You Say You Want a Revolution

...

"Hold my beer, I'm going in"

As we watch the good ship Trump slip beneath the waves in the last weeks before his ultimate resounding humiliation, we are seeing just how foul and grotesque his behavior can be. By claiming that the election is somehow 'rigged', he is calling into question the basic functioning of democratic governance - the peaceful transfer of legitimate political power. American politicians have always been careful to observe the niceties of our democratic electoral system, conceding their loss and congratulating the winner as the legitimate choice of the citizens. Even Richard Nixon, in resigning the presidency, was careful to remark on how the system functioned even in extremis. And Al Gore - up by a million votes and apparently leading the Florida recount - stood down when the supreme court inserted itself into the race and chose a winner.

But not this year. Not this cycle. Not this candidate. When your most energized supporters are fueled by what should be easily debunked falsehoods piled one on top of the next, the idea that they would be willing to accept a loss that Trump himself is not willing to concede is clearly a non-starter. Some will merely shriek their anger at their country, their democratic system and their new president, while others can be expected to make increasingly violent threats to overturn the 'tyranny' they're sure they're seeing but somehow can't quite describe. When you couple this particular movement's butthurt with the decades-long process of stoking a particularly unique kind of spittle flecked hatred of all things Clinton and an ideological attachment to firearms, well, the fear of a violent response seems well justified.

And sure enough, we are seeing more and more Trumpist voters promising to take up arms, to go to war, to rebel against a system that was so corrupt and so co-opted that their candidate somehow didn't win an election in which he has never had a polling lead. But we need to think this through a bit before we give in to our darkest fears of Aleppo come to Peoria. Did you ever notice that when a person makes a death threat, that person virtually never follows through? It's as if the point of the exercise was NOT actually murder after all, but merely to shriek one's anger and frighten and intimidate one's foes. Conversely, when someone DOES actually commit a violent act, they usually did what they could to prevent their plans from being discovered before they acted. These people making these threats? Like Ted Nugent's famous promise to end up 'dead or in jail' if Barack Obama was reelected, we can safely discount them as the 'all talk and no gunpowder' end of the spectrum.

Beyond that, it is informative to look at the level of desperation that has historically driven citizens to take up arms in rebellion against their government. It is hunger, disease, extreme poverty, brutal oppression - the precise things we are NOT seeing in America in the early 21st century, despite the vague claims of 'tyranny' invoked by people, most often shirtless tattooed drunk white men in trailer parks. But that's the thing - even in trailer parks, Americans have jobs and televisions and families and barbeques and beer. That's a lot to give up to go to war against the most powerful military in the world over various tyrannical acts you can't quite describe, but are certain are taking place. None of your friends or family have been killed, imprisoned or tortured. Your children are in school. Your neighborhoods are intact, with clean water and well stocked grocery stores. When the time comes to actually load the magazines and start the killing, these things are going to seem even more important, and Americans will decide, once again, to call the president foul names (oddly still legal in the face of his tyranny) and open another beer.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are some who will do awful things. The Oklahoma Federal Building bombing in the spring of 1995 (unsurprisingly during the last Clinton administration) was a real mass-casualty act of terrorism, and we can't pretend there won't be more like it in upcoming years. The rhetoric HAS gotten hotter, and the hatred has been growing for decades. But those kinds of events are always a possibility - the strident calls to violent rebellion we're hearing from the white nationalist right during (and after) this particuarly ugly presidential campaign can safely be ignored. The one you never hear shrieking his hatred at the administration is the one you need to worry about...
...