Everything now comes down to 2022
In imitation of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, we awoke one morning in the autumn of 2016 to discover that, not our bodies, but our country had been transformed into a monstrous vermin. To skip lightly to another metaphor, we also discovered that, though our ship of state struck an iceberg, it didn’t sink. It was the water, not the iceberg, that sank Titanic. Fortunately for us there wasn’t enough water — that time.
Next time there could be. Because the lesson we learned was also learned by our captious, demagogic enemy. Republicans now know what we know: that water sufficient to once and for all plunge the ship of state known as America to the bottom of the Atlantic is the metaphor for votes. Not popular votes, Congressional votes. Votes enough to disallow any election they don’t like the outcome of. Votes enough to impeach any President and Vice President they don’t like, and for any reason.
Imagine for a moment a Congress full of Jim Jordans and Marjorie Taylor Greenes. Imagine a Senate chock-a-block with Ron Johnsons and Josh Hawleys. That is a formula for the death of the American republic as we know it. Once people like that are in charge then the artificially promoted idea of election fraud for any election they don’t like will become the norm, only to eventually pass away until there will no more elections. A governing body can do whatever it wants and can do it despite its own constitution. All it has to do is have the collective will to ignore its own rules. Mitch McConnell proved that. Hitler’s Reichstag under Herman Goering proved that. Just such a governing body served its purpose long enough to give Hitler unlimited power.
Lest you think I’m crazy, I put it to you again. Where would we be right now if it was January sixth all over again, only this time Matt Gaetz and people just like him represented, not the crackpot minority, but the overwhelming majority in Congress? What if virtually everyone in the Capitol was a conspiracy theory-spouting crackpot like Lauren Boebert? Would Joe Biden be President of the United States right now? Maybe, maybe not.
And even if they couldn’t stop Joe Biden’s inauguration, do you think for a minute he and his Vice President wouldn’t have been impeached and convicted by now and summarily cast from office if such people had been in charge? And what would be his “crime”? Massive collusion with a fraudulent Deep State plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election with illegally cast ballots, of course.
This is why the 2022 election is so vitally important. We must strengthen our hold on the Congress and the Senate. We must campaign relentlessly to ensure that festering thugs like Marjorie Taylor Greene and sex-trafficking creeps like Matt Gaetz are permanently cast out of office and never allowed back. If ever such people own the majority in both the House and the Senate our ship of state may very well plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic. Should that happen it will never rise again.
It is for this reason we must all vote in 2022, because the political soul of the nation depends on it. Republicans are counting on our complacency. We must not give it to them. For as long as the Republican Party exists there can be no final victory. Until Republicans are permanently abolished from the political landscape we can never rest. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.