Tuesday
Finally—finally!—some Republican legislators are standing up to Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election. After years of tolerating Trump’s empty accusations, they are rediscovering their belief in democracy. Perhaps the recording of the president pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” more Trump votes was the final straw.
To the few who continue to hold out, especially ringleader senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, I send out the passage in Northanger Abbey where Henry Tilney chastises Catherine for a conspiracy theory she has developed. As a result of reading gothic novels, Catherine suspects General Tilney of having disposed of his wife, to which Tilney responds,
If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
The mere fact that neither party could get away with the kind of fraud that Trump alleges should be enough to end the talk. We too have newspapers and voluntary spies. We too live in a civilized country with laws, and we too have an education system that should have trained us to see through conspiracy theories.
Following Tilney’s lecture, Catherine runs out of the room in tears. In other words, unlike Cruz and Hathey, she is capable of shame. She also profits from the lecture, learning to reject gothic theories and to see through the self-serving claims of those around her.
Tilney is overly optimistic that “our education prepare[s] us for such atrocities” since Cruz and Hawley both attended ivy league schools that pride themselves on teaching critical thinking. I suppose education counts for little, however, if they are simply two cynical opportunists who think that shamelessly selling out their country is a small price to pay for Trump’s supporters supporters. Even Austen’s villains, with the possible exception of Persuasion’s Mr. Eliot, aren’t that base.
