The Rejection of Washington’s Bequest: What Americans Need to Consider in Advance of the Election

“But are there not many fascists in your country?”

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.”

- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Now? Of all fucking times, now? A variation, perhaps less profane, perhaps tinged more with sadness than rage, went through the minds of millions of Americans when the inevitable became reality. A century ago, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck observed a young republic touched by the magic of luck and memorably remarked “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Once wonders what his latter-day successor Angela Merkel, the last remaining Atlanticist leader upholding the world built by an optimistic, can-do America now long past, must think of the luck of Americans now. In a year when voting in massive numbers is the last stopgap before the irrevocable stain of Putinism becomes too embedded to dislodge, we’re faced with a highly contagious pandemic and a massively, and deliberately underfunded post office. In a year where the litigation is all but certain to decide the thin veneer of legality within which Trump hopes to cloak his purported re-election, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg removes the clearest voice on the Court for fairness and adherence to Constitutional norms, her absence certain to be filled by a sprightly young cheerleader for untrammeled…