We can begin to discern two potential futures, both tantalizingly close, in America this month.
One future allows the rule of law and the great American experiment to continue, albeit haltingly, after a dramatically successful two years of course correction under president Joe Biden.
The other, darker, future is slowly coming into focus too. This is the one where Republicans sweep the midterms, gaining the House of Representatives and throwing sand in the gears of the current investigation into Donald Trump's scandalous theft of our nation's top secret documents - and the nefarious uses he may have already put them to.
That people here could still choose the latter vision over the former, after all that has been revealed to us, tells you just how divided we are and how close run this coming election will be.
January 6, 2021: US Capitol Police stand detain protesters outside of the House Chamber during a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC. (Getty Images)
The stakes couldn't be higher. Whack job candidates who still falsely insist that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent (despite all of the evidence contradicting them) are winning Republican primary races in critical battleground states, where grievance has supplanted good sense. If elected, some of these candidates could be granted the power to oversee future elections.
Meanwhile, the Republican decision to call every election whose outcome they dislike “rigged” is doing far-reaching damage to our democracy, undermining the public trust in our elections and encouraging far-right militants to take the future into their own hands, the way Trump's failed insurrection has demonstrated.
“We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart's grown brutal from the fare...” wrote Yeats in his unforgettable poem "Meditations In Time Of Civil War" about the Irish Civil War. Republican leaders have likewise been increasingly dining out on pipe dreams, with their former fantasist in chief being the most serial self-deluder. It has fateful consequences, all delusion.
When people cannot reconcile the real from the imaginary, when they refuse to accept loss can happen as easily as victory, when they have their fondest illusions nurtured and spread by the same people they elect and the partisan media that they flock to, the incredulity they suffer when all does not go as planned can leave them mutinous.
January 6, 2021: Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Demonstrators breeched security and entered the Capitol as Congress debated the 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification. (Getty Images)
We saw on January 6 where that anger can lead. We will see it again soon if Trump eludes justice - thanks to Republican leaders who already believe there is no wrong he can perform now because he's their anointed leader, come what may.
Ask yourself, what was the worst moment of the Trump presidency? Was it children being forcibly taken from their parents on the command of a latter-day Herod? Was it the silence of half the country when it happened?
Was it the “very fine people on both sides” after Charlottesville when one side was self-avowed fascists? Was it when Trump pressed on with a multibillion-dollar transaction with the Saudis even after the crown prince allegedly ordered the murder of a journalist?
Was it his silence after Turkish agents assaulted a protestor on American soil, literally outside the White House and he looked the other way? Was it his contempt for democracy, even when he won?
July16, 2018: US President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands during a joint press conference after their summit in Helsinki, Finland. The two leaders met one-on-one and discussed a range of issues including the 2016 US Election collusion. (Getty Images)
We are not being asked to choose between two competing paths to our future in the next national elections – the truth is the Republican party doesn't have a path to the future. If it did, you would be hearing less about Nancy Pelosi and more about investment, building, infrastructure, taxes, insurance, employment, business opportunities, and the ordinary work of government.
Instead, though you're being told each election is criminally stolen, that John F. Kennedy, Jr is still alive and will soon be president, that civil war is imminent, that Trump fought a hidden war against a cabal of Satanist pedophiles in Hollywood and the Democratic Party whilst in the White House, that the coronavirus vaccine will allow George Soros to control your mind, and so on.
The GOP fed its voters on fantasy and their hearts have grown brutal. They will need years, not just election cycles, to come back to reality and the ordinary business of government in functioning democracy.
We can not wait for them and we must not indulge their brutal fantasies.
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