By Chris Powell
Maybe President Trump’s greatest talent has been to bring out the worst in nearly everyone — not just his supporters, some of whom ransacked the Capitol the other day to stop Congress from formalizing the result of the presidential election, but also his opponents, whose own betrayal of decency has provided many excuses for Trump’s.
Amid the president’s contempt, sneering, mockery, cruelty, hatefulness, megalomania, narcissism, distortions, self-contradiction, ignorance, mental instability, and unfitness to hold authority over others, the country has become Weimar America, with proto-Nazis and Communists brawling in the street, even at the Capitol.
Trump’s contempt is what has resonated most with people. As government is more corrupt than ever and drained of meaning by posturing politicians, people are especially vulnerable to nihilism. Trump didn’t cause this but he has exploited it dangerously.
While the last-minute effort to impeach the president a second time won’t drive him from office and isn’t likely to disqualify him from another presidential candidacy, it at least may restrain him from more recklessness and subversion in the days left before the next president is inaugurated.
Even many Republicans in Congress must be sick of Trump’s demeanor, which has discredited the good things done during his administration as well as the opposition party the country and Connecticut will continue to need.
But as was indicated this week by a phenomenon at law schools around the country, the Trump years have done vast damage to politics and public life, prompting both left and right and large elements of journalism to abandon fairness and due process of law. Instead of trying to calm the hysteria, the president has stoked and reveled in it.
Thousands of law students and professors have just signed a petition originated at Yale University in New Haven calling for Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, both lawyers and Republicans, to be disbarred for challenging the count of the presidential electoral vote in Congress.
The senators had every right to do this, a right guaranteed in two places in the Constitution, and Democratic senators had done the same after recent elections without being denounced.
The law school petition charges falsely that the challenges by Hawley and Cruz incited the riot at the Capitol, though it was the president who called his supporters to Washington and told them to “fight” before ushering them along to try to intimidate and disrupt the electoral vote count.
But these days it is not enough to defeat one’s adversaries politically. No, political disagreement is now considered cause to strip away their very livelihoods, and this hateful belief infests not just the country’s brawl-ridden streets but also its law schools.
The law students and their professors seem to have missed the warning from playwright Robert Bolt’s resurrection of the great medieval English lawyer, judge, churchman, and martyr Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons.” Bolt’s More says:
“And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.“
For someday the Devil’s side may be in power and eager to abuse it.
The law students and their professors also seem to have missed the similar warning from the great American judge Learned Hand.
In the middle of World War II Hand reflected on the spirit of liberty. The judge said it “is not the ruthless, the unbridled will. It is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow. … The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right.“
That is, it is a spirit that will not deny the liberty of others no matter how profound the political disagreement. This spirit will remain in danger even as the Trump years come to an end.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 