A question I found not long ago in the program of the Northern Stage production of King Lear has me thinking about what it would mean to “rebuild our democracy.” That’s a phrase my wife and I use on the postcards we write to people around the country, encouraging them to vote in local and state elections. Defending democracy is a challenge everybody faces these days, although most of us never imagined we would need to do it here at home.
The King Lear question is this: “How can alert and courageous people not merely escape from the tyrant’s grasp, in order to fight against him and try to topple him, but prevent him from coming to power in the first place?”
Shakespeare critic Stephen Greenblatt asks the question, and the play’s director, Stephen Brown-Fried, presumably quotes it as a way of suggesting how King Lear is germane to our time. Greenblatt might almost be asking how Americans should respond to our political predicament: an aspiring tyrant as president and the possibility of his reelection.
One thing seemed clear when Donald Trump was elected in November 2016: We would need “alert and courageous” Republican politicians to get us out of the jam. And for a while it looked as though this could happen.
Sens. Susan Collins, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act in July 2018, when it was evident the Republican administration had nothing in mind to replace it. But McCain died and the 2018 elections consolidated Republican power in the Senate, even though Democrats won a majority of seats in the House. The likelihood of significant Republican resistance to Trump seemed to disappear.
During the impeachment hearings in the House and the president’s trial in the Senate, Democrats appeared to face a Trump-controlled Republican Party. Then Mitt Romney became the first U.S. senator in American history to vote to remove from office a president from his own political party.
In a speech explaining his decision, Romney said: “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”
He also told the Senate he had considered the abuse he would suffer for his vote: “I’m aware that there are people in my party and in my state who will strenuously disapprove of my decision, and in some quarters I will be vehemently denounced. I’m sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters. Does anyone seriously believe that I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?”
Romney’s explanation of his difficult decision reminded me of an essay I published back in 1975, “The Burden of Imagination: Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority.” I was critical of Milgram’s book, in which he described and interpreted his now-famous experiments, which appeared to reveal that people were surprisingly deferential to authority when told to perform a task injurious to someone they didn’t know.
Subjects in the experiments were told they would function as a “teacher” in a study of memory and learning. The “teacher” would be told to give progressively increasing electric shocks to a “student” under the direction of a lab-coated “experimenter,” who was the authority.
The “teacher” would not actually be shocking the “student,” who would make sounds signaling increased pain and then go silent. In some versions of the experiment, 65% of the “teachers” were willing to give increasing shocks all the way up to 450 volts, a level marked “Danger — Severe Shock.”
This was a much higher percentage than experts had predicted.
Early in his book, Obedience to Authority, Milgram writes: “This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”
Later he adds, in a sentence that seems haunted by the Holocaust: “This is the fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.”
Pundits and politicians have claimed Romney’s resistance to Trumpian authority grew from the senator’s Mormon faith. Mormons, some add, were never enthusiastic about Trump. And Romney doesn’t have to face Utah voters again until 2024. Back in January, the Washington Examiner ran a story suggesting he’s contemplating a run for president in 2024, hoping his disobedience will sell well to Republicans and independents by then.
None of those explanations is as convincing as Romney’s own prediction: “My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate, but irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability believing that my country expected it of me.”
Imagining how our choices will influence coming generations is another way of approaching Greenblatt’s King Lear question about the threat of tyranny. And it’s likely to grow more pressing as a presidential election draws near.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.