back and are consumed by the traps of distraction laid out for us, they will continue to force it further till we no longer recognize ourselves or our democracy.
Those fundamental principles we all shared to learn how to assimilate and live together are disappearing into a “Game of Thrones” type of dystopian existence.
If we are honest, we stopped paying attention to politics quite some time ago. It’s as if it was a dalliance of the past.
Everyone wore Nixon Halloween masks touting the line “I am not a crook” and held up peace signs. We were out of Vietnam, made advancements with Civil Rights and Feminism and it was all “fixed” according to white America. We were moving on to try to better our liberated fair society.
So, we let the Mad Men advertisers dupe us with all the lies that everything was fine, we were aspirational, hard-working Americans. We were the lucky ones that got to live out the American dream.
For white America, it was moving along quite nicely.
In the dark corners of politics and behind the façade of the family first politicians, they were toying with that red line consistently. They were testing us to determine how much we would believe. How many of the falsehoods were we willing to swallow to maintain the veneer of “normalcy.” Turns out quite a bit.
We wanted it all, the security, the money, the big house, the cars, the clothes and all the other luxuries we tell ourselves define us. We were ripe for a figure like Reagan with his empty promises of trickle-down economics. We were duped that a guaranteed exceptional life for all was on the horizon. In reality, his regime actually traded in the middle class for peanuts, it shrank, we noted, but fought each other on topics fed to us to distract.
America became a piece of malleable plastic for anyone to shape.
We were complacent, easily distracted and were tricked by politicians. Although we were suspicious of them, we assumed they were adults who knew what they were doing.
That all came crashing to a halt when Trump ascended down a golden escalator and earned his place as the first fascist-like dictator America had ever seen.
One thing Trump did accomplish was awakened our national interest in politics and we have been changed forever.
It took that. It took almost our entire democracy on the verge of collapse for all of America to begin to pay attention, real attention.
In the past 20 years, we had times of course where more attention was paid than others. The Iraq wars, the 9/11 terror attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the banking crisis and others.
Even those were tests of the blurring of the lines. Weapons of mass destruction were a falsehood and we learned about structural issues in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. However, nothing was ever done about it in terms of accountability. No one was ever brought to justice for any of it. Now under Biden, we are working on America's infrastructure, but it took this long in a first-world nation?
That’s hardly exceptional.
And if anyone thinks this longest hour is over they are mistaken.
Too many Americans have tried to replace the horrors of the Age of Trump with happy-pill halcyon tales suggesting that Donald Trump and his movement have been vanquished and made irrelevant by the hopeful possibilities of Joe Biden's presidency, and an imminent return to some new form of "normal." *
A nation is defined by its moments and America has had some great moments. This is undoubtedly one of the worst.
We cannot go back to a normal that didn't work for everyone.
We will forever be yet another country that was run by a dictatorial figure.
We must have accountability and justice. We need to answer the call.
If you ever wondered what you would have done during some of the worst times you read about in history…well this is it, the test. Can American Democracy be saved?
What we do in this moment, will define us forever.