“This is not America. Not America. This is not America.”
It's time for me to stop lying to myself about what is normal.
A movie debuted at the Sundance Film Festival called War Game. The Washington Post called it a documentary, but that’s not quite right. There are people pretending to be characters—former Montana governor Steve Bullock plays a made-up president, for example, and former senator Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota plays his adviser, for another—but War Game isn’t exactly fiction, either.
Maybe it would help to describe it more. Disturbed by Jan. 6, a nonpartisan veterans group named Vet Voice Foundation conducted an unscripted, real-time “war game” simulation in which real-life politicians played imaginary politicians, real-life national security types played imaginary spooks… You get the idea. In this scenario, rightwing extremists have infiltrated our military and are staging a better-organized insurrection after a close presidential election. Except this time, the uprisings take place not just in Washington but in state capitals as well.
As “President Hotham” worries that invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to use the military to put down the armed uprising, would constitute a disproportionate response, a visibly heated Heitkamp tells him, “I think the idea that you can overreact to this is not valid.” After the screening, she said she wasn’t acting and had been triggered by the scenario of another insurrection.
War Game is not a documentary or an action movie. It’s a nightmare, and not a depiction of a nightmare but an actual one, that is, a terror intended to alert you to a message from our unconscious that this is very real. We are in a Cold Civil War that is likely to become, once again, violent.
And this—an America that is at war with itself—is normal. This is not to say that the status quo is good or desirable, but merely normal. We cannot look at QAnon, antisemitism, and broad-based support for wannabe dictators, shake our heads and say mournfully, “This isn’t America.” There isn’t another America to return to. This is it. This is America. This is normal.
“I think the idea that you can overreact to this is not valid.”
For the last 30 years, I’ve been operating under a delusion that there is a normal, stable status quo that we can return to. When George W. Bush beat Ann Richards, I didn’t think Texas Democrats had been set adrift on an ice floe, never to win again. I didn’t think Bush-era elected officials would be replaced by a series of increasingly extremist-curious Republicans who would mandate rape babies and ban the teaching of history in history class.
I could not have contemplated the absurdity of Russian disinformation conning Texas whack-a-doodles into believing that a U.S. military training exercise was the pretext for an invasion, nor that the Texas Governor would go along with the charade. And my mid-’90s brain would have rejected as implausible the performative cruelty of mouthing rebellious frothings, insisting upon the right to slice asylum-seekers with razor wire.
And even though, for the last 30 years, the long arch of history has bent away from progress and toward repression, away from inclusion and toward demonization, and away from democracy and toward autocracy, I have refused to accept that what has constantly been happening is normal. That is, I have refused to accept that what is normal is normal.
And yes, I have been gaslighting myself, thanks for noticing.
I have been gaslighting myself, thanks for noticing.
Since Donald Trump descended on the golden staircase in 2015, he’s been taking us all on a similar ride. After he secured the Republican nomination in 2016, we waited for Trump to pivot to the center. Later, we waited for him to pivot to normalcy so much that otherwise intelligent observers complimented the stitching in the Emperor’s new clothes. After a State of the Union in which he called immigrants dangerous and defended the Muslim ban, Fox News’ Chris Wallace said, “I feel like, tonight, Donald Trump became the President of the United States.”
Trump never pivoted. He piloted the ship of state like a drunk uncle on holiday, mistaking our screams for cheering. It never stopped, but we all became John Mulaney, insisting that what was happening every day, hourly even, was not normal. We thought if we kicked the horse out of the hospital, that things would return to normal. We refused to accept that the horse in the hospital, while chaotic and destructive, had become normal.
Joe Biden has personified this delusion that there is a normal to return to. In 2012, he predicted a more mainstream GOP would assert itself if Barack Obama were re-elected, famously saying, “I think you're gonna see the fever break.” It did not.
Biden ran on the same horse-free hospital platform in 2020, saying Republican lawmakers would stop sticking their tongues into light sockets if voters kicked Trump out of office. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” he said, wrongly as it turns out.
For a guy who can’t stop bragging that he passed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a screener for mental problems and not intelligence, Trump seems to grasp what is normal better than anyone around here. He’s admitting he’d act as a dictator, calling Americans who oppose him “vermin,” and promising violent retribution if elected, knowing full well that a big chunk of the Republican Party (conservatively 18% of all Americans) are hunky-dork with authoritarianism.
And all this has become normal.
During the pandemic, the stoic writer Ryan Holiday wrestled with all the talk of “getting back to normal,” or the notion that once COVID-19 was killed off, we could get back to normal. On the contrary, he wrote, if what you do every day is wear a mask to go grocery shopping and go to your office job at the kitchen table while your kids go to college and high school in their respective bedrooms, then doing those things is normal. Traumatic and upsetting, to be sure, but normal is not inherently pleasant, peaceful, or stable.
“Everything that happens is normal.”
“Everything that happens is normal. There is nothing unusual about any of this,” he wrote in Dec. 2020. “Life is life. The only surprise is that we’re surprised.”
What was true about America in the pandemic is as true about the American Experiment. This… /gesturing vaguely at the window/ …is normal. It might not be fine, but it’s normal. And yet, I still have in my head an idea of normal to get back to, as if the admittedly chaotic status quo is an aberration of the status quo.
Wait, I need to take something back, but only part way. Trump doesn’t see everything clearly these days. The other day he was leaving court after testifying in his trial for defaming E. Jean Carroll, a writer he sexually assaulted. That he raped her is settled law. Another trial has already held him accountable for that, but he, undoubtedly unused to being held to account by women or courts, was not allowed to argue his innocence in his trial to determine how much he should pay for continuing to attack her.
“This is not America,” he said as he was leaving the courtroom. “Not America. This is not America.”
“This is not America. Not America. This is not America.”
He has a point. Holding a fake billionaire white man accountable for sexually assaulting and then insulting a woman decades later is vanishingly rare in this country. And in his struggle to accept normal for reality, or reality for normal, I recognize his confusion. I, too, look at what is happening and think, “This is not America.”
I don’t know if there is a market for War Game. But I need to turn my thinking from expecting things to get back to normal instead to creating a future I want to live in. Violent authoritarianism might be normal, but I only need to recognize that and not accept it. And when they come again, I won’t let myself look at the news and think that it can’t be happening, not here. I won’t lie to myself that this isn’t America. Instead, I’ll stay busy making a better one right now.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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Well done! Many of us have been on the same trip, fueled with gaslight of our own.
Jason, one of your best!