Among 20th-century novelists, there are few more admired on the right than Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His criticism of communism in general and Stalinism specifically are trenchant, sharp and well-informed. The Gulag Archipelago is a triumph.
But to simply regard him as an anti-communist — which he undoubtedly was, virulently so — is facile. He was, more importantly, anti-authoritarian, opposed to the cults of personality that swept Europe and the world in his lifetime.
There's a passage in The Gulag Archipelago that's been passed around more than a few times in the past four years, as the Republican Party's platform degenerated from something that at least nodded toward conservatism into an ideology based simply on Owning the Libs before taking its final form as Whatever Trump Says.
Solzhenitsyn's story perfectly illustrates the farcical and frightening world of a country gripped by a cult of personality. Read the whole thing if you wish (it's worth your time), but the tl;dr version is that after a tribute to Stalin, everyone stands up and gives an absurdly overlong ovation until one local official has enough and stops clapping. He is, of course, sent to the gulag for a decade. The kicker on the story comes from the man's interrogator: "Don't ever be the first to stop applauding."
In Stalin's Soviet Union and in Trump's Republican Party, it's not enough to be merely supportive or unopposed to the strongman — you mustn't be insufficiently enthusiastic. For what it's worth, castigation for insufficient enthusiasm isn't a problem only on the right; the left does it too, with the opprobrium often coming from a mob rather than a single person, and more likely to be the result of insufficient enthusiasm for a particular cause or philosophy. This a problem but for different reasons.
This weekend, Tennessee's two Republican senators showed that come what may, they will not be the last to stop applauding Trump. They, in fact, may never do so. The pair issued a statement saying they will join an effort by a not-insignificant number of fellow GOP senators and a sizable number of Republican House members to reject the electoral votes of a number of states when Congress sits in joint session for the usually pro forma, usually ceremonial count of the votes Wednesday. Further, they called for an electoral commission to conduct an audit of the disputed states' votes, harkening back to the election of 1876, which isn't exactly a model one should want to follow.
There's no need to bore anyone with a debunking of Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud and "illegal votes," as it's been done thoroughly in the weeks since the election. To believe that a conspiracy led to the president losing reelection by some 6 million popular votes and 74 electoral votes, one would have to believe that 60 out of 61 courts, many with Republican and even Trump-appointed judges — including the Supreme Court of the United States, which has six Republican-appointed members and three appointed by Trump himself — are engaged in this scheme along with election officials, including numerous Republicans, in a handful of states. Such a conspiracy would also need the complicity of poll workers, vote counters and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, along with prosecutors and investigators elsewhere.
It beggars belief that anyone who isn't being willfully ignorant could actually buy such a claim.
And while such widespread ignorance is terrifying in itself, what's scarier is that Blackburn, Hagerty, et al. aren't being ignorant. What's scarier to consider is that they simply don't care or that they are too cowardly to stand up and say no to the mollycoddled miscreant who occupies the Oval Office — a deeply incurious and undignified figure who appears to have simply stopped caring about his job — if he ever cared about it in the first place. He is consumed with himself and the gratification of his own id to the point that he doesn't seem particularly interested in engaging in the preservation of his own legacy, whatever that is, as is the usual practice of even bad presidents, who often spend decades trying to polish the turds they left behind. Indeed, Trump has done more to burnish the legacies of, say, Nixon and George W. Bush than those two men could have ever hoped to do on their own.
Make no mistake: The effort to reject the votes from the so-called disputed states (there actually is no dispute) will fail. Democrats have a narrow majority in the House, and enough Republican senators have recognized this ploy for what it is: grandstanding at best and a polite coup attempt at worst.
"We have the evidence," they'll say. They don't. Because if they did, they would have presented it in at least one of the more than five dozen court cases they filed and lost.
"It's about the integrity of our elections," they'll say. And they'll be lying, because it's about not angering the overgrown toddler who has tweeted them into obsequiousness.
"It's about following the rule of law," they'll say, As a Trump-appointed federal judge in Wisconsin wrote in one of the more biting dismissals, "It has been."
Over the weekend, The Washington Post published two remarkable pieces. The first is a recording of a phone call in which Trump tried to shake down Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the president very clearly told the should-be-anonymous state official to "find" enough votes to flip the state. Such a move is chilling, and had it been anyone else, the grand jury would already be sitting. So damning was the call that Blackburn, who will usually contort herself into a hemihelix trying to defend Trump, admitted on Fox & Friends that the call was "not a helpful call," much as the iceberg was a not a helpful navigational aid for the Titanic.
The second Post piece didn't get quite the same level of attention but is noteworthy too. All 10 living former secretaries of defense found it necessary to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election and that our transitions of power should be peaceful, and to remind folks that the military should have no role in determining the outcome of elections. Why did these serious men, only two of whom are Democrats, write this letter? Is it because they fear what Trump and his henchmen (apparently including a dozen United States senators), have planned for the next two weeks?
It is time to stop pretending that this is merely a farce (though it is). It is time to stop hoping that these efforts are merely the death rattle of the Trump administration, that this 74-year-old man be given time to process his loss in his own way, like he's a 12-year-old who struck out to lose a Little League game.
Blackburn and Hagerty aren't engaging in a courageous effort to stand up for what is right. They aren't standing guard as bulwarks of conservatism, because conservatism, in its true form, recognizes the value of persistent institutions, the rule of law and decentralized power, and abhors strongmen, tinpot dictators and cults of personality. They aren't even passing a test of party loyalty.
They are subverting an election that has been shown time and again to be free, fair and legal, and they are doing so at the behest of a man who has no concern for anything beyond his own interest. They aren't keeping their oath to support and defend the Constitution — they are willfully breaking that solemn promise.
They are never going to stop applauding, even if they take the entire American experiment down with them.
