Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) sounded the alarm on Monday in a powerful essay in The Atlantic warning that the nation is “in denial”, and we are ignoring serious threats that could be “cataclysmic” to its existence.
“When a well-known conservative former federal appeals judge testified that we are already at war for our democracy and that January 6, 2021 was a real constitutional crisis, MAGA loyalists laughed that he spoke slowly and celebrated that most people did not watch. not, ”wrote the frustrated senator.
Romney referred to the powerful testimony last month before the Jan. 6 House panel by retired Judge J. Michael Luttig. He called Trump and his supporters “a clear and present danger to American democracy” for their efforts to throw out the results of a presidential election they did not like, adding: “Our democracy today is on.” a knife point. ”
Romney also pointed to the damage already done by global warming in dangerous droughts, the lack of action against rising government debt and illegal immigration.
Yet too little is being done to address these serious threats, he wrote.
The “sudden rejection of potentially catastrophic threats” is fueled by denial and a “powerful impulse to believe what we hope to be the case” that “occurs across the political spectrum.”
“We are more and more a nation in denial,” Romney warned. “A classic example of denial comes from Donald Trump: ‘I won in a landslide,'” he remarked, quoting the former president.
“Strengthening” that tendency is the “carefully composed, prejudicial-confirming arguments of the common gang of sophists, evildoers, and deniers of truth.”
Romney notes how Americans have been living for decades in a “very forgiving time” with a stable climate and a generally strong economy and democracy, but there is no room for big mistakes now.
He is convinced that the answer is good leadership. (He has no plans to run for the White House again, he told HuffPost in April.)
He hopes for a president who can “rise above the noise to unite us behind the truth.”
“President Joe Biden is a genuinely good man, but he has not yet been able to break through our national ailment of denial, fraud and mistrust.”
“A return of Donald Trump will feed the disease, which probably makes it incurable,” he warned.
Meanwhile, Romney said it was to “fathers and mothers, teachers and nurses, priests and rabbis, businessmen and businesswomen, journalists and experts” to rise above all our “grievances and resentments” and “the mantle of leadership in our country so to seize. much needed. ”
