America has lost the right stuff

America has lost the right stuff. Chuck Yeager, a World War II ace who broke the sound barrier in his “Glamorous Glennis” X-1 in 1947, was a master pilot possessed of calm and humble commitment to duty and country. He died at 97 yesterday, having broken many more flying records:

His character seems almost foreign in today’s America. We have a president who can’t understand why people serve in the armed forces. We’ve got a party in Congress that won’t acknowledge that president’s loss in the election. We’ve got people who think wearing a mask to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus is an infringement on their political liberty. We’ve got police departments that kill with impunity. We’ve got more than 74 million people who voted for a president responsible for the deaths of more than 280,000 of their fellow citizens.

I don’t know how far the election of Joe Biden can go in curing these ailments. He is going to have his hands full first with Covid 19 and then the economy. He would have to be extraordinarily lucky to have the unequivocal support of the Congress. That will be decided January 5, when two Georgia Senate seats are decided in an unusual second-round election. Most states don’t do that, but Georgia does because it was thought an integrationist could squeak by in a multi-candidate first round but not in a two-candidate second round.

Today, all 50 states met the deadline for certification of election results, guaranteeing that they cannot be challenged in Congress after they are transmitted there when the Electoral College meets on December 14 in state capitals. In theory, that ensures the electoral vote outcome will be 306 to 232, precisely the same outcome as four years ago.

Trump has described that win in 2016 as a landslide. This time around he is refusing even to acknowledge that Joe Biden has won. I doubt Trump is deluding himself. He knows he has lost. He keeps up the charade of opposition to the outcome in order to maintain his dominance of the Republican party and to raise money from fools who believe his nonsense. He is even pretending that he might run in 2024, ignoring the facts of life in order to stifle the Republican competition. He is in poor physical condition already and will be plagued in the next few years by legal and financial troubles. While he might try to forecast the election lights to Don Jr. four years hence, the idea of his running is ludicrous.

Duty and country would require that Donald Trump fade quickly from the limelight and crawl into history as the worst president in a century, if not since the founding. But the man is neither calm nor humble. In an America where duty and country were important, he would never even have dared try to overturn the results of the election with phone calls to governors and state legislators. He never had the right stuff, and the country seems to have lost it.