The Morning After
Trump is a vicious moron, but he has the invaluable property of being a strip of human litmus paper--put someone or something in his ambit and you find out who/what they really are. Jeff Flake: sanctimonious coward. Ted Cruz: spineless opportunist. Lindsey Graham: sycophantic opportunist. John Kelly: authoritarian racist. Crown Prince MBS: Murderous tyrant. Marco Rubio: Ridiculous Little Man. Jeb Bush: Effete Legacy. Or on the other hand, Barack Obama: Great-American-whose- fatal-flaw-was-his-over-estimation-of-his-enemies. James Comey: Flawed-and-bathetic-narcissist-but-a-genuine-patriot-who-is-trying-to-atone.Dip the whole United States in the Trumpist cup and you realize, like Trump himself might put it, that "We're not so nice. We kill a lot of people here too." The voter suppression in Georgia and North Dakota that shocks people today--the only difference now is that it is controversial. Back in the good old days that we all long for, southern blacks only enjoyed the franchise when the federal government put a gun to state authorities' heads. Native Americans weren't fully enfranchised until 1924 (the Dawes Act gave some citizenship in 1887, provided they renounced their tribal affiliation) and their votes have been routinely suppressed ever since.The kind of incendiary racism and know-nothingism that Trump and Fox News have been spouting these last two weeks--that Stacey Abrams, a Yale Law School graduate, minority leader in the state House, voting rights activist, and even a successful romance novelist, for Christ's sake, is prima facie unqualified for the job she is running for; that hordes of brown-people-with-diseases are being paid by Jews to storm the border--are bedrock beliefs for a good third of the country AND THEY WERE THE CONSENSUS FOR A LOT MORE OF US FOR A LONG TIME BEFORE. "Don't be a baby," as Trump might say. "Didn't you read THE NEW HATE?"Never-Trump Republicans can belly up to the bar and wax nostalgic among themselves about the glory days when William Buckley purged the crazies from their party (something that never happened) and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan personified all that was good and generous and prosperity-producing (they didn't), but Democrats need to be more forward-thinking. Trump exposes the weaknesses of the old-line Democrats even more clearly than Bernie did.I'm not blaming Hillary and Biden, or the Democrats who lost last night--far from it. In fact, I'm looking to some of them (Gillum, O'Rourke, Abrams) to lead us out of this wilderness. But I want to give Trump his due. By showing us how racist and oligarchic this country still is, by showing us how much more corrupt and rotten its economic systems are, how compromised and racist its criminal justice system, he has set a high bar before us. And after last night, we at least have a little bit of power, a foundation to work from.Nothing worth doing has ever been easy.
