We've passed the point at which our presidential election is an embarrassment. It is now a chilling reminder that there are aspects of democracy that are as menacing as they are liberating. The fact that anyone can become president of the United States, being a fact that denotes our egalitarianism, is also a reminder that bad things can happen to a good people. If you listen to Donald Trump with something other than the election and party politics in mind, his eminence in our politics is not just sobering, it is menacing. You have to remember how people like Stalin, Hitler and Qaddafi came to, and retained, power. They were all demagogues who started their rises to power by vilifying foreign powers and blaming them for the internal decay and international decline that characterized their eras. They solidified their political hegemony with education of the young from a very early age to believe their xenophobic screeds the way we do our national anthem, and to put chauvinism ahead of all else in their politics. And you can add to the list Kim Jung Un, his father, Vladimir Putin, and now, Donald Trump if he gets his way. Donald Trump is not just a hapless buffoon. He is a dangerous, paranoid personality who seems to believe now after several not-so-subtle escalations of his rhetoric that the world is colluding against him, and that the conspiracy is led by Bill and Hillary Clinton, maybe Chelsea as well: an international cabal of Trump haters with nothing better to do than blame Trump for his own conduct, and to gain popularity, and power, as a consequence. According to Trump, he is not the megalomaniac. The Clintons are as they seek limitless, autocratic power through corruption, subversion and cooptation. It is frightening to realize that, while it now seems unlikely, there was a time when someone like Donald Trump could have become our president.
If you look at his candidacy from a distance, you see the progression from mere narcissist and egomaniac to ardent seeker of the adulation of like-thinking, one-time political naifs, who were eager to embrace a mentality that made them the knowing class in our polity. Trump turned them into moral arbiters with one simple phrase, "believe me"--and they did. With that simple rhetorical tactic, that is, making a conclusory statement that the audience wants to believe and then giving them permission to believe it without proof by authenticating it himself, he has seduced millions of people and even galvanized them into sometimes violent ardor. People are ejected from Trump's rallies physically and they are not just taunted; they are physically assailed as they are thrust out of the hall. Children of apparently tender years, such as a boy appearing to be about 10 years old whose parent or parents thought it was appropriate to bring such a child to a political rally carrying a placard that read, "Gut the Bitch," are being brought into the fold as if doing so was something other than a despicable predation on a malleable mind that may well scar it forever. And Trump no longer hints at the notion that there is some larger, international nefarious scheme afoot. He says it outright as if reasonable people could believe that such a thing were possible. Donald Trump is a modern mountebank pitching snake oil from the tailgate of his Mercedes, and people are drinking it by the gallon as if it were Jonestown Kool-Aid. Trump is poisoning our electorate, and we can do nothing other than wait for his defeat, and perhaps a decade of contemplation by those who have joined his march to the cliff. Eventually, the lemmings will die out or get some other religion, but in the interim, we can expect that no matter how badly Trump loses next month, there will be cries of conspiracy that drown out the now discredited notions that the moon landings never actually occurred. We are not dealing with rationality here. We are dealing with a bizarre fantasy indulged in by a deluded would-be politician who knows no limits, that he has proliferated until it afflicts us like a medieval plague. If it weren't for the sane 45% or so of us who intend to vote against Trump in a meaningful way--that is for Hillary Clinton instead of one of the off-mainstream, marginal candidates who don't even know where the world is much less how if functions--and the 25% or so on whom we can count not to vote at all, which group may well harbor the supplement to Trumps devoted, nearly 40% that he would need to win the election, we could be unleashing on the world the worst menace since the end of World War II. He no longer sounds just odious. Now he sounds insane.
So don't think for a moment that this is a year in which your vote doesn't matter because you don't like Clinton or Trump. Don't kid yourself that some "what's the worst that could happen" type of scenario will be tolerable if you let Trump win by default. Don't excuse yourself for not voting by telling yourself that it isn't as if world peace is at stake. It is.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment