FLAT EARTHERS, BIG-BANGERS, AND THE RISKS GOING FORWARD

A week and a day ago, America voted and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won.   They are now the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect of the United States.  While some votes remain to be counted and their vote totals will therefore rise, we know at this moment that 76,997,481 voted for them and that, on January 20, 2021, at high noon in Washington, DC, Donald Trump will no longer be President.

That is the good news.

Here is the bad.

71,926,283 voted for Trump.

In the wake of his defeat, Trump has for the past week tweeted out an unending string of lies claiming he won the election.  He has made unproven and unevidenced assertions that illegal votes were counted and that the election itself was marred by fraud in critical states (though never in the ones he won or, apparently, in any districts where the GOP won House or Senate seats).  He has also initiated a host of lawsuits making the same unspecified claims, all of which are now before the courts, many of which have already been dismissed, and none of which have either a basis in fact or the ability to overturn the result.

In a national opinion survey conducted from last Saturday to yesterday by Reuters/Ipsos, 79% said they believed Biden won the election, 13% said the election had not yet been decided, 3% said they thought Trump won and 5% said they did not know.  If so, 97% of the country is telling us that Donald Trump is . . .

Nuts.

It is more or less a given in this country that 97% of us can never agree on anything.  

In 2018, a YouGov.com poll found that only 84% of those surveyed "have always believed the earth is round".  Though only 2% reported they "have always believed the earth is flat", 7% reported that they had "recently" become "skeptical" one way or the other and 7% said they "weren't sure" or didn't know.  When the internet lit up with a partial report, based on that poll, that a third of millennials thought the earth flat, outrage was immediate -- only 4% of them thought that; the other 29% were skeptical or not sure.

But c'mon.

How can anyone be "skeptical" . . . 

Or "not sure".

On the flat earth question?

There are, of course, many questions on which disagreement is both predictable and to be expected.  

Take, for example, the debate between creationism and evolution.

A July 2019 Gallup poll reported that 40% of Americans believe in a so-called “pure” form of creationism in which God alone created the universe and us roughly 10,000 years ago.  In that same poll, the rest reported that humans evolved over millions of years.  23% said that happened without God's assistance.  33% said it occurred with divine assistance.

I'm in that last group.

I believe in the big bang theory.  I think the universe started gazillions of years ago in that instantaneous explosion and that ever since it has been expanding and evolving.  I believe we humans represent a mere nano-second on that time-line and that our forebears were apes.  I believe -- with Einstein -- that if we could run at the speed of light, we would . . .

Out-run time.

And I believe that when we die . . .

We finally do.

I believe all that because I also believe in God, the Divine Pre-Banger as it were , the Aristotelian first cause that set it all in motion. I believe that all those scientific laws we keep discovering, the ones Stephen Hawking and his friends won Nobel Prizes elucidating and writing books about, could not exist without Him or Her or It.  And I believe that the bright light reported by those who have approached death but returned to tell us about it is . . .

God winking.  

Inviting us to that other side of the space-time continuum.

When pressed to disaffirm any of these beliefs, I can't.  

Not because they are false.  

Or true. 

In fact, they are neither.

They are just unknowable.

The results of the recent election, however, are neither unknown nor unknowable. Biden and Harris won. Trump and Pence lost.  That the vast majority -- in fact, at this point all but three -- of the GOP's Congressional caucus refuse to say so at this point does not make it so.  Most of them privately admit the gig is up for Trump.  They know the law suits are just the most recent examples of the President's narcissism and petulance, that none of them can overturn the outcome and that collectively, therefore, they are simply a waste of time.

They also know that what Trump is doing is dangerous.

Perhaps fatally so.

There is nothing ineluctable about democracy or the American republic.  Unlike the Big Bang, it was an act of men, not God. Like the Big Bang, however, it contains its own set of unknowables that make it work.  These are the unwritten traditions and norms that, over time, have stopped the experiment from imploding.  In 1800, after he lost the Presidency to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams thought he had been robbed by an ignorant mob of the unschooled and uninformed.  He could have told his Federalist supporters to hit the streets and undo the perceived wrong.

Instead, he went home to Massachusetts and cooled off.

In so doing, he birthed the tradition that power is to be transferred peacefully when the opposition beats you.  And with one exception, that tradition has been followed ever since.  By Adams's son in 1828, Van Buren in 1840, Cleveland in 1888, Hoover in 1932, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980 and Bush in 1992. The exception was 1860 when the south refused to tolerate Lincoln.  As a consequence, 720,00 Americans died in the Civil War.

Trump does not advocate violence but he flirts with it.  Over the past week, the violent, white supremacist Proud Boys claimed that Trump's infamous "stand-back and stand-by" pronunciamento from the first presidential debate -- a statement widely derided at the time as a presidential permission slip in waiting -- had been "rescinded", and though on-line threats have not actually materialized since then, neither have they evaporated.  

This, moreover, is the Trump way.  

Every planet of reality -- counting and certifying the vote, conceding the election, funding and undertaking the transition a mere 70 days away, the normal day to day functioning of the federal departments, even proscriptions against violence -- must orbit around the sun of his own narcissistic fictions and lies.  

If you dissent or even demur, you are removed.  

Two days ago, the Defense Secretary was fired, throwing the country's national security apparatus into disarray. The head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, is reportedly on the chopping block. The Attorney General remains in office, probably because he authorized the DOJ to investigate any ostensibly "substantial" irregularities in last week's vote count.  Though this was not all of what Trump wanted, it for now apparently will do.  In response, Richard Pilger, the director of the elections crimes branch in DOJ's Public Integrity Section, resigned. Said Pilger: the "new policy abrogate[es] the forty-year old Non-Interference Policy for ballot fraud investigations in the period prior to elections becoming certified and uncontested."

The 71.9 million who voted for Trump for the most part do not believe he won but also do not care that he has refused to concede or has settled on frivolous legal maneuvers for ends unknown to all but his embittered psyche. In this, they are behaving true to form.  They did not care about the 20,000 plus lies, or bribing the Ukrainian President to start a phony investigation of Biden, or separating the children from their parents at the border, or the Access Hollywood comments, or the two dozen sexual harassment claims.  They did not even care about his rank incompetence on Covid.

How is that possible?

Are they all flat-earthers denying reality or at least skeptical enough about it that the Trumps of the world now get a chance they would otherwise be denied and can hold all of us hostage in the meantime?

Or are they big-bangers, secure in their faith that controlling the Senate and the Supreme Court outweighs any risks that shattering long-practiced traditions entails?

I do not know.

The part of me that celebrates is grateful that 76.9 million of my neighbors got rid of Trump, a cancer on democracy.  The part of me that worries is that 71.9 million of them didn't.   I have Facebooked with them, tweeted with them, talked with them, and am even related to and love some of them.

I just do not understand them anymore.