I Don’t Know What Lies Behind the Door of a Trump Presidency. Do You?
Posted on May 4, 2016
By Alexander Reed Kelly
Mike Maguire / (CC-BY-2.0)
Dear Liberal Friends,
Is Donald Trump’s success in the Republican primary really so surprising? The party has been constituting itself according to our species’ worst impulses for decades, and by the light of our culture, Trump is a logical successor to what came before. Yes, we have to “stop” him. But it is far from certain that this means we must support Clinton, who through her policies may have ruined, degraded and destroyed far more lives than he, as journalists and scholars have for more than a decade reported are consequences of her past policy decisions.
I’m struck that many of you have succumbed to the idea of Clinton’s inevitability. Why are you not instead doing all you can to get Bernie Sanders nominated and elected? I understand that many of you have come to believe the presidency lacks the power to do anything but drive the country deeper into the possession of corporations and the rich, and after eight years of Obama, I don’t blame you. But the idea that our 44th president represents the limits of leftism in America today is wrong.
Please acquaint yourself with the facts and arguments recorded in Roger Hodges’ ‘ The Mendacity on Hope,’ my friend Thomas Frank’s new book, ’ Listen, Liberal’ and the columns Paul Krugman wrote in the early years of Obama’s first term, before Krugman’s popularity, social significance and political influence began to decline.
The progressive champion Ralph Nader is often disparaged for having suggested, around the start of George W. Bush’s stolen presidency, that conditions in our society must worsen before they can get better. I’m not sure he’s right either. But I also know that experience prepares us for understanding, and there are large numbers of once-comfortable Americans who may never have heard what Bernie Sanders is saying if they hadn’t watched their assets vanish in 2008.
I honestly don’t know what lies behind the door of a Trump presidency. Do you? Might our soporific, wobbly-headed Democrats be aroused at last to a long state of genuine opposition? Stiffened by the confidence that theirs is the support of millions of blacks, latinos, women, Democrats, independents, young new voters and other people of basic goodness and reason, including significant numbers of Republicans?
On the other hand, we have two-and-a-half decades worth of reasons to fear what a new Clinton presidency may bring: yet more breaks for the powerful and the rich, whose stupid, persistent habit is to consolidate misery for their fellow citizens; another decade of lost earnings and debt for my generation and the one that comes next; and the likely chronic grimness of millions of older Americans who have every reason to believe they won’t escape this madhouse in what remains of their lives.
And add to that a lack of opposition from Democrats, who in their membership-sanctioned complicity in war and despoliation, would further disgrace the name of their party, rather than restore it in a courageous and celebrated bid to usher in a new age for America and perhaps the world.
I know you’re afraid. I am too. All of this is uncomfortable, even for those of us who remain, for the foreseeable future, better off materially and in other ways than those who had the misfortune to be born with the wrong combination of skin color, place, genitalia and ancestry. But for now this discomfort is unavoidable. All we can do is apply our bodies and minds to the task of our salvation, recognizing that our best chances of success lie with each other, and in refusing to allow fear of the worst to rob us of our desire to make our wishes, including the many we share, come true.
Alex |
