Everyone wake the fuck up, because this is how the Republic dies.
Trump’s latest argument: Vote for me, because if Hillary is elected, I and my party will grind everything to a halt.
Not because we have two parties that vehemently disagree. Not because their two visions for America are so, wildly dissimilar. That’s absolutely fine.
What is really goddamned terrible is that I’m sitting here in 30 BC Rome and watching the Senate give up its authority to strong men. Watching it fucking happen. As if there aren’t already 100 books in the library about How Republics Die.
Starting now, we have to stop thinking that everything is going to be okay. This is both our best and worst trait as Americans. This magical patriotism; this excessive exceptionalism. Lawmakers and political actors (and we) believe that they can stop governing — that Congress can just stop passing bills, not fund programs, not appoint heads of agencies, not advise and consent on a Supreme Court justice — that they can cease the actions of government, and though things will be tough and bad, somehow this place called America will always be here.
That isn’t true. America is not a feeling, it’s not a sentiment, it’s not a person walking through a corn field in a Superbowl commercial, or someone writing concrete poetry in Greenwich Village, or people building rockets in Silicon Valley.
It is not.
America is a system of laws and customs, renewed and enforced by the act of governing. America is not held together by those things. America literally is those things. If you stop doing those things, that is the end of the Republic.
Because your voting on bills, and funding programs, and electing a Supreme Court, that is not the surface of the Republic or the heart of the Republic, it literally is the substance of the Republic. That is it. And we are flirting with killing it.
There is no magic floor underneath us. The institutions are it. The rule of law. That congress will argue, but the rules are greater than your desire. That the FBI will investigate, but the rules are greater than your desire. That Congress will consent or not consent to a Supreme Court justice, because the rules are greater than your desire. That people can and will vote, because the rules are greater than your desire.
When that stops — which it seems to be — when it grinds to a halt, that is when our great experiment ends. Not fast, with bombs bursting in air, but slowly, with every punitive move: every senate hearing to serve a political end, every government shutdown for show, every questionable threat of impeachment. Every single one of these actions is not the symptom of the end of the Republic, it is quite literally the end of the Republic.
This is it. Welcome to it. I, for one, can’t wait for this new guy Octavian. I really think he is just what the Republic needs.
Why do I give a fuck? Because there are no human rights. Sorry to break the news. There are no human rights, only civil rights. If there *were* human rights, every nation would have them. But no, only some nations do. The corn field and the poetry and the Silicon Valley happen because the Republic happens.
I, for one, like living in a country where if I am hurt, or sexually assaulted, or wronged, I can see my wrongdoer brought to Justice. It ain’t perfect, that’s for sure, but the fact that we *have* something called the ACLU, and the NAACP, and NOW, and Unions, and a free press, all sitting like gadflies on institutions that would limit our rights, shows that the system is worth working within.
That is why I give a fuck, and why you give a fuck. Because murder bad, rape bad, hate crime bad. And our freedoms did not. Appear. Because. We Are Special. We are a well made system — a Republic — that is dying.
Republics don’t die with an act of violence. They kill themselves. Because it is just so comfortable here inside this house we were born in. And we never learned how cold it is outside. So we start to believe we’re just naturally this warm.
We’re not. Just watch.
