Disappointment is a part of life. Our expectations sometimes fail to bear the fruit we most desire.
Expectations of many of us in the body politic in Alabama and in America the past half-dozen years have been especially disappointing in that regard. Hopes for outcomes desired have been disappointed on the rocky shoals of electoral realities. That has been true for more than half the country. But, that is a part of politics. “You win some; you lose some.” When you lose, you re-evaluate and come back with more zestful effort next time. That’s the American Way.
No one wins every vote — at the polls or in local or legislative vote-casting. Anyone who chooses to participate in politics at any level, and all of us ought to, and loses must accept that reality and not cast aspersions at the winner merely because he won. More than that, that one should not, must not, accuse the winner and those who administer elections of “rigging the election” and chatting through fraud, unless clear and convincing evidence that that is so is brought forth immediately and placed properly before a court of law. After that, if one is still disappointed, one must accept the loss (or appeal to the highest available appellate court) and move on. That is, if one wants our democratic republic to continue to endure — and, yes, with all of its flaws. That is why Republican Richard Nixon accepted the results of the presidential election of 1960 and Democrat Al Gore did the same in 2000, even though both had doubts about the integrity of the counting of votes.
Shakespeare wrote: “Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest, and despair most sits.” That likely described the situation two falls ago when expectation failed the supporters of Donald J. Trump (DJT). Many had unrealistic hopes, given the polling at the time, and others bought into his pre-November claim that the only way he could lose would have to be the result of a rigged election. That was said without a shred of evidence before the election, as he had announced before the 2016 election, without any evidence. He has maintained that view to this day, still without credible evidence, all the time fraudulently raising more than a quarter of a billion dollars for a “defense fund” he’s used mostly for other purposes. During the interim, he and his “lawyers” have lost more than 60, count ’em, five dozen legal challenges based on little more than “cold hope” and fraudulent assertions judges all over the country found to be without merit. The most prominent of his legal representatives filing meritless briefs and motions has had his license to practice law suspended and others are being investigated. One of the lawyers filing a meritless brief in the matter is the Attorney General of Alabama, for which the Alabama Bar should have censured him.
History will be even less kind than contemporaneous assessments of those who, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and their own doubts, pretend to say they believe the nonsense DJT continues to spew at his “rallies” and elsewhere. That now includes his incredible claims about “his” possession of tens of thousands of government documents, purloined from the White House, at his golf club in Florida, more than a hundred of which are highly classified materials, some concerning atomic secrets. (Anyone else would already be in jail awaiting trial if s/he had done such a thing.) Some lawyers have been similarly compromised in that case and have had to “lawyer up” themselves. One reporter recently said that representing DJT gives new meaning to MAGA: More Attorneys Getting Attorneys.
I was disappointed in 2016 when, with the electronic assistance of the Russians, as the subsequent Special Prosecutor’s report PROVED, despite the then-Attorney General’s mischaracterization of it, making the presidential election that year the fraudulent one, DJT was elected President by a majority of electors, surprising even himself. I thought winning the popular vote would preclude that anomaly. So, I prepared myself to support him in office, until the lies began to accumulate his first week in the Oval Office. After that, I began a four year-long wait for the 2020 election, in which I supported Joe Biden, whom I’d met twice, and my expectations were rewarded, my previous disappointment assuaged. That’s the way the system was designed to work, although I now favor abolishing the Electoral College.
Now, I have a new, more serious disappointment. I am disappointed in the millions of Alabamians and Americans who say they believe the lies of DJT, despite his documented failure to prove any of his outrageously perverse electoral assertions and despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps, I shouldn’t be. His documented record of prevarications now exceeds 35,000, a statistic that doesn’t seem to bother even his most religious enablers and followers. Lincoln was right: You CAN fool SOME of the people ALL of the time, particularly if they want to be fooled or if they don’t mind being fooled, over and over again.
Even some of my own friends in Alabama and elsewhere have fallen for DJT’s lies. That is so even though they cannot rebut the case against him. They have abandoned one of the principal presuppositions of discourse in our democratic republic, which assumes that political differences will be debated and talked out. But that’s not all. For nearly 50 years in college classrooms at five universities, I taught what I still believe and act on — that, if one will not or cannot rebut (respond to an argument), much less refute (undermine an argument), another’s case, one if obliged by democratic rhetorical principles to be persuaded by that case. If that were not the case, we could have but one other way to resolve the situation: the Law of the Jungle — fight it out. That is exactly what the rioters and terrorists resorted to on January 6th, 2021. That is the lesson of that day from them.
To my religious, evangelical friends and others in the same camp who are still enamored of DJT, let me challenge you to make a credible case for him — on his election claims, which I find incredible — before you will be required to make similar cases for him on his violation of the Espionage Act for his handling of federal documents, his obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Logo for the games he’s been playing there, and his planning of the January 6th riot, when all of his schemes to steal the 2022 election imploded. If you cannot make such a case and you cannot even rebut to mine, you are obliged by the principles of democratic debate to stop defending him and to accept the contrary claims. His convenient support of abortion-hating judges is not sufficient to justify what you are doing to the body politic of our state and nation. In the meantime, I’ll take comfort in these words of English writer Samuel Johnson: “He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation”!
Dr. Jim Vickrey is a former university president and retired college professor and lawyer, who writes from his native Montgomery.
