What if it is only the intermission?

And the second act is still waiting for the curtain to open, on a more hideous chapter of the play?

Like many Americans, I was elated when it became clear that Donald Trump had lost the election. I’ve been writing about how dangerous he and his band of totalitarian wannabes have been since 2015. The last two years especially had it clear that any Trump second term would be a rapid slide down the ramp into outright fascism. Fortunately, a majority of voters recognized that, and almost 82 million people thought enough to put Trump out on the streets of Mar a Lago and not back into power in the White House.

However, thanks to America’s troubled Electoral College system, it was very much a touch and go thing – and the result was under threat from Election Day 2020 through January 20th, 2021. It should bother everyone that a part of the route of flight to the inauguration included an armed insurrection against the United States government.

And in the background, as writer Tom Nichols notes, are the 74 million people who still – even now, over 70 days after the inauguration – still are spouting the Big Lie. Nichols, in an article in The Atlantic – written just after the election – noted:

America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.

Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.

America has to deal with the fact that 74 million people were unable to recognize a genuine sociopath and a bonafide danger to their democracy and way of life. Even more frightening is that over the long haul, they appear not to have learned anything from their mistake, and are quite willing to double down and make the same mistake again.

America has a problem with an acceptance of outright fascism, and it is not going away. If not dealt with, it may come back to us with a vengeance. Just witness what is happening in state legislatures across the country, starting in Georgia. Under the stewardship of Brian Kemp, they are taking the laws that kept Trump from stealing the election in 2020 and changing the laws to make it not just possible but desirable to prevent the results of a free and fair election from going against one particular party. There is NO defense of Georgia’s election law, and may God have mercy on those who try to do so.

Voting is a right, full stop, and people’s right to do it should not be unreasonably infringed. Six-hour lines with no water is an unreasonable infringement. We don’t need to go further than that, and we certainly don’t need a privileged white dude who grew up in a Seattle suburb and moved to DC after private college to push out a “well, actually” piece about a Jim Crow revival.

One would think that contrast of the last three months would make it clear how incompetent Trump and his lackeys were – just the progress on getting people vaccinated for COVID alone -proves how much better things can be with competent people at the helm.

Sadly though, many Americans are not able to see that – and still cling to the myth that socialism is coming to destroy all that they hold near and dear.

And as the January 6^th insurrection proved, a percentage of them are willing to physically try to destroy a representative government unless it bends to their vision of what they think the country should be.

The country is not learning a lesson socially — because, well, why would it? There is no case being made politically that what happened during the Trump years wasn’t just some kind of small-time mistake, that’s gone away, phew — but a historic shame and stain on the moral conscience of a nation, its reputation, its power, and purpose and raison d’etre.

So the ugly old social norm — “Ah, you’re a racist? A fascist? I don’t like it, but I guess that’s OK because it’s permitted in our society” — still exists. And the power structures built on that norm — law firms, lobbyists, pressure groups, and so on, have not changed one iota.

We can be certain that Americans as a whole, and Trump supporters, in particular,  are drawing the wrong conclusions from the 2020 election. “Republicans will conclude that just a bit more overt racism (but less tweeting about it) will carry the day the next time. They will see the exit polls that called for a “strong national leader,” They will replace the childish and whiny Trump with someone who projects even more authoritarian determination. They will latch on to the charge that democracy is a rigged game, and they will openly despise its rules even more than Trump has.”

As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states. That’s certainly proof enough that the GOP wants to skew the results of future elections – even if Trump does not run again. (I don’t think he will because he will be in so much legal trouble by then that the GOP will turn to any one of its up and coming fascist superstars instead).

All of this makes me think of the current Biden administration as being in the “interwar years” of the failure of American democracy. The ’20s and ’30s of the 20th century were a time of great turmoil, but people – save for the prescient few –did not see the danger on the horizon. When the 2nd World War broke out, it was far more destructive than the first.

And the drama will play out almost entirely on American soil – not pushed along by some outside event overseas – but by cold-hearted American selfishness. The rest of the world will watch in horror as the Americans slowly but surely, destroy whatever redeeming qualities they may have once possessed.

What on earth? The entire planet shudders at this nonsense. The only people who sympathize with mainstream American “debates” are the Taliban, ISIS, Muslim fanatical groups, and extremist parties in Eastern Europe, who are actual Nazis. Everyone else recognized long ago the principle of live and let live, more or less. Nobody’s murdering you in France for being an Asian grandma. Nobody in Germany is saying you shouldn’t have the right to exist as a gay person — or at least if they are, nobody gives them airtime.

America’s cultural backwardness goes on because it hasn’t had a true political reckoning yet. One that forces society to take a hard look at itself culturally. One that draws bright red cultural lines which are impossible to ignore. Which says, in stark terms, that even a racist idiot can understand, things like “hate is not OK. It leads to violence”, or “dehumanizing others is not OK. It leads to supremacism”, and “We do not permit these things in our society. These values are anathema to us. Those who express them will face the full fury of the law.”A real political reckoning that teaches a whole society where the line between good and bad, permissible and not, right and wrong, really is, and cannot be crossed, or else. Like a Nuremberg Trials.

“Stephen Miller stood out as ‘probably the most repugnant individual to serve in the Trump White House.’” -writes Charlie Sykes, a once conservative columnist driven away from his own party by its addiction cruelty. The cruelty, I might add – Miller was the poster child for.

“If you had to pick just one,” Hasan said, “who should be pushed out of public life, who should hang his head in shame and never be heard from or taken seriously ever again, it would have to be Stephen Miller.”

So perhaps we are in what I want to call: the inter-war years. That means that democratic governments will come under increasing pressure from those who favor and worship at the altar of authoritarianism. That includes too many Americans.

The Victor Orban’s, the current Polish government, Bolsinaro in Brazil, Xi Jinping in China, Trump’s buddy Putin, the generals in Myanmar – the people willing to torch personal freedom and democracy are not a small number.

And just like the ’20s and ’30s, the off-ramps to avoid destruction will be available – if we have the presence of mind to see them.

I’m not optimistic that we do. So we had best enjoy the lull before the storm returns.

“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others, not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.” ~ Yehuda Bauer