The inside story
‘ The calls are coming from inside the house.” This precellphone urban legend and horror-movie trope used to haunt my head and oscillate my guts when I babysat as a teen. In case it's not familiar, the story goes like this: phone rings, babysitter answers, creepiest voice ever says, “Check the kids.” Calls keep coming, so freaked-out babysitter calls the police, who trace the call and send the sitter off the deep end with the news that the existential threat is in the building.
It has long been argued that if US democracy is ever felled, the axe will be Americanmade and swung. That’s pretty much where we are at present, with core elements of what we used to call the lunatic fringe now running the Republican asylum. This includes the ravings of many outside government, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, whose podcast has millions of listeners. Bannon supports Vladimir Putin because “he’s anti-woke”, and suggested to Fox News' Tucker Carlson that Dr Anthony Fauci should be beheaded.
It’s hard to pick one from Carlson’s oeuvre – they’re all so compellingly nuts – but I’m particularly fond of his pride in the US standing alone against “the global tyranny of the metric system”. Before you dismiss him, understand that he has the highest-rated prime-time cable news show in US history – 4.5 million nightly viewers.
But Donald Trump so slimed our body politic that the lunatic fringe has seeped into every crevice of our legislative bodies. Recently, Senator Rick Scott of – where else – Florida, introduced an 11-point plan to “rescue America”. It features many of the greatest and most irrelevant hits of the irresponsible right, from forcing kids to salute the flag every morning – they hate life-saving vaccine mandates, but they’re fine with mandating abject, unquestioning loyalty to fabric swatches – to declaring that there are only two acceptable genders.
The details of Scott’s plan were less notable than its existence. The party’s leader in the Senate, famed Machiavelli-impersonator Mitch McConnell, was livid that anyone would release a Republican agenda before the party regains its House and Senate majorities.
McConnell knows most of his plan – tax breaks for rich people, knee-capping of all environmental regulation, bigger tax breaks for even richer people – is wildly unpopular, and as such should be kept quiet.
How crazy have things got when the leader of a major political party in a democracy says vote for us and we’ll tell you what we’ll do, but not until after we win? That’s like your doctor saying take two of these twice a day and I’ll tell you what’s in them in six months if you’re still around.
What Trump did in all of his malevolent, unwitting wizardry was to so disfigure political norms that what was once a disturbing but recognisable political battlefield now looks like a Jackson Pollock reject. It’s hard to win the ideas argument when such things as truth, facts, maths and science are unwelcome
What was once a disturbing but recognisable political battlefield now looks like a Jackson Pollock reject.
guests. And while Trump, Scott and the other churlish champions of autocracy grab national headlines, their minions are systematically dismantling democracy at state and local levels.
Throughout this sixyear nightmare, I have held to my lifelong belief in the marketplace of ideas: that a true democracy not only tolerates but also welcomes all ideas, even the most odious, confident that the best ideas will win out. It’s why you let neo-Nazis march in Jewish neighbourhoods in Chicago, and why you let white supremacists march near the US Capitol.
Okay, so that last one didn’t turn out so well, and I’m no longer so sure what I believe in. The laws of political gravity no longer seem to work, and that’s every bit as unsettling as it sounds. The incessant ringing from the right is drowning out all rational voices. And every last decibel is coming from inside the house. ▮