Resisting the right’s fit of pique
I’m trying not to repeat the mistakes of 2016. I really am. There was no way the country was crazy enough to elect Donald Trump president, I told myself. “He’s mentally unstable,” I told my parents one night while visiting for dinner. One well-heeled Bernie Sanders supporter, unnerved by Trump signs sprouting like weeds out in the county, printed and fabricated his own quarter-sized Clinton signs by the thousands in response. They went like the proverbial hotcakes.
Then I spent the afternoon of Election Day 2016 greeting voters outside a nearby polling station standing a few feet away from Talks To The Sky. You know what happened later. This fall, she might be proudly wearing adult diapers outside her pants in solidarity with her king.
Sadly, Americans are crazy enough to elect Donald “88 Counts,”professional huckster. They proved that once already. They left him in charge ahead of a global pandemic and got American carnage and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. But if it’s not prion disease and it’s not an outbreak of brain worms — I was reminded yesterday that a friend once picked up one while living in Nepal; she’s fine — what’s behind it? Yes, a political and religious cult is at work, but what’s behind that?
Something Dave Weigel posted to BlueSky this morning gets to some of it:
Lots of Project 2025’s recommendations boil down to: “Democrats have effectively used this executive branch power to enact policy, it must be reversed until the 5th Circuit can stop it.”
Honestly a very useful guide to how the center-left does things when it has the presidency.
The center-left Weigel references actually believes in progress, in using the U.S. government to improves people’s lives, in promoting “the general Welfare” and in securing “the Blessings of Liberty” for everyone. That’s the government’s goal, stated explicitly. But it’s not everyone’s.
What Trump personifies is a multi-year, national tantrum that intensified with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. But the tantrum did not start with that. Wealthy movement conservatives have worked to roll back the 20th century for decades. Movements demanding equality for marginalized Americans incensed men (mostly) more obsessed with their marginal tax rates than with realizing the more perfect union imagined in the Preamble. So long as they could maintain their Brahmin status working within the system, they could tolerate “created equal” as a rhetorical flourish they never really believed and could forestall. Once challenged, however, they redoubled their efforts and mobilized the grievances of those lower down the social ladder against those nearest the bottom, and against their silly advocates whatever their castes.
The United States has often been considered a young democracy, even if a long-lived one. Until this century, it seemed the country was finally emerging from adolescence. What the backlash to demographic shifts and the Trump cult prove is that that assessment was premature. What a spoiled child does when asked to share his toys is to throw a tantrum and break them. MAGA Republicans mean to break America. They’ve made a formal project of it. They should turn in their flags.
I want to believe that the fever will break, that there is still enough good-old Protestant shame and Catholic guilt in the land among mature adults to resist donning Donnie diapers and throwing bricks through the nation’s windows in a fit of pique. I want to believe that Trump is bleeding support. It’s just not yet showing up in polls. But I’m not counting on it, nor should you.
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