The Wedge of Conspiracy Theories & Reasonable Doubt
New York Times’ Editorial Board member Jesse Wegman quoted one of the founders of our Republic in this morning’s news. “‘The fundamental maxim of republican government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 22, ‘requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.’”
He also cited this. “‘Take the Supreme Court,’ said Akhil Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School. ‘No one thinks that when it’s 5 to 4, the four lose and the five win. Everyone understands that five beats four. It goes without saying.’”
Mr. Wegman also maintains that perhaps it no longer goes without saying. Majority rule was a maxim oft-invoked during my childhood. I had two younger brothers at the time, Boston twins, and it was a de facto reality that they consistently formed a bloc, voted against me—the lone girl, if the eldest—and chanted Majority rule when I balked. It was inarguable.
Opinion Columnist Charles M. Blow asserts that the actions of both Mr. Trump and the Republican lemmings who are afraid of him are “nothing short of an attempt at a bloodless coup.”
But, both alarmingly and sadly, it hasn’t been bloodless. There were four stabbings in Washington over the weekend. I lay the responsibility for the blood-letting, even if was only one drop, at the flat, bone-spurred feet of its cause, Donald J. Trump. Because he has remained potently silent in the face of violence enacted by his base against Black Lives Matter activists.
The majority of Americans agree with much of the agenda of BLM. A minority disagrees. Mr. Blow again, “Trump wants to operate a dictatorship behind a veil of democracy. He wants to wield power without winning it legitimately. He wants to manipulate his mob and prioritize it above the masses who oppose him.”
The Electoral College “meets” today. Ordinarily, a rubber-stamp of election results, now it’s patently dangerous to be an elector. The Times wrote a hand-patting piece meant to assuage the worries of the majority of the populace who voted for President-Elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris. I winced. I wished they’d taken it more seriously.
Mr. Wegman writes, “Boil it down to three pillars of democratic self-governance: equality, legitimacy and accountability. … First, and most fundamental: Majority rule is the only rule that treats all people as political equals. … There is a second reason majority rule is critical: It bestows legitimacy on the system. … Finally, majority rule ensures electoral accountability.”
Equality. Legitimacy. Accountability.
All three of these fundamental pillars have been subject to political earth-quakery. [Yes, I made it up.] The actions of 45 and his minions bespeak very little to do with equality except in the some-(cough, cough, allow me to interject, some-white-male)-people-are-more-equal-than-others sense. I will say I was pleasantly surprised to read that he cancelled the intended Vaccines for The White House Staff First plan. Something equal? No. Something decent? Maybe. I’m gasping.
The legitimacy of our election was challenged by the white, patriarchal boy-os again and again, and still, there are Republicans planning some sort of objection and possible coup on January 6th when Congress must certify the vote of the Electoral College. I feel like a kid in school again praying for the last day to come faster.
The accountability of our election has been completely derailed by the consistent application of the latest favorite wedge of the minoritarians—the conspiracy. The conspiracy wedge, and make no mistake, it is precisely that, perverts another pillar of our democracy, this time of the judiciary. We know its short-hand form: Reasonable Doubt.
Google tells me, “A reasonable doubt exists when a factfinder cannot say with moral certainty that a person is guilty or a particular fact exists.” Reasonable doubt underlies conspiracy wedges.
Sabrina Tavernise, writing about Saturday’s D.C. demonstration interviewed one of the participants, “‘Trump’s over,’ said [John Kenney, 55, a test prep instructor in Los Angeles who voted for Mr. Trump.] ‘He’s irrelevant. But the Republicans aren’t going to forget this. The resentments are going to remain.’”
She posits, “What happens next is a critical question for American democracy. What will become of the belief that the 2020 presidential election was in some way illegitimate? Will it melt away along with Mr. Trump’s prospects for winning, and vanish completely when Mr. Biden is inaugurated? Or will it fester, nursed by Republicans in power, and metastasize into something that could be a rallying cry for nationalists for years to come?”
Metastatic disease is a chilling metaphor for what our entire country faces right now. Personally, I agree with Maya Phillips, a serious Dickens’ A Christmas Carol aficionado. “But this year, as I indulged in a holiday buffet of different productions of ‘A Christmas Carol,’ I found not just a story of redemption and the Christmas spirit but a study of what it truly means to be a decent person in a community.”
We are encountering this option for decency—in the face of every wedge, every conspiracy, every reasonable doubt—again and again this Season of Light.
Ms. Phillips again, “Dickens’s tale, like many of his others, is grounded in progressive politics, and I saw that especially now, in every version I encountered this year, as coronavirus numbers remain high. This isn’t just about Scrooge; it’s about a society that values profit over humanity, fails to hold its most privileged accountable and refuses to support its most vulnerable.”
Take the politics out of the equation, Beloved. Leave the clarion call to decency. How will you answer it?
It was no mistake that today’s Word-A-Day by Anu Garg was “irrefutable, adjective: Impossible to deny or disprove; indisputable.” Decency is what is at stake.
His daily email always ends with “A THOUGHT FOR TODAY.” Today is from writer Ellen Jane Willis (14 December 1941-2006), and it made chills run up and down my spine.
“In its original literal sense, ‘moral relativism’ is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one’s children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined ‘relative’ as ‘arbitrary.’”
Mr. Blow ends his essay, “Yes, Trump is attempting a coup, whether or not you want to call it that. But, no matter what you choose to call something, it will still be what it is.”
Equality, Beloved. Legitimacy, Beloved. Accountability, Beloved. We all have some serious personal choices to make as Mr. Biden becomes president. So far, a majority of us have been audience members to the acting out behaviors of the minority. I’m with Ms. Phillips’ A Christmas Carol question, “After all, what else is an audience but a community?”
This community, these United States, are ours to live in and care for. Mr. Wegman again, “Thomas Jefferson, in his first Inaugural Address, said the ‘sacred principle’ is that ‘the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail.’ In the same breath he emphasized that political minorities also have rights that require protection. Those protections exist in the design of our government and in the guarantees of the Constitution, as applied by the courts. The point is that minorities can be protected at the same time that majorities elect leaders to represent us in the first place.”
This is the new reality we can live in if we choose it, Beloved. We’ve all been in the majority before. We’ve all been in the minority before. We will all be in both places again. The choice seems like a formality to me. Let’s elect to live in community—common unity—and care for all of us all the time so we make a world that works for everyone, shall we?
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her website is susancorso.com.