It’s tempting to say nothing. With so much anger and nonsense everywhere, I keep telling myself, turn the other cheek. This, too, will pass. But eight years in, it hasn’t passed. It’s worsening. So as we celebrate the 248th birthday of our shared inheritance, a warning.
When thousands of American citizens storm the nation’s Capitol under a president’s orchestration, at his behest, and without his interference … when they wave Confederate flags while they pummel those who defend ours … when they erect a gallows to hang the vice president and the president tweets, “He probably deserves it” … I’m plumb out of cheeks to turn — top and bottom.
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But our institutions stood, right? Wrong. Every American on any side of any aisle should have risen up on Jan. 6, 2021, and every day after it to say what happened that day was inexcusable. Inexcusable. Instead, the Senate shirked its impeachment duty. And with depressingly few exceptions, Republicans — throughout this nation and throughout Montana — spent the next 3 1/2 years perpetuating the big lie and kowtowing to the Big Liar. They should know by now what virtually everyone in Trump’s White House learned the hard way: When you sell your soul to Donald Trump, there’s no buy-back clause in the contract.
But the cancer on the body politic that was the Trump presidency had metastasized. In Montana, we elected a governor who assaulted a reporter and lied about it, an attorney general now facing 41 ethical violations, a secretary of state who spent millions of taxpayer dollars in court to keep likely Democrats from voting, a state auditor who lied about his residency to get a cheaper hunting license, and a state school superintendent who … well, ‘nuff said. All in thrall to Trump.
We’ve spent the last two legislative sessions enacting a carpet-bagged agenda attacking libraries, schools, the court, local governments, and the autonomy of women and other marginalized groups while Montanans’ taxes sky-rocketed, health insurance evaporated, climate issues intensified, and housing escalated from problem to crisis.
The hate Trump legitimized is everywhere. The nonsensical theories that fuel it defy any rational discussion. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court that Trump packed — the Court the framers designed as a bulwark against partisanship — has become a political action committee.
Now, facing the prospect of yet another Trump term, we’re once again ignoring the havoc he shamelessly promises to wreak. This, too, is not going to pass. We’re at a crossroads. As Lincoln biographer Jon Meacham observed, “When an element within the nation seeks its own power and its own way over … any other factor, that element must be confronted. Politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law.”
That fatal moment is upon us, Americans. If we don’t meet it calmly, rationally, and unwaveringly, the whole experiment fails. The beacon of democracy sinks into the sea. The 248-year effort to become a more perfect union ends.
Instead, after an exhausted, sick, and overprepared president froze up in last week’s debate, pundits obsess about his “performance.” Sure, they acknowledge, his opponent in that debate lied outright or mischaracterized the truth every time he opened his mouth. But what’s new?
Leadership performance is not measured by the game show that presidential debates have become. It’s measured —over a lifetime of sacrifice, not 90 minutes of self-promotion — by the principles you stand for and strive for, prime among them liberty and justice for all.
As a re-energized Biden reminded a cheering crowd the day after the debate, Yeah, I’m getting old. I don’t walk, talk, or debate as well as I used to. But I know right from wrong.
I hope you do, too. Because birthdays aren’t guaranteed.
Mary Sheehy Moe
Mary Sheehy Moe is a retired educator and former state senator, school board trustee, and city commissioner from Great Falls. Now living in Missoula, she writes a weekly column for the Lee Montana.
