Their capacity to astonish
In a recent interview with Brian Tyler Cohen, Harvard-educated historian Heather Cox Richardson said, “If your roommate steals $20 from you, you’re mad at your roommate because you can conceive of that kind of a crime. But if you roommate breaks into your entire family’s bank account, sells their house, wipes out everybody’s retirement, takes everything, runs up the credit cards and so on, you don’t really have the language or an emotional groundwork to get mad at that person because it is so beyond anything you can imagine, you don’t have the tools to do that.”
Speaking of the Iberian Conquistadors as “sea pirates,” the late author Kurt Vonnegut once had something similar to say: “The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”
I think Richardson and Vonnegut are onto something here. I think that is the very emotional mechanism at work when we think about and talk about the MAGA Project 2025. We tell ourselves it is simply too outrageous, too extreme. No one could possibly do such a thing. Their capacity to astonish us with plans that evil makes us doubt such a thing could ever happen. Until it is much too late.
And yet, says Richardson, “And this is one of the things that [Donald] Trump has done when he continually comes out and says, ‘Yeah, I did that,’ or ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do this.’ people think, ‘Well, I must be misunderstanding it, because of course you wouldn’t [say that you] want to take over American democracy and replace it with a dictator, of course the Supreme Court wouldn’t take away a Constitutional right that has been recognised for almost fifty years, of course the Supreme Court wouldn’t give the president the right to commit crimes in office.’ And yet all of those things have actually happened.”
It’s also a normal human reaction to assume that because a thing has never happened before we automatically believe it never will. Prior to September 11, 2001, no significant act of terrorism had ever taken place on American soil. Many people believed for that reason alone it never would. When it finally did happen it was so shocking, so inconceivable, that many Americans to this day still don’t believe it.
But I believe that if Donald Trump is elected in November he will initiate the protocols of Project 2025. I believe, despite his denials of even knowing what Project 2025 is, , that’s exactly what he’s planning to do if he’s elected. And meanwhile MAGA is hard at work constructing the bureaucratic and ideological apparatus necessary to do just that.
We are fools if we think that Project 2025 will never happen. After all, many of us tell ourselves, nothing like that has ever happened to America before, nothing like that happened when Trump was president before. Yes, but that was before Trump was in danger of being indicted, convicted and sent to prison. That was before MAGA began infiltrating local, state and federal government. That was before SCOTUS gave Trump permission to commit crimes with impunity.. That was before MAGA and Trump became emboldened by the absence of swift and terrible consequences for many of his outrageously criminal transgressions while in office last time.
I am confident that the Harris-Walz juggernaut will sweep them into office in November, and we won’t have to worry about the protocols of the inimical Project 2025. I am also confident that Donald Trump will eventually go to prison. However, because the consequences of failure are so awful, so disastrous, I cannot allow my confidence to permit me to relax. In the final analysis, the Constitution and the laws of the land are mere words on pieces of paper. Those laws mean nothing at all if enough men and women are prepared to disregard them. We must not be taken unawares by their evil intent and their capacity to astonish.
That is why when we say you must vote like your life depends on it, it is no rhetorical exhortation. Usually when such rhetoric is employed in an election year it’s pure political hyperbole and nothing more. This is not one of those times. This time it’s real. Another Trump presidency would almost certainly be a mortal wound to American democracy. Don’t be deceived by your own incredulity. Their capacity to astonish is almost without limit.
The most important thing you can do this year, this decade, is to get out and vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.