With a couple of weeks left till election, this will likely be my last political post till after it’s over. I have never been so anxious about an election. Annoyed, irritated, amused, baffled, angered…but not anxious. I thought the election of George W. Bush was a tragic misstep. I thought he was ill-equipped for the job and as it turned out he was. It was too much for him, even with perhaps the best of intentions. His first major mistake was the tax cut. He inherited a surplus. Say what you will about Clinton, he left us in better fiscal shape that any president since Eisenhower. Instead of doing what would have been more meaningful, namely investing in new programs that would have injected that money into the economy in a productive way, he advocated and got tax cuts. And of course the lion’s share went to people and corporations that didn’t need them, who only off-shored a huge amount of them, and padded their own futures, which ended up costing us down the road. Investment would have been too hard and frankly counter to what the moneyed interests wanted. His second mistake was in not rolling them back after 9/11. His third mistake was in allowing no-bid contracts for rebuilding Iraq (which of course could not have happened without mistake 2.5, which was the invasion of Iraq in the first place), which resulted in another huge pilfering of public funds and a job left unfinished.
And on and on. He left too much up to his vice president, learned too late that he should not have done that, and then bumbled his way through the rest until, mercifully, he left office—but not before one of the biggest economic disasters since the Great Depression, which can also be laid at his feet because his administration hobbled all the regulatory agencies that might have mitigated if not prevented the 2008 collapse.
But with all that, he left government institutions intact. I never felt he was a threat to the machinery of our democracy.
We have no such security now. What dismays me is that, despite the declarations and threats coming directly out of his mouth, so many of my fellow citizens think Trump will serve as a good president. I can only assume they don’t believe him, don’t understand what is at stake, or don’t care. But even if it is that they think he’s kidding, all the rest of what he says and represents should signal his unsuitability.
I don’t understand.
Not him, he’s easy. A self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, lying bully who can’t wait to get his hands on the machinery of state so he can penalize all those who have called him out and opposed him. So he can continue the handouts to cronies. So he can avoid criminal penalties for what he has been found guilty of and escape future judgments for crimes he has yet to be tried for. He is a frightened old man who is far out of his depth and all his evasions, misrepresentations, and venality are about to bring the starkest censure unless he can win the top seat and pardon himself. He has done serious damage to this country.
He’s easy to understand. The people who think he’s their savior are the ones who baffle me.
Is the liberty to be a thoughtless cad that important?
Never mind Project 2025, that does not, I believe, figure into the calculus of the average American who supports Trump. I think it is safe to say that most of them, possibly none of them, have not even bothered to look at it, and even if they got a look at the Cliff’s Notes version they no doubt feel none of it applies to them. What might matter is the idea of payback inhering within it, that all the folks they find threatening will be “taken care of” by a second Trump administration. It’s no secret who those people are, they’ve been targeted by the Right for some time now and it’s out in the open. Gays, independent women, nonchristians, Democrats, intellectuals, the gender-fluid, ethnic minorities. Laws banning books from public libraries or school libraries, regulating parental rights to act on behalf of their children medically, voter roll purges to address a problem that does not exist (but which will affect legitimate voters by association). We have quite a list of the unacceptable before us, and I have to believe at this point that revealing such lists will do nothing to dissuade those who sycophantically support Trump. They will not be shocked, they will be encouraged, because that is what they hope for.
For many years, I have noted, in my opinion, that for these kinds of people, the thing that drives them is what their country looks like to them, and if daily all their intolerances are teased then it should surprise no one that if the promise that it can all be “put right” is presented to them, they’ll vote for it.
It actually does not take all that many in any given community to affect the votes.
I have been having to come to terms with the fact that what he represents is what many of my neighbors actually want. They seem unamenable to arguments about consequences and higher meaning and longterm. He’s promised to make them feel they are right, and in the absence of any counter-message they can decode in any meaningful way, that is a powerful political aphrodisiac.
Those who know better, I think, outnumber them. But we have allowed the stage to be managed the last four decades in such a way as to dampen our impact at the polls. We weren’t interested because we grew up feeling that even a subpar president like Bush could not really damage our democracy. We thought, too many of us, that it didn’t matter, that we could “fix it” next time.
Well, this time it should be obvious. Rights have been lost in this Red miasma. People have died as a result of the kind of ideological irredentism pushed by a Party dedicated to “making America great again” by making it culturally “pure.” The absurdity of that slogan nauseates me, not least because given those who wield it and shout it loudest it means exactly the opposite of what it says. You cannot make something better by tearing apart the very thing that made it unique in the first place.
So. Whatever your opinion of Harris may be, I urge you to vote for her. Not because she’ll solve all the problems, but because she won’t break the tools we need to continue working on solutions. And not voting for her does nothing but help the other guy, and he will be a disaster. He was before, he’ll finish the job this time.
Also, down-ballot. The current GOP needs to go. They need to go off into the wilderness and remake themselves into reasonable people with genuine empathy and a grasp of the idea of service.
My objectivity, you may notice, has been compromised. Naturally. I’m voting this time to help keep my friends whole.