After T****, What?

That's the question that haunts me right now.

In the next-fifteen-minutes focus of national politics, the overriding topic of discussion of whether D****** T**** can be removed from office, and how that can be done best.  How far, and for how long, should the impeachment process go?  And if T**** is not impeached, can he be beaten at the polls?  Who can do that?  Who is tough enough?  Or clever enough?  Or both?

And these are the questions that overshadow the process of selecting a candidate to face T**** next November, even though the Democrats vying to do so are simultaneously trying to not only make the case that they can successfully take him on, but that they have the right ideas about what to do once they have replaced him in the White House.  About health care, about paying for college, about fighting global warming, about re-asserting our place in world politics, about almost every issue anyone could name.

But all of that assumes that it's possible for America to go back to life before T****, to a time when, at least once in a long while, it was possible for partisans to look at one another and see fellow patriots, rather than a fifth column that needed to be destroyed.

I'd like to believe that we can.  I'm trying as hard as I can to do it.

But I'm not succeeding, and, frankly, I'm on the brink of giving up.

And I recently discovered that I'm not alone.

Garrett Epps, a law professor at my wife's alma mater, the University of Baltimore, recently had this article published in the Atlantic Monthly.  It raises the question of whether or not the America we've lived in during the past three years is, fundamentally, the America that existed all along:  a nation of pious hypocrites, who wear Sunday manners as the thinnest of social and moral veneers, barely holding back selfish, destructive passions that, at their very centers, are who they really are and what they really want.  It does so through the framework of summarizing Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," a short story about a young man who is haunted until the end of his life by a vision of the people he knows, even his wife, as being worshippers of Satan, underneath the mask of Puritanical propriety.

Epps goes on from there to list many of the most egregious political sins committed most recently by Republicans on behalf of T****, and finds himself wondering whether we are all like Brown, unable to find a path away from his vision back to a place where he could once again believe in the fundamental goodness of the people he know, even the members of his own family.

I wonder that as well.  I worry that T**** is the snake that has found a way into the Eden of our democracy, and whose presence, even after retribution and punishment, will end up expelling us all from it, by exposing not all of us, but far too many of us, as putting many other things before their identification as Americans, if indeed they still identify with America at all.

That characterization of many of our fellow countrypeople is well illustrated by the examples cited by Epps in his article.  For me, however, it has been reinforced beyond destruction by the conduct of congressional Republicans, and their enablers in the conservative echo chamber, in reacting to the testimony of witnesses during the public, televised hearings of the House Intelligence Committee this past week.  Twelve members of the American foreign service operation--some career public servants, some political appointees put into place by T**** himself--testified in public and provided a clear, credible narrative of T****'s attempt to use military assistance to a foreign ally as leverage to help his own political fortunes in running for re-election.

And then, two amazing things happened.

First, the Republican members on the committee attempted, unsuccessfully, to attack the facts--or, if not attack them, attempt to manipulate to the point at which they could confuse the public about what was actually said by the witnesses.  And the right-wing chattering classes were only to happy to participate, even to pile on, in helping to sow the confusion as widely as possible.  Not one single Republican on the committee--indeed, not one single Republican in Washington--was willing to dissent from, or stand up to in any way, this systematic process of disinformation.

The second amazing thing, however, is far worse.  If recent polling is to believed, the disinformation campaign has largely worked.  Despite the televised testimony, public opinion is largely split on the question of whether or not to go forward with impeachment.

If congressional Democrats do go forward with it, as they now appear poised to be, it is very possible that additional evidence may yet break the balance of public opinion in favor of going forward at least with a trial in the Senate, and perhaps even a two-thirds vote against T**** on at least one article of impeachment--or, at least, a majority of Senate votes that would not remove him from office, but damage his political viability past the point of even Rupert Murdoch's ability to repair it.  If in fact that happens, it may yet be the case that public opinion as expressed at the polls will be enough to end T****'s presidency.

But what if it isn't?

What if, in fact, public opinion swings the other way?

What if a large plurality, even a majority, of Americans decide that this is really nothing more than the political witch-hunt T**** and his followers want them to believe it is?

What if they decide, in consequence, to not only re-elect him, but also give his party large majorities in both houses of Congress, and in statehouses across the country?  And what if, as now seems likely, those political outcomes are facilitated by foreign interests to whom T****, with the aid and connivance of his supporters inside and outside Washington, has effectively sold off the people he is charged with protecting, the Constitution, and the ultimate sacrifices of millions of men and women, in and out of uniform?

What if, in our own way as a people, are we facing Goodman Brown's dilemma?  We will have discovered that the majority of us are not only allied with the rest of us, but is cheerfully willing to sell all of us to the devil--figuratively and literally.

Even worse, as Epps himself points out, we have already discovered that a large percentage of us is willing to do all of these things.  If it is the case that the Democrats prevail on all election levels next fall, how will they be able to govern, when so many of the people they will be charged with governing are in fact committed to doing anything they can to destroy them?  And, unless everyone starts wearing MAGA hats or Resistance buttons to show where they stand, how can we tell who is friend or foe?

And, if the MAGA-hat wearers decide that you are the foe, how far are they willing to go in order to act on that conviction?  The increase in gun violence during the decade that is about to end gives me no reassurance that their are any limits to their actions.

Goodman Brown woke up from his nightmare, only to discover that, for him, it never truly ended.  I fear that, come next November, those of us opposed to T****ism, regarding of political affiliation, and everything that T****ism represents, will share his lifelong horror.

I hope and pray with all of my heart that I am wrong.