Connect the Dots 101

In Federalist 42, James Madison saw post roads as part of the connective tissue between the states and as such a corrective to the weak Articles of Confederation. “Nothing which tends to facilitate the intercourse between the States can be deemed unworthy of the public care.” Like the Transcontinental Railroad and the telegraph, the postal service has long bound together far-flung sections of the country in a practical, positive nationalism. 

And what more quintessential manifestation of Americanness is there than free and fair elections? In creating obstacles to mail-in balloting, the weakening of the USPS is an unraveling of who we are.

To put the current assault on the USPS into context, it is useful to remember the assault on the Charleston post office in 1835. Abolitionist journals published by the American Anti-Slavery Society were quarantined, stolen and burned in Post Office Square by white supremacists with the approval of Andrew Jackson’s Postmaster General. “While postal officers had an obligation to follow the laws,” he said, “they had a ‘higher’ obligation to their communities, and ‘if the former be perverted to destroy the latter, it is patriotism to disregard them.”

Are today’s Republicans following the same impulse in service of similar aims? How can the GOP portray Democrats as captives of radicals and anarchists and condone the public rigging of the November presidential election?

This crisis is a perfect storm of three destructive tendencies within the Republican Party:

Government is a business. A central fallacy of Reagan-era Republicanism is that government should be run like a business. It isn’t a business. An irony of the current crisis is that the post office is in financial trouble, not just because of email and Fedex, but because Congress has mandated that it not be run like a business. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 requires the post office—unlike Fedex or UPS or other businesses or federal agencies—to fund post-retirement costs seventy-five years into the future. 

Facts don’t matter. Republicans—the Freedom from Facts Party—thrive in a fact-free environment. When confronted by a reporter with the fact that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows mystifyingly asserted that “there’s no evidence that there’s not either.” Whether it’s voter fraud, climate change or the efficacy of face masks and social distancing, magical thinking and a disregard for facts on the ground and elsewhere animates this administration. Rep. Louis Gohmert literally banged on his desk during a Judiciary Committee hearing to prevent testimony from being heard from a critic of Attorney General Barr.

Boys behaving badly. Whether it’s Jim Jordan putting words into the mouth of Dr. Fauci or Matt Gaetz, et al storming the SCIF to protest the Ukraine hearings or Postmaster General Louis De Joy ripping mailboxes out of the ground, there has been an elevation of thuggishness within this administration. Barr has turned a blind eye to the massive voter fraud being plotted in plain view by Republicans and ignored the responsibility of the Justice Department to prevent it. Instead he is working feverishly to deliver his own October surprise to save the boss’s bacon. Space prohibits a cataloging of the behavior of the president who defies Congressional subpoenas, fires Inspectors General and deploys federal agents like a roving street gang.

Our nation announced itself to the world from a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” How do we explain ourselves now? What makes us different than Hong Kong or Belarus?

Americans aren’t inherently better people than anyone else. We just have better systems in place to guard against our worst impulses. American exceptionalism has been built on accidents of history and geography and—to paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda—the gods putting the Founding Fathers all in one spot.

Donald Trump may have jammed a stick in the gears but it is up to the electorate to demonstrate that the machinery of self-government still works, that John Adams’s “government of laws, not men” is more than an ideal. We either value free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power or we don’t. The people can vote on that….if they get a chance.