Suspicion

One would laugh to compare Josh Hawley with Cary Grant, but for this one role in the classic Hitchcock film "Suspicion"

In the classic Alfred Hitchcock film Suspicion, from 1941, the lead male role, Johnnie Aysgarth, is a character without a shred of character.

An inveterate gambler and overall ne're-do-well, played by Cary Grant, Johnnie insinuates himself into the life of a young woman, Lina McLaidlaw, who seems happy enough with her quiet bookish life until she suddenly fears she might end up unmarried, a "spinster." Although played by the glamorous Joan Fontaine (who won the Oscar for her performance), Lina is a plain young woman, from a well-to-do family, who needs her glasses to read anything—and to better see the larger machinations happening around her.

Grant is marvelous in the role, as he uses his brilliant smile and dimpled chin and overall rakish charm to dominate and manipulate her, against her better instincts, into falling in love with him. In an effort to own her and disturb her sense of self, he immediately gives her an odd nickname, one intended to remind her that he is the desirable one here, that she has a catch so long as she stays with him, and he uses it incessantly throughout the film: monkeyface.

Although he is one smooth operator, at one point fairly deep into the film, he slips up and she suddenly sees him for who he is. At that moment of clarity she says, "Why, you're a baby!" And as audience members we begin to hold out a bit of hope for her. Then he proceeds to drive her life off a cliff.

All of which leads me, improbably, to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who has pledged to object Tuesday to the Senate's certification of the vote of the electors, which is typically a formality. His objection, specifically about the vote in Pennsylvania, is based on, well, baseless claims of fraud in the election. He claims he is objecting not for himself but on behalf of those who distrust the results. And they distrust the results not for any legitimate reason but because they have been instructed by Donald Trump and his minions to distrust the results. Indeed, they were told for months and months before the election that it would be rigged, if Trump didn't win. The Fraudster-in-Chief is still telling them that the only reason he lost the popular vote in 2016 is that millions of immigrants voted illegally.

The “TRUMP 2020: NO MORE BULLSHIT!” banners from the campaign were clearly missing a critical comma.

I'd much rather stay on the topic of Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock than talk about the burgeoning anti-democratic impulses of the Republican party. Not that Hawley is remotely a Cary Grant, but he is that blandly handsome type of boy-man one notices rising, seemingly ineluctably, to prominent positions in corporate America and in government. I'd hazard, a fraternity man, if only in spirit, of which we have a plague in this country. The British have their own devastating infestation of the type, what they call Oxbridge men, the elite who dominate politics in the United Kingdom and self-assuredly drive their citizenry toward one cliff or another whenever it pleases them to do so.

These are the happy-go-lucky white men who have always gotten what they want because their daddies also got what they wanted, often in various brutish ways. Their club generally celebrates a willful ignorance of history and culture (though Hawley himself seems admirably educated, with a BA in history from Stanford and a law degree from Yale), heartily congratulates misogyny, and rewards aggressiveness in the acquisition of power, money, or notoriety. This willful—at least in public, in order to not appear elite—ignorance coupled with arrogance is something we might call ignarrogance. Think George W. Bush or that smarmy pal of yours from back in your college days. Easier, just think Matt Gaetz or Jim Jordan or, say, Ted Cruz or Lindsay Graham or Marco Rubio, or any of the sad excuses for thinking human beings one would have trouble not bumping into if one were to walk anywhere near Congress.

It should go without saying that having this type of man (or woman) insinuate themself into the public service area with an evangelical fervor for self-promotion and a desire to shut down what government is meant to do for all citizens is a disaster for public service and for a nation.

Even his name, Josh (plus, yes, that Haw), seems to speak to his low level of seriousness—apart from self-interest—giving him a built-in way out of any malicious endeavor. (Hey, it's Josh, he was just joshing, folks.) Putting outrageous things forward and then calling them a joke was, of course, a favorite maneuver of the current lame-duck president.

But Hawley appears dead serious about breaking his oath of office—to "support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic"—in order to make more of a name for himself in anticipation of running for president in 2024. It has worked so well that Ted Cruz felt compelled to one-up him.

After this publicity move by the junior senator from Missouri (and the youngest in all the senate), "joshing" should take on distinctly different meaning, both sinister and pathetic. In future, we might roll our eyes and whisper to colleagues that someone just big-time joshed his ambition; we might sigh and say someone is once again joshing an argument about how Christians are under attack; we might shake our heads sadly to see that someone has come joshingly close to treason.

Reportedly, some 140 Republican House members and 11 Republican Senators plan to object to certifying the electoral votes. Cruz is leading his competing assault on the certification, to get Congress to appoint an investigatory committee to look into all the fraud that didn't occur (judges in 60 cases have ruled, and the governors of all 50 states have certified, that there were no material issues with the vote in 2020). As historian Heather Cox Richardson put it in her nightly "Letter from an American" newsletter this week, noting the political gains Republicans made via their cynical Benghazi, Clinton email, and Hunter Biden investigations, "They are working to smear Biden by investigation, as has become their signature move."

The maddening thing about Suspicion is that, in the end, he gets away with it—all of it—only because he does not do the very worst things she has imagined. She is so charmed by him—by his charisma—she becomes a cult of one and thinks he can be rehabilitated. They will somehow work it all out—together. But he's still the same rake and a compulsive gambler to boot. (As our younger daughter might say, it's enough to make you want to vom.)

He has, perhaps unwittingly, manipulated her beyond even what he attempted; her own suspicions led her to consider him capable of truly evil deeds. But as soon as his character comprehends what she has been thinking, Hitchcock has him drive their car ever closer to a cliff—to her obvious horror—only to pull away at the last moment in the course of turning the car around. (At this point, an American might almost reflexively think of Susan Collins, Republican senator from Maine, who voted to acquit Donald Trump during his impeachment trial because she imagined that he had learned "a pretty big lesson" from being impeached by the House. As I write this, the news of Trump's call asking Georgia's attorney general to "find" more votes just broke. Did he think he was talking to the former Soviet state of Georgia?

One might consider this scene to be very much like what the Republican fraternity boys party has accomplished in this country over the past number of decades, beginning with the ascent of Ronald Reagan, a two-bit movie actor, to the presidency. They have, as my older (and much smarter) brother likes to say, ceaselessly ratcheted (with an emphasis on rat) their ideology to the right, so that the "center" is now unrecognizable. Whatever the political center was before Reagan's time, in terms of comity, in terms of compromise, in terms of holding a basic belief in the social compact, it was moved rightward by the intractable right and their shills in the media. From Reagan's declaration that government itself is the problem to Newt Gingrich's cheerleading of incivility to the endless hissy fits of the culture wars to government shutdowns to gerrymandering and damaging rhetoric about voter fraud, a vast manipulation has been perpetrated on the public, to teach them that government simply cannot work. This longstanding effort has sunk to its nadir with Donald Trump, a two-bit TV personality and mobbed-up real estate developer, reaching the White House.

On Tuesday, Hawley and his fellow frat boys (and sorority girls)—many of them, like Hawley, very well educated and extremely accomplished; they know what they are doing to the country—will fail to change the outcome of the election (which Biden/Harris won by some 7 million votes), but they will have succeeded in further damaging the norms of conduct and good faith that we have learned, under much duress in the past 4 years, are critical for any democracy to survive.

As the story goes, a Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia, wife of the mayor, asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of country had been created. Franklin's response was reportedly a witty warning: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Can we keep it, in the face of determined efforts of the Republican party, over decades now, to undermine it? Can a nation survive governance by men and women of little or no character?

After Tuesday, the car of state, as it were, may be turned around, but the entire country is still in for a terrifying ride. If given half a chance, Trump Republicans will drive this country straight off the cliff.