The Last Week

I’m writing this on Saturday after one of the most momentous weeks in recent American history.

It was the week that the president of the United States tried to get the Secretary of State of Georgia to commit election fraud. He got caught on tape doing it. A couple of days later, after said president said the runoff election was “illegal”, the Republicans lost both Senate seats in Georgia and the US Senate majority. Then the next day the president incited his followers into an assault on the Capitol. The next morning, in defiance of the presidential mobs, the vice president and the Congress did their jobs and certified the election results that made Joe Biden president-elect. A couple of days after that the president’s Cabinet started resigning, there were across the board calls for his resignation, there is talk of invoking the 25th Amendment, and Trump has been banned by social media platforms, as have his loonier followers. God knows what will happen tonight.

All that in 7 days. Whole years have gone by without that much news. But how will it be seen in the pages of history? What will the week have started and what will it stop?

It will start the breakup of the Republican Party, as intelligent reasonable people demand the populists and Trump supporters be booted. It will start the Trumpian exit to a third party. It will start a political realignment. It will propel the New York state AG’s office into thinking it has carte blanche to prosecute Trump for business misdeeds.

It will stop the elective political future of Donald Trump. His brand is ruined, as normal people reel from his brand of childish egomania and seek adult leaders. Those who bizarrely see that brand as still ascendant, I’ve noticed, have taken to posting on social media the quote, in support of Trump mobs, “All that is necessary for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke said that.

What the badly educated automatons who scrawl that in support of mobs do not comprehend, and we actual Burkean conservatives do, is that Burke, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, wrote the preeminent conservative book against mobs and specifically against the mobs of revolutionary France. Thus quoting Burke in support of mobs is like asking for a kosher restaurant review from Hitler.

Just as their puzzling antipathy to the word “democracy’, though they champion the frothing egalitarian mobs who are at the forefront of pure democracies as opposed to the individuals who comprise the vanguard of reasoned representative Republics, betrays their nit picking ignorance, so does their hero worship beckon to Rome in 1926 or Berlin a decade later.

The last week unmasked these pitchfork populists, these cast of “Deliverance” dunces, these cornpone and codswallop-swallowing cretins for who they really are: sheep of the lowest order. The last week proved it that way. History will judge the same.