Nothing in All Creation Is Hidden
To escape from any dire situation requires that you accept two truths: the truth of how you got there and the truth of how you can get out. And the sad truth is that, in less than a year and a half in office, Donald J. Trump and the squalling far-right movement he has dragged into the White House like a mischievous dog have already changed the parameters of the American presidency and the nation’s politics beyond recognition.
The time has come to think seriously about whether, at some safer, wiser moment in the future, the United States will need a truth and reconciliation commission. I know the idea sounds outlandish—truth and reconciliation commissions are something that happens to other people in other places, typically countries that have been truly brutalized and can find no other way past their national traumas. It is tempting to propose this as satire. But the sneer withers away; the chuckle turns to dust in the throat.
Reconciliation is only possible when you start telling the truth. And while reconciliation is not complete justice—justice demanding, as it does, accountability and at least compensation—it makes it possible to move forward. This is a serious business. Done right, it would establish the real narrative of the moral twilight we are moving through now, alter political behavior for the better, and revive enough faith in this country’s ability to govern itself for democracy to prevail. It may even restore truth itself.
I don’t mean to claim that what has gone on here since the election of Donald Trump approaches what most of those other nations that used truth and reconciliation commissions have endured. The first such effort, initiated by President Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina in 1983—one earlier attempt, in Bolivia in 1982, was shut down before it was completed and another one, in Uganda in 1974, was overseen by Idi Amin; I’m not counting either—was created to soothe the still-raw wounds of a military dictatorship and “Dirty War” that disappeared some 30,000 people. Since then, at least 42 other nations have tried similar means of getting past the past, and the crimes they have confronted have usually been even more horrific and wide-reaching: the genocides in Rwanda and East Timor; the reign of the white supremacist, apartheid regime in South Africa; Soviet-imposed communism in East Germany; the slaughters perpetrated in Haiti after the overthrow of Aristide, in the Yugoslavian civil wars, and by Mobutu, Kabila, and so many others in the Congo; the atrocities committed by U.S.-backed, enabled, and even encouraged regimes in Brazil, South Korea, Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Uruguay.
How fortunate America has been to avoid the worst of these tragedies. Yet to return to something that resembles a functioning and participatory democracy, the country needs a period of internal reflection and public cleansing. Americans must, at some point, decide on which truths we still find self-evident. If anyone has a better suggestion than truth and reconciliation, have at it. ...