The shock value of the indictments has been devalued as what once would have been considered shocking is becoming ordinary
, the unprecedented has become commonplace, the startling has become ordinary, the shocking has lost its power to disrupt public discourse.
The governing wisdom in this parlous period of American history – one in which a former president is portrayed as a mob boss and is being prosecuted under a-era legal approach designed to battle organized crime – may well come from a 20th century English novelist, Graham Greene. “It is a great danger for everyone,” he wrote inCritics in the decades that followed publication of the novel often said that it foreshadowed the Cuban missile crisis that occurred four years later.
Now the shock value of a past-president’s indictment – even one with strains of Mario Puzo, the Mafia crime writer – has been shorn of its shock value. That has been normalized much the way Mr. Trump’s comportment – his defiance of presidential customs, his employment of disparaging comments – have been normalized.
The normalization of crudity is not confined to the presidency – and the presidency has not always been immune to it. Mr. Nixon’s private conversations, made public in printed transcripts during the Watergate ordeal, displayed a president willing to use ethnic slurs and profanity. Mr. Trump’s public remarks were once startling, but are now almost predictable.
Can a country tolerate an attempted heist of the presidency? Is the political culture of the country so acidic that a sitting administration would unfairly prosecute the leader of predecessor administration? Are the guard rails of American democracy strong enough to prevent either the disruption of elections or the persecution of political opponents?
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