Trumpism, the movement to divide society, scorn its values, deface its heroes, and trample whatever it holds dear, has just sunk to a new low.
One Trumpist congressman just said Gen. Mark Milley, the American armed forces’ previous commander, should be hanged. A second Trumpist blocked approvals of hundreds of military officers’ promotions because of his personal disagreements with the Defense Department.
Donald Trump himself, meanwhile, accused the judge he faces of aiming to interfere in next year’s presidential election. This was besides accusing Milley of treason and also calling “moron” the man who served 43 years in the military where Trump served not one day.
These exhortations were but the prelude to the chaos Congressman Matt Gaetz just sowed at the political heart of the free world, the political continuation of the physical assault on Capitol Hill, all of which will have to result, one way or another, in a political big bang.
Waging war on party colleague
A LOUDMOUTH who invited Holocaust denier Charles Johnson to a congressional event, Gaetz waged war on his party colleague, then-House speaker Kevin McCarthy because of what his master sees as two cardinal sins:
First, the speaker prevented the budgetary paralysis his colleagues were concocting, in line with the Trumpist ideal of sowing chaos. And second, McCarthy cooperated with the Democrats, with whom he hammered out an interim budget that prevented a government lockdown.
Aghast, the consummate Trumpist turned to Trumpism’s main weapon – the lie. “We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” said Gaetz, thus suggesting that “we” – meaning the Republican lawmakers – had lost trust in their leader.
In fact, the Republican legislators voted decisively for McCarthy’s deal, 126:90. Even more tellingly, Gaetz’s ambush of McCarthy was joined by only seven of 218 Republican representatives.
Even worse, from the Trumpist viewpoint, the lawmakers who defied the Trumpists formed with the Democrats an overwhelming 335:91 majority. And that – the show of consensus, if even just momentarily and tactically – is the worst sin a Trumpist can commit, because Trumpism, and populism in general, depends for its life on the existence of an invented enemy, one that can be repeatedly scapegoated, libeled, and besmirched.
That is why McCarthy had to be shed. A Republican who harmonizes with the Democrats must be removed, lest the people realize that, unlike what Trump effectively tells them, they are one people, a nation which in the face of adversity can, and must, find its common ground.
At this writing no one knows what is to follow McCarthy’s ouster. What is clear is that the free world’s nervous center is torn not only between Right and Left, but also between Right and Right, and that chaos, Washington’s continuous condition during Trump’s presidency, is back in business.
Chaos is back because of eight Trumpists, but this doesn’t mean the people across the aisle behaved prudently in the face of the Republican infighting, or that they understand the crisis at which America has arrived, and what it means they should do. They didn’t, and they don’t.
FACED WITH a situation for which they did not prepare, the Democrats decided to vote for McCarthy’s removal, even though that meant teaming up with the madmen to his right. They couldn’t resist the temptation.
That’s tactical thinking, the kind that is so immersed in the “how” that it can’t focus on the “what,” let alone the “why.” Well, the “what” is not Republicanism but Trumpism, and the “why” is not the Democrats’ power but the future of the American people and the entire democratic world.
This means searching for cracks along the Trumpist line of fortifications and, once locating them, storming through them into the Republican mainstream.
Narrowly speaking, this meant voting for McCarthy and against Gaetz. Broadly speaking, this means seeking Republicans with whom to jointly restore the American people’s sense of destiny, solidarity, and purpose.
“The center cannot hold,” wrote William Butler Yeats while staring at World War I’s manslaughter and a pandemic’s felling of yet more millions while a dozen new countries struggled to emerge from four empires’ debris.
“The center cannot hold,” wrote the great Irish poet, whose wife was among those plagued by the Spanish flu (which she survived). “Things fall apart,” he lamented while dueling the Angel of death, “anarchy is loosed upon the world,” he observed, and “the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” so much so that “the worst are full of passionate intensity” while “the best lack all conviction.”
This is where America’s leaders have now landed along with their country and its allies, certainly the Jewish state, which faces its own agents of chaos and manufacturers of schism, slander, and deceit.
Yeats, in his despair, turned to God. “Surely,” he wrote, “some revelation is at hand... a shape with lion body and the head of a man.” In fact, no such savior was on his way, only another world war with even greater carnage and death. The crisis, in other words, awaited not divine intervention but human vision, deed, and resolve.
American politics faced such a moment in 1854 when a new law – the Kansas-Nebraska Act – led slavery into the West. The shock to the political system was such that one major party, the Whigs, fell apart, and a new one, fusing Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers who detested slavery, was born.
That political big bang’s newborn party was the Republican Party, the one that is now ready to die. Like the decaying parties it originally rivaled, today’s Republican Party will have to give rise to a new party which, like the one Abraham Lincoln joined, will combine former rivals, all selfless patriots who will set out to restore America’s faith in justice, fairness, honesty, modesty, and truth.
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.