Why Don’t You Just Come Out Once and Scream It?

The title comes from a line in a Bob Dylan song called Positively 4th Street, where he accuses certain acquaintances of secretly hating, and then hiding their enmity behind an unconvincing facade.

Having witnessed Democracy (capital D) led up at the Supreme Court to a place of execution upon the guillotine of absolute Trump immunity, the line occurred to me as I listened to Justice Alito admonish that he did “not want to talk about the particulars of the case”. As if the orchestration of an elaborate, illegal, and violent coup attempt by Donald Trump were merely an outlandish hypothetical that need not bear on any decision at the court. As if the mere suggestion of presidential immunity is already beyond the pale and entirely destructive of the rule of law that, in 1776, made certain that we lacked a king on these democratic shores. In other words, the fact that they took the case and then seemed to look for nuance, spells terrible trouble for the Republic. There has never been, nor can there ever be any person placed above the law in a democracy. Otherwise, you are not a democracy.

Our brief experiment with participatory democracy may be drawing to a close. The Supreme Court seems ready to say that the president can murder people as long as he feels it is within his job description to do so. And that even a criminal mastermind like Trump would be above the law as president.

This news brings every rational American to the brink of despair. How are we to continue believing in a democracy that refuses to stand up for itself? How can we survive as a nation of laws when we have a Supreme Court that has no loyalty to the constitution, but only a keen desire to see Trump victorious?

The arid confines of the court make for a theater of probity, when in fact the SCOTUS bench is a boiling cauldron of corruptness and a firm belief that the nation ought no longer be a democracy. The Supreme Court has in effect flipped Democracy the bird in their fervor to install, as Commander-in-Chief, a rheumy-eyed, pussy-grabbing, Russophilic wanna-be dictator presently under criminal indictment for election fraud.

Of course, it’s possible the court decides the president does not have perfect immunity—even if there is no call whatsoever to grant any type of immunity. But this could only be 5-4 at best, as follows: Ketanji-Brown, Kagan, and Sotomayor are joined by Barrett—leaving Justice Roberts as the swing vote. Are you feeling as troubled about this swing voter as I am? Because if you are, you should also hope they rule before the election, because it may give Joe Biden the power to stay in office rather than hand over the keys to a dictator bent on never having another election.

We are living through nothing less than a textbook version of how democracy dies. The immediate circumstance finds us with millions of Americans having been bred to hate millions of other Americans. The immigrant is called an “animal” by Trump. The drag queen is called a “sex-groomer” by Marjorie Taylor Greene. And finally, as if we did not have enough idiocy in the public sphere, here comes the cry from a hundred college campuses that Israel has no right to exist, and that a murderous terror organization like Hamas is celebrated as a band of “freedom fighters” who just so happen to want to kill every Jew. From any rational perspective, the foundations of civil society are buckling under disinformation-fueled hate and manipulated outrage.

At the center of the fascist circle are senior officials (and non-officials) like Trump and his enablers: McConnell, Tuberville, Johnson, Jordan, Taylor Greene, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and a crew of smirking white supremacists who believe we had human rights figured out in the 14th century, who seem to believe that the Confederacy was not entirely wrong and that we have lost our way with having given the vote to women and non-whites.

They seem dedicated to the notion that the laws of the land shall be shaped and manipulated in a cynical manner such that they facilitate the installation of a dictator/king, a royal retinue, and a cabinet of loyal ministers not answerable to the electorate. This is how democracy died in Germany. It is how the Taliban ended democracy in Afghanistan. It’s also how Iran became a theocratic state: the mullahs were voted in and then decided they would never allow themselves to be voted out.

We will know soon enough whether we are going to have a functioning democracy—give it a few months, folks, and see whether we have installed a dictator.

But in the meantime, I keep thinking of the song that titled this essay. My question to these fascists, and of their apparent reluctance to just say they disagree with the Constitution and its checks and balances—and its flaws—and that they do not, in general, approve of universal suffrage, or freedom of religion, or freedom generally except for white Christian males: my question to them is “Why don’t you just come out once and scream it”?

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