The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it. -Albert Einstein
One of the narratives that seems to be making the rounds these days is the idea that in this election, “both sides do it.” “Trump may be bad, but so is Hillary“. ” Obama was evil too-you did not call him the threat he was“. These narratives completely miss the point.
The idea that politicians are exactly the same is belied by the facts and the stated position. Never, either in 2008 or in 2012 had Obama or Clinton ever stated the kind of really reprehensible positions that Donald Trump has made the mainstay of his campaign. Neither, this year, has Sanders. ( That Sander’s positions have been grossly misperceived is an argument for another time). When he has even bothered to state a position, that is, which is not very often. Trump, in the middle of a sea of bombast-has declined to take a meaningful position on any issue of importance. He just keeps repeating the lines that every thing will be great. It won’t be, if by some great tragedy this vile and evil man gets elected. It will be road to the destruction of the United States as a liberal democracy, built upon the rule of law.
This is what the “ABC” morons do not get. You don’t have to like Hillary or Bernie to understand their positions. You do, however, have to take the time to understand them. I do and so do a lot of other people. Still does not make me an ardent fan of Hillary, but she has a demonstrated track record and positions that are within the bounds of normalcy, whether you agree with them or not. So I will have no problem voting for her or anyone else who will stop the biggest threat to American Democracy since, perhaps the beginning of the Civil War.
There is an argument to be made that the Democrats need a bigger and deeper bench. I’ll be the first to state that here on this blog. But that is not a problem we cannot solve this year, and if Trump is elected we will never solve it, because the freedom to do so will slowly drift away-doubtful to return in my life time. “Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. “
For that reason, this blog and its author are declaring all out war on Donald Trump and the sick twisted souls who are his supporters. Fuck you all and the horse you rode in on. I will fight you with every inch of my strength and resources. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “If Trump was in an election in hell, I would at least make a favorable mention of the devil in the House of Commons.”.
All politicians are not the same. Some are truly dangerous and must be stopped.
From this day forth, I will wage war on Donald Trump!
A year ago if you had told me that Trump would be the Republican nominee, I would have told you that you were crazy. As I noted earlier, I had more faith in the GOP primary voters to see through his bullshit. But as the past year has proven, a certain percentage of the electorate is even more stupid than I thought.
And so here we are.
People who should know better, are someone setting aside their “principled conservatism” to accept him. Many who I thought had more sense have apparently found it easy to sell their souls to evil.
I turn my back on them.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump. First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.
Let me say it again, Trump is dangerous-really dangerous. To support him is to say you don’t care about the future of the United States, and is to display a shocking ignorance of your county’s political history.
Here is why:
One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’
No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
This is the equivalent of saying “Nixon’s the One!” on August 7, 1974. And if you need that reference explained to you-you are a part of the problem, not the solution. Trump has promised to make America great again. But a closer look his policy proposals, such as they are, suggests that within his first few years as president, he would more likely make America economically depressed again.
I’m too close to retirement to survive that. Even more, I care too much about the United States to simply ignore the threat this man is.
The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forces—and yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire.?
We shall draw the line here! The monster we created must be destroyed!
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
–Samuel Adams