Staircase Conscience

Most of us have encountered situations where we thought of the perfect reply to an argument after the fact, when it was too late. Denis Diderot describes this phenomenon in his essay “Paradox of the Actor,” recounting how he was initially flustered by a statesman’s comment, only to have the perfect rejoinder occur to him when he was heading down the stairs on his way home. This notion of “l’esprit de l’escalier,” or “staircase wit,” has equivalents in other cultures and languages, including a phrase in Chinese that roughly translates as “shooting after the horse has passed.”

As we approach the time when we’ll see a horse’s backside exiting the White House, it will be interesting to witness the retrospective insight coming from Republicans who supported Trump when it was useful to do so, who ignored the impeachments and the felony convictions and the billions of corrupt dollars he funneled into his family’s accounts; who were silent when he tried to steal votes or challenge legitimate elections or threaten the peaceful transfer of power; who looked the other way when he undermined civil liberties and the rule of law and vulnerable allies and our leadership in the world; who joined him in attacking immigrants and the press and peaceful protestors and any political opponent he could harm with a frivolous investigation or lawsuit.

This is not to say that no Republicans have opposed him. In fact, the list features a number of big names, including former presidents, vice presidents, presidential nominees, senators, representatives, governors, his own Chiefs of Staff, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretaries, National Security Advisors, Attorneys General, his own Secretary of State and Directors of the FBI and CIA.  What’s noteworthy is that so many from his own party could oppose him without making a sufficient number of his voters suspect that something was wrong with the guy. The problem, I think, was that so many of the renegades waited until it was too late, their staircase conscience kicking in when they were leaving the halls of power.

Some who’ve studied the phenomena of staircase wit think the cognitive lag results from an emotional overload that slows our processing. This squares with how Diderot described himself when faced with the clever statesman: “[A] sensitive man overwhelmed by the argument leveled against him, becomes confused and doesn’t come to himself again until at the bottom of the stairs.” In this view, a few of us can think on our feet without being overwhelmed, like the mythical Prometheus, whose name means “forethought;” and the rest of us are like his slow-thinking brother Epimetheus, whose name means “afterthought.” It’s tempting to frame it this way and then compare the evils cut loose by Trump to those released from a box by Epimetheus and his wife Pandora, but this is not an accurate description of what happened with Trump supporters; they knew what they were doing in backing Trump, and they kept doing it.

The impulsivity and violence of amygdaloids like Donald Trump can trigger fight or flight responses, like the attacks by January 6th rioters swept up in a frenzy, or the escape by Senator Josh Hawley, who’d egged on the crowd earlier in the day but ran like a rabbit when he saw how dangerous they were. But regardless of the bad behavior we justify by blaming the limbic system, the excuse disappears once the dust settles and our cortical brain takes over again, and this doesn’t take long to happen. To pin it on the amygdala, to suggest that the mammalian brains of powerful Republicans hijacked them and kept them in permanent panic mode, is to overlook the fact that its influence clears within a few hours, and they’ve had years to enlist their neocortex for higher-order functions, like moral reasoning. The real problem is that they were deficient, metaphorically, in another part of their anatomy. Tempting as it is to return to the rabbit comparison here, let’s just say that they lacked courage. And a conscience.

The poster boy for this gutless immorality in the wake of January 6th was the late Lindsey Graham, though he’d demonstrated these qualities before that. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Graham called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who was “unfit for office,” but when the political winds started to favor Trump, Graham followed him. Then, assuming that Trump had lost his hold on the party in the wake of the January 6th riot, Graham jumped ship again: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” But within six weeks, having seen that the party didn’t have the stomach for impeachment, he was climbing back on board; and later he put on his most humiliating display, weeping for the billionaire reprobate as he begged for cash and prayers on his behalf like a 1980’s televangelist. This was the image of Graham that came to me when I heard he’d died, and I winced again.

At long last, Republicans are realizing that those who fail to speak out against Trump lack a basic sense of decency–an accusation that Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn heard and was unfazed by as he sat near the disgraced Joseph McCarthy. Lindsey Graham blew his chances to show that he had any integrity, so the evil he did will live after him, while his stray good deeds will be dissolved by the political calculations that allowed them to happen in spite of his unscrupulous, craven will.

Other Republicans have a chance to separate themselves from Trump now. If they can’t find the courage to oppose the man at this moment, as he sets the stage for more election denialism that threatens our democracy, they won’t be credited for epiphanies or conversions on their political deathbeds. Instead, their staircase conscience will cause them to meet their ends, like Lindsey Graham, as pitiful punchlines and rabbits. And they will deserve it.