Our so-what majority

by David Benjamin

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” —Pogo

MADISON, Wis.—It might not seem evident to the naked psyche, but the MAGA army is in retreat. Its soldiers are, after all, a cult whose god is now a lame duck. The Capitol Hill vandals have one last tantrum to throw—call it American Carnage II—on 20 January. But everybody knows that the sequel is never as good as the original. Ideally, the memento for the 2025 inauguration will be a Dixie cup bearing the mug shot of the Orange Jesus, filled symbolically with (red) Kool-Aid.

And then?

Cadet Bone Spurs, who’s sinking toward senescence and surrounded by Machiavellian sicarii, has shot his last wad. He has no more interest in “governing” than he did in his first reign. His best option to forestall irrelevance is to cancel elections, proclaim himself President-for-Life and groom one of his spawn to succeed him after he finally kicks the gold-plated bucket. But even his court of lickspittle Republicans might hesitate at the enthronement of Mad King Orange when they ponder the prospect of Don, Jr. as the Prince of Wales or his mannequin sister as Ivanka the Terrible.

For all the faithful in their ugly red ballcaps and Old Glory facepaint, what next? Unquestionably, the very stable genius will stage more rallies, because that’s his best thing, swiftly becoming his only thing. If he summons them, they will come … well, most of them, and then some of them. By and by, though, they’ll have other things to do—going to work, mowing the lawn, subscribing to Netflix. But as tools for Trump, they’re finished. He can’t run again, and, God willing, his Supreme Court will balk at making him Richard III. His parishioners have put him where they want him—on top, clapping for himself and spewing obscenities—and they have nothing else to do.

He doesn’t need them anymore.

Yes, of course, there’s a 922-page MAGA manifesto out there, but no one has read it, much less Trump, whose attention span falls well shy of 922 words. And nobody who voted for the Creature from Jamaica Estates really gives a rat’s ass what this turgid Testament says. The two-word motto that will eventually overshadow Trump’s four-word slogan as the byword of this political Dark Age is the rejoinder that the once and future president uttered when told that his mob was threatening to “Hang Mike Pence.”

“So what?”

The next stage of this revanchist regime will be a wave of destruction aimed at Constitutional bodies, institutions and traditions—and civil servants—carried out with none of the structure, sequence or discipline of Project 2025. It will be random and scattershot, like a gust-blown wildfire that leaves half the forest untouched but a thousand trees and a hundred homes in ashes. Some acts of “retribution” might affect—or even ruin—members of the MAGA mob but Trump’s deadheads won’t connect their trouble to its source, because they will have already withdrawn from political discourse and public policy.

They will revert to being the vessels of disgruntlement that things happen to—and they don’t know why.

Trump, you see, is not a phenomenon conjured by the GOP, by “likely voters” or the “undecided.” He is the rare darling of the disengaged who rarely vote, and who never vote in local, midterm or special elections, a vast underground fungus with no civic consciousness whose politics is personal to the point of solipsism and whose sense of community falls somewhere between a sneer and a sob.

There are, among these cynics, some who are poor and outcast. But most are getting by and some are outright prosperous. But they see in their lives a straitjacket stasis. They survive, even thrive, but do so in a rut where nothing much changes, nothing gets better, where appears no prospect of anything ever being different. They are eminently, yearningly susceptible to a messenger who can assign blame—beyond their own limitations in talent and tenacity—for this dreary lifelong stagnation spiraling inexorably toward Eleanor Rigby’s grave.

These millions of us whose existence is both normal and angrily disappointing have found solace in a torrent of propaganda. They slog through a thousand-mile sewer of online shit and deem it chocolate.

This is hardly a new development.

Once, millions of Americans fell in love with John Dillinger, a murderous sociopath.

Once, on the radio, Father Charles Coughlin, a Jew-baiting bigot and Nazi sympathizer, captured the devotion of the American listening audience.

Once, the nation fell under the spell of Joe McCarthy, whose stock-in-trade was slander, and millions of us gloried and gloated over the careers he destroyed and the innocent lives he ravaged.

Once, in a landslide, we re-elected a dissembling criminal, facilitator of the killing fields of Cambodia, Richard Nixon, to the highest office in our land.

We remember in shame that these villains were elevated, however briefly, into our pantheon of American heroes.

But we’ve been saved before by our second thoughts. Again and again, for almost two and a half centuries, we’ve found redemption in our ability to (eventually) see through the dark delusions fomented by our demagogues and to rejuvenate the tenuous American traditions of decency, amity, inclusion and respectful discourse.

Here we are again. America has rarely—if ever—had second thoughts that compound our folly so preposterously. Rarely—if ever—have we fallen so deeply in thrall to a greasepainted blowhard as vicious, vindictive and vapid as Trump. We have rarely so long endured a political spasm as pathological as the infantile fit that gripped our nation when the Thing from the Lagoon by the Sea descended on his gilded escalator. His regeneration is perhaps the greatest test of our resilience since the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

There is good news. Having thrust their million middle fingers toward their mythical “elites” and claimed their Pyrrhic victory, his vigilantes are blessedly without purpose. The Capitol is theirs, through peaceful means, without truncheons or guns, without beatings or bear spray—without any fun. Nothing to do, nowhere to go but home. America, to them, is not an idea. It’s graffiti. They have no curiosity, no motivation, no experience to apply to the complexity, compromise and the sheer grind of republican governance. They don’t like or understand government, don’t know how to manage it and want nothing to do with it. They cry out to destroy it but don’t know how and have no plan—nor would they read the plan if someone wrote it up. If pressed to begin, they would shrink with dread at the enormity of the project. Rather than try, they would go home.

The rats are returning to the sewer. They are leaving behind—to putrefy under the sun of a warming earth—a landscape of half-gnawed garbage and a carpet of turds. Our job, after the next four chaotic and dispiriting years—in America’s second Reconstruction—is to clean it up.

Only we can fix it.