“Eh, I guess”

A while back, when the Trump impeachment inquiry was first announced, Damon Young at The Root wrote about it:

My apathy about impeachment is complicated, and the main complication is that I just don’t think what he did here was that bad. Wrong? Sure. Illegal. Perhaps? Treasonous? Maybe. But of the hundreds of abjectly terrible things he’s said and done since being President, since being alive, using his power to outsource an investigation into Hunter Biden’s sham board appointment is at the ‘eh, I guess’ end of the spectrum.

…

But that this is the hill that’s chosen to defend is both insulting and insultingly boring.

I really agree. It’s important to remember that it wasn’t Trump’s violation of civil and human rights that brought on his impeachment. It wasn’t his endorsement of war crimes. It wasn’t his prolific lying. All of which constitute abuses of public trust and offenses that injure society. It was a violation of political process. A transgression of “norms” which his supporters elected him to transgress in the first place. The Democratic Party is playing a game of civility (demanding adherence to manners and decorum), while the Republican Party is playing a game of cultural hegemony (fighting to dominate social values and normalize its destructive world view). What Democrats are facing now are, in the words of Audre Lorde, “the dangers of an incomplete vision.”

This impeachment is unsatisfying because, while it signals a refusal to be silent, it also signals a refusal to firmly dissent on the basis of more substantive concerns. Instead it relies on gotchas. Since I didn’t get a chance to honor Dr. King on Monday, I’ll do it now. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb observed that, while we’ve recognized MLK as an activist, martyr, visionary, and orator, we have yet to consider him in the canon of great American writers. Here, from a speech written in 1967, his words are relevant to our current crossroads:

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”