The Moon Is Down

An illegitimate political party takes full control of our government today. I think things will be different in this country for the rest of most of our lives, though the details of what exactly will be different and what will rise afterward is not yet certain and is, to a degree, up to what all of us do about it.

This is why I'm thinking today about legitimacy and illegitimacy, and I want to give you the simple message today that no matter what pageantry might surround this transfer of power, it is neither peaceful nor legitimate.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

There's power, and then there is legitimacy. Two separate things.

This is a challenging sort of idea to get our heads around, because Trump and Republicans are being treated as legitimate, and they will go on being treated as legitimate. The Republicans did win the election, after all, and electoral wins are very legitimizing—as they should be, in times of health for a democracy. And Republicans will indeed hold the offices they hold, and exercise the power such offices afford, which also lends the appearance of legitimacy. They'll be treated as legitimate by the media, and by corporate interests, and I imagine by most citizens, and they will certainly be treated as legitimate by the party that ought to be standing in opposition, the Democrats, most of whom will attend his inauguration in show of legitimacy, and congratulate themselves for their comity in the face of existential danger, praise themselves for their adherence to rules of propriety and regulation that have already been shredded and set on fire, celebrate their principled upholding of a democracy as they hand it over to be executed.

There's been a lot written about the election last November, and why Donald Trump won it, despite being an adjudicated rapist, a felon dozens of times over, an open insurrectionist, profoundly unqualified, unsuitable by temperament, an open advocator of Nazi and white supremacist policy and rhetoric and symbolism, and so on and so forth. I even recently put my hand to the task recently.

Few if any of these postmortems focus on the simplest and most direct reason that Donald Trump and Republicans won, which is that they were permitted to run in the first place.

This should not have been allowed, as a matter of law—by the words of our founding document, the U.S. Constitution, and by even higher laws than that.

Let's start with the U.S. Constitution.

Trump at the very least shouldn't have been permitted to run as a constitutional matter, and neither in my opinion should members of his insurrectionist party. He engaged in insurrection. Trump fomented an insurrection in order to overturn an election he lost, and his party supported him in this effort and has supported him ever since. The evidence was on all of our televisions, and the rest came out after an investigation that took far too long as no consequences were issued, and as a result the idea began to take hold that what had happened was not a consequential matter.

If the Constitution were to be defended, then Trump's trial, and the trial of every Republican providing material aide to the insurrection, including every Republican voting to overturn the election, should have been carried out immediately, been pursued vigorously, concluded quickly, and all means necessary should have been taken in order to remove all Republicans aligned from office to the furthest extent possible, and that should have been the main focus of the Biden presidency.

The reason I say this is because when things that must not be permitted to happen are allowed to happen, then they stop being things that are not permitted to happen, and a narrative of normalcy and permission begins to form around those things. If consequences for infractions against society and law and government are not pursued with urgency, then they stop being understood as urgent matter. If human beings are allowed to be dehumanized and terrorized and persecuted and killed by the state, then such impermissible things become permissible under the law. When a president is allowed by the land's highest court to break the law with impunity, then the law stops being legitimate and so does the court and so does the presidency. When an insurrectionist party is allowed to run for office, then insurrection is no longer disqualifying, and if this happens even though the Constitution says it is disqualifying, then the Constitution no longer matters, either.

These outcomes are more dangerous, in my opinion, than whatever danger would have risen from doing what was needed to prevent it. So the Biden administration had one job to do, which if left undone would mean that every other good thing it managed to do would simply be mooted the moment the illigitimate party took power once again. As, I'd argue, we are about to see.

This one job would have started with recognizing that the Republican Party has made itself illegitimate to hold public office, and the actions would have followed from there. This foundational step never happened. And now the country that was is, to a large extent, over. The moon is down.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you subscribe to independent sources of information instead. This week I'm suggesting you support Wikipedia, which is an open source of information—one that has been targeted by sad boy and famous rubbery megalomaniac Elon Musk specifically because it provides information without being owned.

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I know it's common to respond to such statements by saying that recognizing the illegitimacy of the Republican Party is unrealistic or impractical, or even dangerous—particularly since pursuing it would have resulted in extreme strife. It's not false to say that the course I lay out was unrealistic or impractical or dangerous, but it is wrong—wrong, because realism and practicality and danger are not reasons to abdicate the duty to do what needs to be done, even if what needs to be done is dangerous; not when not doing it means greater and more enduring danger; not when not doing it means surrender of all future questions of what will be realistic and practical to insurrectionist monsters who care nothing for law or standards or safety.

And treating an opposing party as illegitimate is often treated as not only impractical and unrealistic and dangerous, but electorally unwise. We're told that what the American people want is bipartisanship above all, civility above all, depolarization above all, adherence to the rules both written and unwritten above all. I don't think the evidence supports this. Treating an opposing party as illegitimate is actually a very successful tactic, if the history of this fading century is any indication, and there appears to be little if any political cost for engaging in this practice.

It's how this the illegitimate Republican party took power, for example.

In the wake of the 2008 election, the Republicans were in a similar place as the Democrats are now. They had lost the House and the Senate, and they had lost presidency by a lot more than they just won it, to a young and energetic candidate named Barack Obama. Obama was a Black person, as you may have heard. The response to this fact was seismic for a clear majority of white people, in that it appears to have broken their minds entirely.

The problem as I see it is that our culture is fundamentally white supremacist, and a lot of people realized that, even though Obama quickly proved to be a fairly centrist or even conservative person, the very fact that a Black person held the nation's highest office was corrosive to the project of white supremacy, and, if allowed to continue, would help corrode all the rest of the predatory capitalism and privilege bigotry that rested upon it. And corroding white supremacy risks bringing about an open and free pluralistic democratic society that truly holds all people to be equal, which is something that the majority of people considering themselves "white" have proved incontrovertibly they fear more than any other danger.

So it was that the Republican response to their epic loss was not to look within and see how they ought to change, but to treat Democratic rule as foundationally illegitimate. What has followed since that decision is nearly two decades of scorched earth: ignoring every gentlemen's agreement with Democrats, every unwritten rule that had made government work; sabotaging Democratic efforts wherever they could, at every level of government. They blocked every appointment they could. They investigated every rumor. They fought every loss with whatever tool they had before them. They encouraged their followers to engage in extrajudicial violence and celebrated those who did. All of it communicated very clearly the message: the Democratic Party is illegitimate, and any power they hold they hold illegitimately, especially now that they are led by a Black person.

All of this was evil and broken and corrosive, and we might be tempted to believe that what was evil and broken and corrosive about it was the Republican tactic of treating their opposition as illegitimate or their determination in pursuing their objectives. I don't think so. I think what made it all evil was the fact that the Republicans believe in evil principles—white supremacy and everything that rests upon it—and oppose good ones—equality under the law, and the idea of a government that exists for the thriving of human beings rather than profit, and so on. They engaged in their campaign of de-legitimacy of Democrats in order to attack the modern ideas of equality for all under the law, and in defense of the predatory capitalism and white supremacy and patriarchy and ablism and christian supremacy and oligarchical greed worship that forms the core of their ideology. Evil principles make them evil, not tactics or their determination.

Along with being evil, their campaign was one other thing: successful. Turn on the news today; you'll see. They're taking power now, using an apparatus—democracy—that they themselves hold illegitimate. So we see that American voters don't appear to give much of a shit about comity or rules or even the law, but they do seem to respond to people with principles, even if those principles are evil. There are a lot of voters who very much like American supremacy, who very much like the pursuit of oligarchical greed, who want to see the retreat of an open and diverse human community and the expansion of white supremacy, male supremacy, christian supremacy, wealth supremacy, and all the rest.

Obama had run a campaign on changing our society fundamentally. It's the only time in my life that Democrats have run such a campaign, incidentally, rather than trying to triangulate certain carefully-chosen progressive policies with a generally conservative center-right platform in order to capture moderate right-leaning voters by legitimizing their unfounded fears and bigotries. The latter strategy sometimes works, but very often doesn't. Obama's 2008 alternative strategy resulted in the only presidential landslide we've seen this century.

Despite his landslide Obama didn't govern as he had run, though. At every turn, he did his best to legitimize the concerns and fears of those opposing him as illegitimate. He pursued incremental change, offering a Republican plan for healthcare reform, in hopes that this legitimizing of Republican tactics would garner their support. He responded to Mitch McConnell's announcement that the Senate would not consider any Supreme Court nomination by nominating a conservative, Merrick Garland. None of this worked, because Republicans weren't concerned about points of agreement; they sought to make the larger point, which was: the Democratic Party is illegitimate, and any power they hold they hold illegitimately, especially now that they are led by a Black person.

There might be some lessons to draw here.

When you treat a party or person or idea as illegitimate, people start to believe in the illegitimacy, even if the target is legitimate. If you treat a party or a person or an idea as legitimate, people start to believe in the legitimacy, even if the target is illegitimate. When you pursue your principles with determination, people believe you have principles, and if they share those principles, they will give you their loyalty. As it turns out, people with evil principles are very loyal to the party that promises evil and delivers it.

There's a flip side to that coin. When a party actually is illegitimate, and you treat them as legitimate anyway, then people start to think you don't believe anything.

Obama will attend Donald Trump's inauguration, by the way.

Joe Biden greeted Donald Trump and his wife today with a big grin, by the way.

"Welcome home," he said.

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To a white supremacist like a Republican, having been led by a Black person is foundationally and permanently disqualifying for a party, and we've learned that this is a message that white supremacists like centrist American moderates are very receptive to.

As a humanist and a person who seeks to cultivate empathy and basic decency in his life, I think that being led by a Nazi is foundationally and permanently disqualifying for a party, and I can't help but wonder who might prove be receptive to such a message.

It's clear that most Democrats in seats of power today aren't going to act as if the Republican Party is illegitimate, even thought they are, and neither are any of our institutions. I can't help but wonder if the reason that trust in our institutions are at such low points is because none of them are willing to recognize as illegitimate a movement that has made itself illegitimate.

But we can recognize it even if our institutions won't. I believe that remembering the fact of Republican illegitimacy will lend us two things we will very much need in the coming years: moral clarity and direction of purpose.

Earlier in this essay I alluded to a higher law than the Constitution.

By this, I meant the law of humanity and the law of reality.

The law of humanity I would define as the idea that every human being is a unique and irreplaceable work of art carrying unsurpassable worth, and that there is nothing a human being can be done to lose that humanity, and nothing they must do to earn it.

The law of reality is the law governed by what can be observed and proved with evidence. It's how we know vaccines work, for example, and how we know that refusing vaccines results in disease and death. What you have decided you believe about vaccines doesn't touch the law of reality a bit, any more than deciding you don't believe in the law of gravity will allow you to fly.

These are, I think the deepest laws—so deep that they will show whether they are codified or not, so deep that anything that counters them makes itself illegitimate. Their truths prove themselves over time, simply by being true.

Supremacy is an anti-human lie, so supremacists will always tell on themselves by opposing these two deepest of laws. And this is why Republicans would be illegitimate even if our Constitution had no edict against insurrectionists.

There's power and then there is legitimacy.

You can have one without the other. The Nazi Party had power, but they were illegitimate, and so were their vile laws. The American Confederacy had power, but they were illegitimate, and so were their vile laws. Eventually the deepest laws told on them, and they collapse. So it is with the Republican Party.

So let us understand now that Donald Trump is illegitimate, and the entire Republican Party is illegitimate, and any Republican holding appointed or elected position of public trust does so illegitimately, and their anti-human rulings and laws and proclamations are illegitimate, and their instruments and methods for punishing those who don't comply with them are illegitimate, and every judge appointed by a Republican is an illegitimate judge, and every Cabinet member, too.

They are in power today—but they are only in power. They will have the ability able to force people to comply with their evil laws and practices, but they are not legitimate.

If we hold our allegiance to the deeper laws, we will have moral clarity to meet anything they bring. Our actions will all be specific to circumstance, because we all have different resources, different skills and abilities, different access to levers of power and influence. Some of us may be called to keep our positions of power or resources, some of us may be called to seek such positions or resources, some of us may be called to resign them. Some of us may be called to proclaim the truth in the public square. Some of us may be called to tell lies to keep human beings safe from others who would harm and kill them. We won't be united in our tactics or our methods, but we can all unite around a commitment to the deepest law: laws of reality, laws of humanity.

Hold to the deepest laws. Let those guide your actions. They will lend you a legitimacy that fascism can never touch.

And remember that the vile thing that's taking power today is only taking power. It can never take legitimacy, because it opposes the deepest laws, and stands illegitimate already.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out; he will not be able to lose himself on skag and skip out for beer during commercials.