**Disclaimer about my handle below
Are there good cops, were our founding fathers good despite the fact that they wrote slavery into the constitution, are Trump supporters generally evil? A commonly used saying is that there can’t be any good cops if they don’t stand up against the one bad cop. Ok, that may or may not be true, but it does nothing towards promoting justice or change. And this saying highlights that the problem is the question itself. It presupposes that if you put in “good” people in these positions, you would have had a different result. We would all like to think that if we would have been put in a time and place of these people, that we would be on the right side, but the chances are that many of us wouldn’t. In fact, it is the conservative side that is constantly trying to make the point that systematic problems are problems of the heart rather than systematic, which is very convenient since you can’t pass legislation to fix the former. Clearly, there are more victims to our systematic racism, structural issues, and colonial background than just the direct victims. For example, if you hire a police officer, tell him that he is in danger from black people, base his training on this assumption, pass laws that puts him in contact with these same black people, what results are we expecting? This doesn’t excuse any atrocities, nor does it mean that we shouldn’t seek justice, but rather it indicts the system and society that helped to cause this. I’m not even sure that it mitigates any of the crimes, but it does mean that we need to do something to address the system. I think this fact is more than obvious to most anyone reading this, however I’m going to take it a step further.
For the last 4 years, our country has done more to shed its democratic norms and institutions than it has in almost any of the previous 230+ years since the U.S. constitution was written. POTUS has done almost everything in his power to put in people that would either cooperate with him in this or that would be so weak and/or incompetent to destroy the institutions that we have build for the last 200 years. All of this in the name of taking down the “deep state”. I don’t think we even know the number of criminals that Trump has helped to create, but we do need to figure out what to do next (if there is a next).
From what I can see, there are usually 2 schools of thought when it comes to how to deal with corruption. One is to find and punish all of the guilty parties so that there is disincentive to repeat the crimes and a sense of justice restored. Another is to just move on so that we don’t put our country through a painful time while trying to bring the guilty to justice. This is in many ways what happened in the case of Watergate. But, if you believe that justice is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, there may be a third way to move forward. But what are the ends? It seems to me that what we need is to have our democratic norms and institutions reestablished, we need to change the system so these things are much less likely to happen again, and the guilty should never serve in government nor in any real positions of influence and power again. The only way we are going to accomplish this is to know the truth; we need people to talk.
One thought I have is that we should consider a truth and reconciliation commission. In South Africa, the assumption was that the primary culprit was the apartheid system, not necessarily just those who committed atrocities. The idea was to get victims to talk about what happened, and let the criminals confess what they did for some form of amnesty. I believe this played a major role in creating a functioning democracy and foster some form of goodwill and understanding. If we go the prosecution and sentencing route, we have to consider that it will cost consider political capital as we have an adversarial system that is even more so when it comes to politics. People will grow tired of prosecutions (even Nuremberg took political capital away from the Tokyo trials) and the inevitable fighting that will come with it. Having a truth and reconciliation commission will cost almost no political capital, will likely yield more truth, and may leave us in better position to prevent it in the future. Of course the amnesty need not be carte blanche, and most of these people should never hold any kind of power again. Its not a well developed idea, but I think one worthy of a discussion. Of course, we need to GOTV for it to even matter, and if we win we have to have major election reform.
** My handle is RightleaningMod, and while that was a good description of me when I joined in 2010, it is no longer an accurate moniker. The last GOP POTUS candidate I voted for was John McCain in 2008, and I wasn’t that excited about him. Anyway, I get a lot of push-back from folks here about my name, so I wanted to make that clear that I am a democrat despite my name. I do tend to be an independent thinker, highly against group-think, and sometimes even lean towards a contrarian, so just assume anything I say not aligning with progressive orthodoxy is that rather than right wing talking points.
