'Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom'
Some recent examples of the "corrupt and vicious" behavior that the Founders warned about.
Barring any tragedies of historic proportions — which I guess can occur just about any day now — this will be my final post for the year. I want to thank all of you for following my reporting this year. From threats to Social Security in the spring to the Battle of LA in June, to threats to democracy in Georgia and elsewhere and all the other stories this year, we’ve covered a ton of ground.
I’m taking a much needed break over the holiday, but in the meantime, if you’ve appreciated my reporting and writing over the last year, please spread the word about American Doom via one of the buttons below. And if you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. Your dollars are appreciated, and they directly fund my journalism. For the next few weeks, you can get 20 percent off subscriptions to American Doom. That means you can help fund independent, adversarial journalism for less than $5 a month.
Thank you for your support and best wishes for the holidays. - jg
I remember lots of things about my Grandpa Smith, but recently I’ve been thinking about his hands and his shoes. His hands were always dirty. Dirt under the fingernails and chalky, white dryness all around his fingers. Like the rings inside a tree. He always wore steel-toed work boots — even when he was wearing a suit or a sportcoat like in the picture above. And when he wore a formal jacket, he usually wore an American flag lapel pin.
His hands were out of his control. They were the way they were because he made a living working with them. My Grandpa Smith built ice plants all over the world and was a master electrician. He was a jack of all trades and master of many. He was licensed to handle dangerous chemicals and held certificates in just about every electrical, heating and cooling system you can imagine. He was tasked to engineer massive facilities and maintain them. He constructed grain elevators all across West and Central Illinois and had pins in his leg from a heavy pallet that fell from a crane at an ice plant in Canada. He was deaf in one ear and blind in one eye toward the end.
He could help his footwear but chose not to. No fancy wingtips for Al. Instead he chose to wear those work boots. I think it was his way of signaling to people wherever he went that he was an honest working man.
When my parents would drop me off at his lake house in Galesburg, Ill. for a week or a weekend, there would be all sorts of work to do. He had a shop and a van filled in every corner with tools and equipment. I never knew what half of it was, but I was there to help — I knew that. We would drive into town and fix a toilet at City Hall. Once we drove to some sort of plant where he backed into an alley. He and my cousin Chris got out and put masks on, running toward a brick wall where liquid and gas ammonia was pouring out of a pipe. They told me to stay in the truck. I watched them in the side rear view mirror as they ran into the smoke and fog.
On the way back to the lake house one day we were driving along one of the two-lane county blacktops that wound their way through the corn and soybean fields. Not far from where we drove was a farm where he partly grew up. I couldn’t find it now if you paid me but somewhere out in the flats of West Central Illinois, someone is still tilling that dark, black earth. We drove along and I looked out the closed window. It was cold, meaning all I could smell was the mixture of stale cigarette smoke and WD-40 inside the truck. I was already lost in the maze of roads that all looked the same but he knew exactly where he was going.
He slowed down and pulled over onto the gravel shoulder and walked down into the ditch. There, he pulled up a highway sign that had fallen over. I can’t remember what it said — probably “CURVE AHEAD” or something like that. Nothing major like a stop sign. He somehow got the sign to sit upright again and got back in the truck. No one paid him to do it. It just needed done, so that’s what he did.
My Grandpa Smith — Al to everyone else — did lots of little things like fixing that sign. It was the right thing to do, and it helped people. That’s all the reason he needed. I’ve been thinking about him lately as my own hands get dirtier, drier and more calloused the more I work on my house. My memories of him quickly turn from the physical to the moral, to the spiritual.
You see, my Grandpa Smith was a patriot — but not in the way that word has come to mean certain things. He was a history buff who understood both the failure and promise of this country, and he knew what it meant to do the right thing. He knew — and taught to me, without me even knowing — that doing the right thing means helping out someone other than yourself. This sense of collectivism was what he taught me makes America great. Know your history. Show people respect. Be kind, and do the right thing.
Somewhere along the way, many of us have lost that.
***
When I think of my Grandpa Smith I think of hard work, common sense, a fundamental understanding of right and wrong. Another word for this is virtue, and it’s a word the Founders used often.
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin said in 1787. “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Corrupt. Vicious. Are there two words that better define the last year? In the first year of his second presidency, Donald Trump has turned the White House and much of the federal government into his own personal plaything — both literally and figuratively. Over the course of my career as a journalist, I have heard plenty from Republicans and conservatives about the bias of the press. But what they have mostly meant — especially in the era of Donald Trump — is not that they yearned for some idealized past form of journalism that was always entirely objective. What they have meant is that they don’t want a press that calls things out for what they are.
There is simply no way that a person thinking or speaking objectively would not describe Trump’s governance as “corrupt and vicious.” His cabinet is the wealthiest in history, and are actively engaged in deal-making with taxpayer dollars that will benefit their own industries or those of their associates. Trump’s family is busy doing the same, enriching themselves off access to the president and scoring lucrative contracts with the federal government.
Every single government agency works almost entirely to benefit Trump’s family, his business interests or those of his own friends and associates, or Trump himself. The Justice Department acts as Trump’s personal law firm, prosecuting his political enemies and suing states for access to voter information in a desperate attempt to prove his lies about election fraud. Even the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which most Americans have never heard of, is led by a man who has tried to dig up enough dirt on some of Trump’s political enemies for them to prosecuted for mortgage fraud.
There’s just a few examples of corruption. There are many more. Viciousness? On display every day. As I write today, the viciousness du jour is Trump’s attack — attack! — on writer, director and activist Rob Reiner, who along with his wife was murdered less than 24 hours ago. That’s just today. There are many more days.
But most people know all of this, at least those of us who are willing to see it. Many of our fellow Americans are not. And many of those people are engaged in their own acts of corruption and viciousness.
***
Last week, as I worked around the house fixing and improving things that have gone too long without a caring touch, I listened for two days as the Georgia State Election Board carried out its business. Not present over the span of these two days was the board’s lone Democrat as well as the board’s chair, who I think would describe himself as a moderate, fiscally-conservative Republican of the “compassionate conservative” school of George W. Bush.
Without these members present, the remaining three members of the board — all Trump supporters and election deniers — as well as their executive director, got a lot of things done. In doing so, they put their viciousness and corruption on display.
The board spent two days adjudicating complaints of election law violations, apparently in response to a newspaper article about how the board had allowed a backlog of these cases to pile up.
Last month, Mark Niesse of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote an article about how the State Election Board had largely failed to carry out its primary duty: hearing complaints of election law violations. Prior to the last four years, this is almost entirely what the State Election Board did. A citizen would complain that a small-town mayoral candidate had missed a legal deadline and therefore wasn’t technically eligible for an election, for instance. The State Election Board — which up until recently worked with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican — would hear the investigative findings on a complaint and decide accordingly. Often, these complaints resulted in letters of reprimand or instruction, admonishing the person for their technical violation of election law or informing them of what the law says, respectively.
But in recent years, the State Election Board has expanded far beyond this relatively mundane duty. The board — led in the last year or so by the Trump-supporting trio of Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King — has become a rule-making body for Georgia elections. Most of these rules have been introduced by election denial activists who believe Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud.
The rules are many and complex, but can generally be defined as anti-democratic. Like the election denial movement itself, the rules exist to propagate claims of widespread election fraud, restrict access to voting, create endless investigations, and generally sow doubt in election results that show Republicans losing.
This is not exactly what the State Election Board was created to do. It’s supposed to be the Georgia legislature’s job to create rules and laws governing the state’s elections, but there has been so much fighting here over the 2020 election that that has been difficult to do.
Niesse’s article in the AJC simply pointed this out: the State Election Board has spent much more of its time passing rules that no one but election denial activists have asked for, and far less of its time adjudicating election law complaints.
Johnston was incensed. At a meeting in November, she demanded Niesse sit at a table for presenters at the meeting and answer her questions. There were fewer questions than statements. Mostly what Johnston did was decry Niesse’s reporting and attack his integrity. Like Trump, Johnston sees it as her duty not to carry out her business as an appointed government official, but to do to Trump’s bidding. In one word, this means attack. It’s my understanding that Niesse has since taken a leave of absence from the paper.
Vicious? Most certainly.
Since the radicalization of the State Election Board went into overdrive following Johnston’s appointment by state Republican lawmakers, the board’s small staff has struggled to keep up with public records requests. Johnston herself has been sued for violating Georgia’s open meetings act because she tried to conceal her emails from public disclosure. Those emails further exposed her close relationships with election denial activists, and her extremist behavior.
To alleviate the backlog of records requests, the board created a job opening for an administrative assistant. The position was initially supposed to be for a paralegal — someone with legal experience. But that changed when the board’s executive director got involved. James W. Mills changed the job description so that legal experience was not required. The board’s three Trump-supporting members then voted to hire the wife of the board’s former executive director — a woman named Hope Coan who has no legal experience.
Coan was hired over 70 other applicants, 40 of whom had legal experience, the AJC reported. She will also receive a salary higher than was initially posted.
Corrupt? Seems so.
The AJC learned of these behind-the-scenes machinations thanks to emails that were obtained via the lawsuit against Johnston — emails she had sought to hide. Johnston called the reporting a “gossipy and petty story.”
The AJC, Johnston said, “should be ashamed of itself for its lack of journalistic ethics and standards.”
Hope Coan is paid $64,000 a year by taxpayers for a job she appears unqualified for. She apparently received that job thanks to husband’s connections to the State Election Board’s current executive director, James Mills. That’s not “gossipy” or “petty” — that’s journalism.
But Johnston, like Trump, and like many right-wing Americans, is not interested in actual journalism. Instead, she simply wants journalists to tell her side of the story.
And so, over the course of two days last week, Johnston led her fellow Trump supporters on the board through a long list of complaints that had laid dormant for years. Why? Because Mark Niesse had uncovered the fact that these complaints had been ignored.
Having never addressed that many complaints in her tenure, it was clear that Johnston wanted to show that the board was capable of performing this task. But she never said the obvious: it was Niesse’s journalism that prompted her to finally do her job.
Johnston admonished the AJC for not showing “mercy” to Coan, who in addition to her duties is taking care of an ailing mother in hospice care. But Johnston and her fellow Trumpists on the board know no mercy. Of the dozens of cases of election fraud she heard at last week’s meetings, not a one showed anyone purposefully violating the law. Instead, they showed people making mistakes — violating rules they didn’t know existed or didn’t fully understand.
They include an intellectually disabled man who tried to vote twice. Johnston and King sent his case on to the Georgia Attorney General for possible prosecution.
***
Johnston’s behavior is instructive. It helps us to understand how someone like herself — an avowed Christian who often talks of subjects like virtue, godliness, mercy and patriotism — can be so swept up in the fervor of Trump that she routinely acts in conflict with her own stated values. It also helps us understand what elections will look like if people like Trump and Johnston get their way.
As they efficiently hacked their way through the long list of election law violations last week, Johnston and King — with Jeffares barely talking as he approved everything put in front of him — requested prosecution by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and even the Department of Justice for the many people who simply made mistakes. Those people were wrong by the letter of the law but had no ill intent. They had done the wrong thing, but many of them had done the right thing by showing up at the meeting to apologize for their crime.
The rest were, at worst, ignorant. Johnston and King demanded punishment anyway. Either purposefully, in fealty to Trump, or sub-consciously, by convincing themselves of the opposite, Johnston and King were unwilling or unable to do the virtuous thing — to distinguish between right and wrong.
Toward the end of his life, my grandpa was a poll worker. I remember him talking about the long days he spent at polling locations on election day. He didn’t do it to ensure that his side won, or that no one “cheated.” He did it because it was his civic duty. It was the right thing to do.
I wonder if people like Johnston and King even know what that is anymore, or if they even care. I wonder the same about so many millions of other Americans who head into the holiday season preaching compassion, love and kindness while supporting a president who, on a daily basis, exhibits the complete opposite of these ideals. I wonder if they ever think their own hands have gotten dirty, not from honest hard work, but from the viciousness and corruption that has become of their lives.
***
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