Emperor's Wardrobe Day

Spoiler Warning: I'm going to speak of the ending of a certain fairy tale here, so if it's something you've waited your whole live to read, you'll want to stop when it's mentioned and go read it before continuing on. —kmp

So we're on the same page

In the well-known Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes, the emperor is sold a garment that is said to be invisible to stupid people. No one wants to seem stupid, so no one tells the emperor there is no garment at all. He just walks around naked and everyone tells him how great his outfit is. It takes an innocent child to finally break the spell by blurting out what should have been obvious to everyone all along, but that everyone was afraid to say: the emperor is the stupid one, and they have all been enablers. The story doesn't quite end there, but that's as much as I want to rely on for here.

People have sometimes used the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor for the dark spell that Donald Trump has cast upon the Republican party (GOP). In the early days, I think everyone was looking around expectantly for such a Deus ex machina ending to the otherwise bottomless pit that is Trump's daily sinking to new lows. But no GOP leader stepped forward to play the role of the innocent.

The cancer has mestastasized

Some say there were never any innocent leaders in the GOP. Others say they lost their innocence over time or through specific actions. For our purposes here, it doesn't matter. Actions by single individuals at this point are unlikely to work.

It's commonly suggested that people are afraid to act. I'm sure fear is involved. But too often it's offered not just as explanation, but excuse. People worry they might lose their job, or that they might face physical violence. They cite danger to their families. And I don't disagree there are risks.

But these leaders are the ones we trust to make weighty decisions for our government. They decide who will get medical care and who will not. They decide who will be sent to war. They decide who qualifies for financial aid late in life, or after a storm. They hold the lives of others in their hands every day. And others accept that it's proper for them to do this, at least collectively, because we have a government by and for We The People.

Under our system of government—and I mean as it's intended, not as it's been perverted by recent decisions by a corrupted Supreme Court —those in our government are not special people, better than us. They are just us, charged for a time for performing actions in our interest. The reason, under the original design, that we might trust them with all these life-or-death decisions is that we know those decisions apply to them, as well. They ask some of us to take occasional risks in the name of society, for example, because they know they are subject to those same risks.

I would say there is already a civil war, a battle to undermine and restructure government through mechanisms that are not ordinary governmental consensus process. Wars are often fought with guns, but not always. In The Art of War, written by famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who lived around the 5th century B.C., there is a recurrent theme of minimizing unnecessary resource expenditures, and only resorting to armies as a last resort. “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle,” he says.

Some say that some element of government has always operated behind the scenes in ways that make democratic control an illusion. I argue that some changes have made even that process far worse. Maybe it's just that with each step, it all gets worse, and after a while the exponential nature of the growth of evil is too hard to ignore.

All hands on deck

There's an election coming up. It matters like no other. Voting may not fix everything, but it's important to vote, and to vote for Democracy. That means voting for the Democrats.

I emphasize that I'm not a card-carrying Democrat myself. I'm a political independent. I don't even always agree with the Democrats on policy. But lately, policy is not the issue. Having a democratic government at all is the issue. This is a matter that is beyond policy. It's about survival of our way of life. One of two parties will win: The Republicans, promising to bring Democracy down. Or the Democrats, promising to safeguard Democracy. That choice seems clear to me. It should be to you as well.

To underscore this point, many staunch Republicans, including who've worked closely with Trump in the past, have spoken out in favor of Kamala Harris and the Democrats. former Representative Liz Cheney, for example. And her dad, Dick Cheney, who was George W. Bush's Vice President. John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff and a retired Marine general, recently called Trump a “fascist.”. Thirteen former Trump administration officials signed an open letter backing this. General Mark Milley and other retired generals have issued similarly strong statements in recent days.

Breaking the wardrobe silence

Maybe the dam will finally burst as more and more people come out about the danger. I hope so, but I'm not so sure.

There have been numerous reports that many GOP leaders privately want Trump to lose the election, but aren't willing to say so publicly. Explanations of why vary. Some say they just want to keep their jobs. Others cite threats of various kinds. Romney has spoken about this, for example.

I think the sense is that there is safety in numbers. Going back to the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor, no one is willing to be the singular voice of reason.

But does it have to be one single person?

Maybe someone with a sufficiently large microphone could just designate a day. I'm tentatively calling it “Emperor's Wardrobe Day” when everyone who is afraid to come out individually agrees that they'll suddenly say what they really feel. If everyone plans on the same day, there can be a giant deluge of people speaking the danger, and no one will feel singularly at risk.

It needs to be soon because people are already voting, but also far enough out that people could hear the message and plan their statements. So it really depends on when someone picks up the idea.

Any break in solidarity before the election, explaining the danger, and perhaps most importantly, explaining that attempts to claim there is an election fraud problem are just made up, could be very important to processing of election results. Our election system is not broken in the ways Trump is saying. If he can, even now, be exposed as just making this up, that could matter.

It feels to me like it's worth a try. Everyone is just waiting for there to be a right time. Let's just put one on the calendar.

Hallmark, if you're listening...

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Also, if you're looking for more reading, these recent pieces by me may offer additional insight:

• Vance Notice
• Political Terraforming
• American Dictatorship
• The Pace of Political Evil

There's also my recent poem The Fraud Who Stole Freedom, which covers many of the same issues as does Vance Notice, but in a hopefully-more-entertaining way.

The graphic was produced by abacus.ai's ChatLLM using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was: «draw a grayscale image of sad old donald trump wearing just a barrel, holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says "Will dictate to stay out of prison."» It inroduced the misspelling of “dictate” and I decided to just keep it.