The Big Disconnect
The world is spinning off in two different directions at the same time. What I can’t really figure out is whether or not this is what always happens, if it is a short-lived quirk, or if this is a new phenomenon that sets the tone for what we have to live with going forward. We have all heard about and experienced the divisiveness in our society these days. In the extreme, the divide is defined by liberal and conservative leanings, but that does such a mediocre job of describing things as they stand. The more difficult problem in some ways is the depth of commitment to their respective stands that people have taken with their positions. It has been said that the divide has created rifts in families and friendships that have not been experienced since the Civil War, when brothers found themselves across the battlefield from brothers. It is such a rift that emotions have run to extremes and family members have found themselves forced to galvanize their position rather than concede their regret or their mistake when their position takes an obvious turn towards a clear and contrary position. That is what we have called the moment of truth when people are “doubling down” on their positions rather than conceding defeat. Nothing exemplifies this more than Donald Trump’s stand about the 2020 election outcome. In the law, this is called willful blindness or willful ignorance and it is considered an act of bad faith to avoid becoming informed about something so as to avoid having to make undesirable decisions that such information might prompt.
Yesterday, John Eastman, the lawyer representing Donald Trump during the attempted coup and insurrection that led to the January 6th attack on the Capital, surrendered himself on his indictment to the Fulton County jail. When asked afterwards if he still believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, he enthusiastically said that he certainly did. The immediate reaction from the legal community on MSNBC was that he made that statement (something most savvy defendants wouldn’t do except through counsel) specifically to stake out his position that he truly believes that what he and others did was justified by virtue of their strongly held belief that there had been meaningful election fraud by the Democrats. The fact that this had been disabused in over 60 court filings and adjudications would seem to be irrelevant to that case. But once you have taken your action, the strongest legal stance is to say that you believed you were justified regardless. The legal pundits go on to explain that it will be very hard for Eastman to prevail in that tactic (as it will be for Donald Trump to do so) because of the abundance of evidence that he was presented with sufficient evidence that a reasonable man would have recognized that there was no truth to the election fraud concept. To ignore overwhelming evidence and advice (from agency officials like Bill Barr, Christopher Kreb, and Pat Cipallone) is considered by most legal scholars as a perfect example of willful ignorance and it is a losing tactic.
The people most ensnared in the web of coup lies seem to be Trump, Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, who just this morning is headed to Fulton County jail and is telling all the reporters that will listen that he still strongly believes that the election was stolen. One immediately comes to the conclusion that these people have nothing to lose either in terms of credibility or in terms of looking stupid because their legal defense is narrowing to them saying that they believed what they say and therefore were justified in their other actions. Strangely enough Giuliani has already had to claim that he knew and willfully lied about certain things during those pre-January 6th days when he spoke about poll worker fraud by Ruby Freeman. That admission was important in his civil case, but critically undermines his claims of ignorance, and makes them seem quite willful. Another of the defendants in the Fani Willis indictments is Sidney Powell, who was perhaps the most vocal and outrageous election deniers in that moment of confusion. In her civil lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, one of her defenses has been that no reasonable person would have believed her claims. When her turn comes to present herself at the Fulton County jail, it will be interesting to see if she claims that she still believes the election was stolen. On the one hand, she could use the willful ignorance stance to justify her actions and on the other hand it would directly screw her up in her civil litigation. I suppose Rudy saying that he lied about Ruby is narrower than Sidney’s legal posture. Nevertheless, you see that the last hope of these desperately galvanized people is to claim that they honestly believed what they believed rather than opportunistically and tactically claim to have believed that to justify their nefarious deeds.
The opposite side of all this denial is extreme awareness of your surroundings and in the vernacular of today’s progressive movement at the opposite end of spectrum of this election denial is the concept of being or staying woke. The etymology of woke dates back to the 1940s in American Black culture. It serves two purposes. First of all is the sense that black people need to stay constantly vigilant of their surroundings because their status in American culture is such that they never know where the next threat might come from. That seems a very understandable and practical modus operandi in modern American society. The other thing that woke has been taken to mean is that everyone, especially Black Americans, need to stay tuned into what is happening to their rights and privileges in our society since there is a trend through voter suppression, state legislation and judicial pronouncements to impinge upon those rights and privileges. Strangely enough, woke was a sort of casual reference made by black people and progressives and not a rallying cry, and yet now, the right has taken it up as an anti-woke rallying cry to be sure.
Think about that for a minute. The right is working hard to double down and deny and in so doing, adhering to a legal principle ignoring awareness of the truth. At the same time, the left is trying to stay vigilant and hyper-aware of their surroundings and reality. That, in turn, is the major source of the right’s biggest cultural problem with the left, that they are too woke, or by definition too aware and vigilant about what the world is trying to do to them.
When watching Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders as a member of Parliament for Birmingham, he explains to someone that the extreme left and the extreme right approach one another and that the political spectrum is really not linear, but far more circular. Actually, I would only buy that if we said rather than circular, it turns into a mobius strip, turning in on itself. Well, woke seems to be just such an inverted concept in the political world today. The big disconnect between being willfully ignorant and woke may be more connected in a perverse sort of way.